If our sea-voyage had been monotonous, this voyage across the solid sea of the rolling plains was even more so. Day after day the same green circle of hills surrounded us; every little town we passed was as like the last as one pea is like another; such a perpetual sameness in the landscape was there that we might have thought we were walking in a circle, but for the sun, which every morning rose behind us, and every evening shone in our faces.
The only break in the monotony of our wearisome task was an incident which occurred perhaps half-a-dozen times; an incident with which we could very well have dispensed, for the reason that by no means could we make head or tail to it.
Every now and then, as we came plodding along the track, each with a stick in his hand and a rolled-up blanket over his shoulder, we would, on passing through a station, find the agent standing on the platform, watching our approach, and grinning as though he saw something in our appearance that was irresistibly amusing. Sometimes he would merely eye us as we went by; at other times he would greet us in some such fashion as this:
“Well, boys; glad to see you. Had a longish walk, haven’t you? Getting pretty tired? Well, don’t let me detain you; you’ve got a tidy bit to walk yet. Good-bye.”
Then, laughing to himself, he would go back to his clicking telegraph instrument, while we walked on, wondering how he came to make so good a guess concerning us and our affairs. It really seemed as though these men must have been expecting us, had such a thing been possible. It was very puzzling; we were quite at a loss to account for their extraordinary behaviour.
On one of these occasions I caught a glimpse through the window of the waiting-room of a face which somehow seemed familiar. For a moment I thought it was the man whom we had seen in the Captain’s cabin at New Orleans, but as such a thing appeared to be out of the question I dismissed the idea without a second thought.
In the early part of our walk we were fortunate in the matter of finding a lodging for the night. Our practice was, when the sun began to get low, to look out for a farmhouse of decent appearance, and having first washed off the dust of travel and made ourselves as presentable as possible, to apply for leave to sleep in the barn; a permission which was nearly always accorded.
But by the time we had come somewhere towards the middle of Nebraska this condition of affairs had changed. It is true that we were still kindly received at the farmhouses, but the farmhouses were more widely scattered, and the farther we advanced the less frequent they became. In consequence, we had now and then been benighted on the prairie; on which occasions, especially if it happened to be a windy or a rainy night, we found that the pleasure of camping out lay more in the imagination than the reality.
The farther we went, too, the more tired we grew. It seemed almost impossible sometimes to summon up energy enough to go on when the rising sun warned us that it was time to start on another day’s tramp. In fact, we were beginning to entertain uncomfortable suspicions that we had undertaken more than we could accomplish, when there occurred an incident which relieved us of all further anxiety on that score.
We had been toiling all day against a strong west wind, the sun had gone down an hour ago, we were out on the wide, open plain, with never a house in sight, and, thoroughly weary, we had decided to camp in the first sheltered spot we could find, when we came upon a small trestle-bridge spanning a narrow, but deep, gully. Across this bridge we had walked in order to get under the lee of the creek-bank, when, looking back, we saw on the side we had just left a little tumble-down cabin. We at once retraced our steps, and scrambling down the side of the gully, we approached the building. It was evidently very old. The door was gone; the mud chinking had all fallen out; while, of two bunks built against the end wall, one above the other, the upper one only was sound.