The land beyond the mist

By Ernest Haycox
Author of “A Wooing in the Wilds,” etc.

To keep out the misery of the eternal Oregon rain, Tom Cameron sang.

The heavens leaked with a persistence beyond the experience of the emigrant train. In seven days there had been no sun or sky above the tops of the fir trees. A heavy rolling mist hung over the line of wagons, shutting them out from the rest of the world as effectually as if they were in a fog bank at sea. Through this dark, lowering curtain came the steady deluge, soaking into the canvas schooner tops, wetting clothes, bedding, penetrating the food—reaching every fabric and every article. There was not an ounce nor an inch of anything dry in the whole weary column.

Cameron’s pony walked as if he were a twenty-year-old nag. His flanks steamed and twitched, his hoofs were weighted down with huge lumps of gummy clay, his mane hung in separate twisted hanks. The animal was in no worse shape than his master, whose blanket capote dripped water like a colander sieve. Rivulets ran from the man’s beaver cap across his wet face to a yellow mustache; fell from either side of this, like twin waterfalls, to the capote and thence streamed down the buckskin breeches in an ever-growing course, falling finally to the sodden, mud-sunken road in a tiny cascade.