The Argosy — page 333: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

314 | ACROSS THE PLAINS. A True Narrative. E had been out three days and three nights, each day, each night, dragging its long, slow, heavy hours over us, with the same grey, hopeless blank of sky overhead, and the same wearisome reach of sandy plain underneath. A dreary, fixed, eternal monotony of land- scape, that had some awful power in it—something worse than any fierce wrath and raging of storm, as its spirit entered into and took possession of the soul. There was a damp, still cold in the air that pierced your very marrow, chilling and numbing all the life that it touched, just as — the scene outside chilled one’s thought-and feeling. And yet I knew that beyond the horizon, which shut us down with its grey gloom, with its awful chill and torpor, there was strong, bound- ing, joyous life, and warmth, and love. It seemed ages since we had entered that death in life: but in another day, as the driver said, we should “ strike civilization.” How every sense ached and hungered for a sight of the little, long, ~ low habitation where we were to take our first real meal after leaving the mining regions !—and yet, how my eyes sickened at the sight of the gloomy adobe-houses, where we paused occasionally to take a hasty lunch and change the tired mules in the old stage! Then, the meal over, back again into the coach—or waggon ; as you may please to call it—and we went plunging on, on, towards the dear old East—towards the warmth, and light, and bustle—towards the great cities, with all their throb and burden of life—towards the pleasant old towns that dream along the railroads—towards the familiar faces, and voices, and ways —and oh, heart of mine, towards home! It was in the opening of December, but the roads were unusually good for the season; although that dead grey sky, with some dreary pathos in it that Seiad me of human faces I had seen, out of which all the spring and hope of life had vanished—that dead grey sky had grown a little darker and heavier each day. Still we hoped that the snow would not fall before we got_beyond those wide, treeless plains of Western Kansas, and beheld signs of human life and cultivation, for which one pair of eyes at least were famishing—famishing. My companions, three in all, were from Denver city ; they had been, | like myself, delving among the mines there, and the marks of toil, hard- ship, exposure of every sort, lay on each of us. J was, by half a score of years, the youngest of the party. My travelling companions were men with heavy, stolid, lymphatic forms and faces, but not without occasional gleams of kindly humour and generous nature breaking through all their grumbling, and dozing, and general sense of weariness - Gomicbooks.com