woman wore a fringed shawl tied over her head, and she carried a little tin
trunk in her arms, hugging it as if it were a baby. There was an old man,
tall and stooped. Two half-grown boys and a girl stood holding oilcloth
bundles, and a little girl clung to her mother's skirts. Presently a man
with a lantern approached them and began to talk, shouting and exclaiming.
I pricked up my ears, for it was positively the first time I had ever heard
a foreign tongue.

Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out: `Hello, are you
Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for. I'm Otto
Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out. Hello,
Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?'

I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light. He might
have stepped out of the pages of `Jesse James.' He wore a sombrero hat,
with a wide leather band and a bright buckle, and the ends of his moustache
were twisted up stiffly, like little horns. He looked lively and
ferocious, I thought, and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across
one cheek and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl. The top
of his left ear was gone, and his skin was brown as an Indian's. Surely
this was the face of a desperado. As he walked about the platform in his
high-heeled boots, looking for our trunks, I saw that he was a rather
slight man, quick and wiry, and light on his feet. He told us we had a
long night drive ahead of us, and had better be on the hike. He led us to
a hitching-bar where two farm-wagons were tied, and I saw the foreign
family crowding into one of them. The other was for us. Jake got on the
front seat with Otto Fuchs, and I rode on the straw in the bottom of the
wagon-box, covered up with a buffalo hide. The immigrants rumbled off into
the empty darkness, and we followed them.