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. “I’d be a danged sight more dry if I turned this hyar shirt inside out,” muttered Tom, wringing his mustache free from its accumulation of water. Then he fell again to the song. “Oh, Kernel Doniphan-o----” It was in the late fall of ’48, and these twenty wagons were traversing the Barlow Road over the Cascades to the valley of the Wallamet. The trail ended for them after a long, long journey. They had started from Independence, Missouri in April and it was now November. In the beginning, it had been a hundred wagons trekking across the vast prairie lands, following the plainly marked, deeply rutted Oregon Trail. At Fort Hall many months later the greater part of the caravan turned south for California and gold while the rest followed the older road to the Columbia and the old Wish-Ram villages at the Balles. Here they split again, part rafting down the bitter-cold river to Fort Vancouver, the rest coming over the new Barlow Road. The patient oxen pulled at the traces, slipping and sliding in the muck. The bull whips whistled and cracked. Somewhere ahead of Tom Cameron the lead wagon groped in the mist seeking the road through the everlasting, dismal firs. The cattle herd was equally lost in the mist behind. It was all a confusion of noises, overborn by the clack and clatter of vehicles and the incessant pattering of the rain. The wailing of infants came up to him from many a direction, mingling with the shouts and epithets of the drivers. A brave pioneer woman in some distant schooner was singing a hymn: “Bless’d be the land of plenty----”