This one sits shivering in Fortune’s smile,
Taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath.
This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while
Laughs in the teeth of Death.
_John Hay_
John Hay was born at Salem, Indiana, in 1838, graduated from Brown
University in 1858 and was admitted to the Illinois bar a few years
later. At nineteen, when he went back to Warsaw, the little
Mississippi town where he had lived as a boy, he dreamed only of
being a poet—a poet, it must be added, of the pleasantly
conventional, transition type. But the Civil War was to disturb his
mild fantasies. He became private secretary to Lincoln, then major
and assistant adjutant-general under General Gilmore, then secretary
of the Legation at Paris, _chargé d’affaires_ at Vienna and
secretary of legation at Madrid.
His few vivid _Pike County Ballads_ came more as a happy accident
than as a deliberate creative effort. When Hay returned from Spain
in 1870, bringing with him his _Castilian Days_, he still had
visions of becoming an orthodox lyric poet. But he found everyone
reading Bret Harte’s short stories and the new expression of the
rude West. (See Preface.) He speculated upon the possibility of
doing something similar, translating the characters into poetry. The
result was the six racy ballads in a vein utterly different from
everything Hay wrote before or after. The poet-politician seems to
have regarded this series somewhat in the nature of light, extempore
verse, belonging to a far lower plane than his serious publications;
he talked about them reluctantly, he even hoped that they would be
forgotten. It is difficult to say whether this regret grew because
Hay, loving the refinements of culture, at heart hated any
suggestion of vulgarity, or because of a basic lack of courage—Hay
having published his novel of labor unrest in the early 80’s (_The
Breadwinners_) anonymously.
The fact remains, his rhymes of Pike County have survived all his
more classical lines. They served for a time as a fresh influence,
they remain a creative accomplishment.
Hay was in politics all the later part of his life, ranking as one
of the most brilliant Secretaries of State the country has ever had.
He died in 1905.
JIM BLUDSO,
OF THE PRAIRIE BELLE
Wall, no! I can’t tell whar he lives,
Becase he don’t live, you see;
Leastways, he’s got out of the habit
Of livin’ like you and me.
Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven’t heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?
He war’n’t no saint,—them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,—
I reckon he never knowed how.
And this was all the religion he had:
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot’s bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A thousand times he swore,
He’d hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.
All boats has their day on the Mississip,
And her day come at last,—
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she _wouldn’t_ be passed.
And so she came tearin’ along that night—
The oldest craft on the line—
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.
The fire bust out as she clar’d the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned and made
For that wilier-bank on the right.
Thar was runnin’ and cussin’, but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
“I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
Through the hot, black breath of the burnin’ boat
Jim Bludso’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure’s you’re born, they all got off
Afore the smokestacks fell,—
And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.
He warn’t no saint,—but at jedgement
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a goin’ to be too hard
On a man that died for men.