The eager throng had trod,
A little purple flower unclosed,
Nor pined for greener sod:
And one whose load had weighed him sore
Looked down at it and smiled,
And dreamed of woodland trails he loved
To follow when a child.
So still when bitterness and fret
Would drown the melody,
Some little harmony steals in
To set the music free;
And we may keep till day is done
The morning dreams we knew,
If ever in our hearts there live
The daisies and the dew.
THE OCCULTATION OF VENUS
The occultation of Venus and the moon, in March, 1899, was wonderfully
beautiful and impressive as seen in the desert.
A jeweled crown for an old man’s brow,
That mystical, splendid, tropic sky
Arched low o’er the desert, reaching far
Its weary leagues wind-parched and dry:
So bare and lone and sad it lay,
The gray old land that seemed to yearn
With a human longing for some caress
From its granite barriers, grim and stern.
Shouldering up to the very stars
The strong peaks lifted their solemn might;
And through their rock-gapped pinnacles burned
The wondrous glory that charmed the night.
Like a giant’s scimeter wrought in gold
The late moon rose in the dawn-touched east,
And close beside white Venus shone,
As once she shone on shrine and priest.
Like a soul’s white flame the planet passed--
Alone the moon rode proud and high--
O wait of God! the lost star swung
A silver sphere in the hither sky;--
(Is it so, O Life, that thy light is lost
In the disk of Death if we could but know?)
And the old land blushed with sudden youth
In the tender fire of the morning-glow.
A FOREST LULLABY
Wind among the green leaves singing,
Bend the branches as you go;
Gently, gently, that their swinging
Hush the little heart below;
Still the busy little fingers,
Softly close the dark-fringed eyes,
For no gleam of daylight lingers
In the dusky, twilight skies.
Silver stars, come peeping, peeping,
Weaving with your shining beams,
Round my drowsy blossom sleeping,
Fairy spells of happy dreams:
Lullaby, O captive rover,
All your playmates are at rest;
Bees have left the scented clover,
Baby birds are in the nest.
Little rabbits warmly cuddle
In the grasses soft and deep;
And the wee white daisies huddle
In the shadow fast asleep:
Lullaby my bird, my blossom;
Sleep my light-winged butterfly,
Cradled safe on earth’s brown bosom
Till the morning you shall lie.
THE COLORADO RIVER
Long, silent leagues of ever-shifting sand,
White-hot and shimmering to the distant hills
Where wheeling slow the whirlwind dips and fills,
Or beckons like some shadowy, giant hand.
Gray wisps of greenwood and mesquite that stand
In withered patches like an old man’s beard,
Ragged and grizzled: nearer, dark and weird,
The river slips along the cringing land,
Swift to possess and loath to give again.
Foam-ribbed and sullen, staggering with the weight
Of forests spoiled, he takes his price in full,
Stern toll for every drop to land and men;
In witness there--Poor pawn of love or hate!--
Caught in a drift a grinning human skull.
THE END OF THE TRAIL
Sunset--and the end of the Trail;
Here the last faint footsteps fail
And I go on alone
Into the untracked ways;
I who in other days
Blazed many a road straight up
To the peaks that touch the sun--
But now is the climbing done.
No more to my feet the trail;
No more to my hand the rein;
No more--Ah! never again
The sun and the wind, and free!
The far stars over me!
As the Wilderness called I went;
Now deep and solemn and low
A Mightier calls--and I go.
Nor guide nor compass nor sign;
Face out, to the uttermost dark;
And the wind in the strong boughs--Hark!
Paean and dirge for a king!
Life, I have loved you well;
Forget the rest when you tell--
This soul did not falter, nor quail,
Nor shrink at the end of the Trail.
THE RANGE RIDER
Up and saddle at daybreak,
Into the hills with the light,
While still on piñon and cedar
Lingers the wings of night;
Clatter of hoofs in the cañon,
Scatter of horns on the trail;
Dim forms lost in the chaparral,
Fleeing like frightened quail.
Follow! the deer behind them
Pant in a beaten race;
Light in its flight is slower
Than a mountain steer in chase.
’Ware! That black bull charges;
Head down, red eyes aglow;
Crack! Crack! the pistol flashes--
God, but a noble foe!
His black bulk reels from the pathway,
The horses reek and sweat;
Unsaddle a space and breathe them,
The day’s before us yet:
Look back from our bed of bracken
Here on the world’s green roof,
You’d lie at less ease in the green below
But for pistol and sure-set hoof.
What! Is your nerve so shaken?
A man can die but once!
Who shirks the game for the chance-sent end
Is a coward soul, or a dunce.--
The turn of a loose-cinched saddle,
The plunge of a keen-curved horn--
Play down to-day--and to-morrow
Who cares that we were born!
THE YUCCA PALMS
Gray pilgrims without pouch or staff,
Or dust-stained robe, or cockle shell;
Seek ye the path to some lost shrine
Here in the desert grim as Hell?
No arched cathedral dome bends down;
The earth is iron, the sky is brass;
’Tis ages since these blistered sands
Forgot the touch of flower and grass.
Stern penance do ye for old wrongs
Mayhap, or saintship seek from pain;
With suppliant hands that never win
The benison of cooling rain.
In beggar rags like that wild throng
That once in old Perugia stood,
Ye bear your serried scourges high,
A flagellante brotherhood.
IN THE BRACKEN.
Scent of the pine on the hilltops,
Rush of the mountain breeze,
And long, deep slopes of bracken fern
Like sun-lit emerald seas.
Gray old rocks where the lizards hide
And chattering chipmunks play;
Where the brown quail leads her timorous brood
Through the fronds that bend and sway.
Home of the doe and her spotted fawns,
(Shyest of woodland things.)
Haunt of the hawks that dip and dive
On circling, fearless winds.
The skies bend down with a deeper blue
Where the white clouds drift and hover;
And the tall peaks drowse in the golden haze
That dapples their forest cover.
The needles whisper an endless song
As the brown cones bend and nod:
“O rest, O rest, with the bracken and pine
In the strong, green hills of God.”
ARIZONA
In his message of December, 1905, President Roosevelt advised that
Arizona and New Mexico be admitted to the Union as one state. In
Arizona the opposition to this “joint-statehood” measure was bitter and
determined.
No beggar she in the mighty hall where her bay-crowned sisters wait,
No empty-handed pleader for the right of a free-born State;
No child, with a child’s insistance, demanding a gilded toy;
But a fair-browed, queenly woman, strong to create or destroy.
Wise for the need of the sons she has bred in the school where
weaklings fail;
Where cunning is less than manhood, and deeds, not words, avail:
With the high, unswerving purpose that measures and overcomes;
And the faith in the Farthest Vision that builded her hard-won homes.
Link her, in her clean-proved fitness, in her right to stand alone,--
Secure for whatever future in the strength that her past has won,--
Link her, in her morning beauty, with another, however fair?
And open your jealous portal and bid her enter there
With shackles on wrist and ankle and dust on her stately head,
And her proud eyes dim with weeping? No! Bar your doors instead
And seal them fast forever! But let her go her way--
Uncrowned, if you will, but unshackled, to wait for a larger day.
Ay! let her go bare-handed; bound with no grudging gift;
Back to her own free spaces, where her rock-ribbed mountains lift
Their walls like a sheltering fortress; back to her house and blood;
And we of her blood will go our way and reckon your judgment good.
We will wait outside your sullen door till the stars you wear grow dim
As the pale dawn-stars that swim and fade o’er our mighty Cañon’s rim;
We will lift no hand for the bays ye wear nor covet your robes of
state--
But ah! By the skies above us all we will shame ye while we wait!
We will make ye the mould of an empire here in the land ye scorn;
While ye drowse, and dream in your well-housed ease that States at
your nod are born.
Ye have blotted your own beginnings, and taught your sons to forget
That ye did not spring fat-fed and old from the powers that bear and
beget;
But the while ye follow your smooth-made roads to a fireside safe of
fears,
Shall come a voice from a land still young to sing in your age-dulled
ears
The hero song of a strife as fine as your father’s fathers knew.
When they dared the rivers of unmapped wilds at the will of a bark
canoe.
The song of the deed in the doing; of the work still hot from the
hand;
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
While your merchandise is weighing we will bit and bridle and rein
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the
plain;
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired with that mighty race,
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
And out of that subtle union, desert with mountain flood,
Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no home else had stood.
We will match the gold of your minting, with its mint-stamp dulled and
marred
By the blood and tears that have stained it, and the hands that have
clutched too hard,
With the gold that no man has lied for; the gold no woman has made
The price of her truth and honor, plying a shameless trade:
The clean, pure gold of the mountains, straight from the strong, dark
earth;
With no tang or taint upon it from the hour of its primal birth.
The trick of the Money-changer, shifting his coins as he wills,
Ye may keep--no Christ was bartered for the wealth of our lavish
hills.
“Yet we are a little people--too weak for the cares of state!”
Let us go our way--when ye look again ye may find us, mayhap, too
great.
Cities we lack--and gutters where children snatch for bread:
Numbers--and hordes of starvelings, toiling but never fed.
Spare pains that would make us greater in the pattern that ye have
set;
We hold to the larger measure of the men that ye forget--
The men who from trackless forests and prairies lone and far,
Hewed out the land where ye sit at ease and grudge us our fair-won
star.
“There yet be men, my masters,”--though the net that the trickster
flings
Lies wide on the land to its bitter shame, and his cunning parleyings
Have deafened the ears of Justice, that was blind and slow of old:
Yet Time, the last Great Judge, is not bought, or bribed, or sold;
And Time and the Race shall judge us--not a league of trafficking men,
Selling the trust of the people to barter it back again;
Palming the lives of millions as a handful of easy coin--
With a single heart to the narrow verge where Craft and State-craft
join.
CAMP-FIRE TALES
THE HASH-WRASTLER
Being the story of the life and death of the camp cook, as told by an
old cow puncher.
Of course the boss he carries some weight, tho’ the owner’s a
figger-head;
(Handy fer signin’ checks an’ sich-- the Lord in His pity makes some
folks rich!
Fortune at best’s a skittish bitch as’ll neither be drove er led;
An’ “A fool fer luck!” is a standing rule, which I reckon Solomon
said.)
There’s some as growed on the own home range, an’ some as was vented
young;
An’ I’ve knowed buckaros as can’t be beat that wrastled the Greaser
tongue;
An’ there’s now an’ again a tenderfoot the cinches don’t seem to rub;
But the man that the outfit hitches to is the man that hustles the
grub.
It ain’t no cinch in the summer time to tighten a hungry belt,
When yer horse is lathered an’ steamin’ hot, an’ ye think yer goin’ to
melt;
But that old chuck wagon’s a bigger throne than the Czar of Rushy owns
When you’ve punched a blizzard from dark to dark, an’ the marrer
chilled in yer bones.
Yer _chaps_ is froze to the saddle skirts an’ the froth on yer bridle
white,
An’ the sigh ye let it ain’t no bluff when that camp-fire heaves in
sight;
An’ ye see him grab up the coffee pot an’ rattle the lid like sin;
An’ holler away to beat the band: “Grub pile! Fa-all in! Fa-a-all in!”
It’s then that ye know yer friend o’ friends, an’ that wrastler gits
his due--
In cussin’ an’ sich--fer a haloed saint couldn’t cook to suit the
crew.
It’s: “Slushy, say, yer off yer base; them biskits is dough inside.
Did ye bile the critter that Noah milked, or only her horns an’ hide?”
“Stove?” Oh, sure! A hole in the ground on the leeward side of the
camp;
The end-gate dropped fer a kneadin’ board, an’ some grease an’ rag fer
a lamp:
But his kittles was slammin’ by three o’clock, along with the bosses
snore;
A-knowin’ we’d polish his skillets clean an’ yell possessed fer more.
There was me an’ Jim an’ Otero’s Kid, I reckon we didn’t make
That wrastler’s life one shinin’ round of lemon pie an’ cake:
But he paid us off as slick an’ clean as ever a debt was paid--
An’ I low if our pull was better Beyond he’d git some boot on the
trade.
The fall rodear was all but done an’ the beef steers waitin’ to ship,
When it seemed that the Kid an’ me an’ Jim was booked fer a longer
trip.
Smallpox--an’ the way them boys lit out was worse’n the worst stampede
Of buffaloed steers on a rainy night the Old Trail ever seed.
All but that lank-jawed slinger o’ pots, that blamed hash-wrastlin’
fool;--
“I’m runnin’ this camp--you tend to biz;” he says, as stiddy an’ cool
As a chunk of ice on a Christmas tree--an’ I reckon we didn’t dispute;
Fer the Kid an’ me was as crazy as loons, an’ Jim on the cut an’
shoot.
He tied Jim up with a hackamore, an’ he pulled the three of us
through--
But I swear when I think o’ the way things went, an’ him, I feel plumb
blue;
Fer that same disease jist doused his glim as quick as you’d holler
“Scat!”
Jist cut him out an’ afore we knew he was gone like the drop of a hat.
“Th’ boys is comin’,” he says quite wild; “an’ them beans ain’t
seasoned right;
An’ Jim’ll kick at th’ bread an’ say th’ coffee’s a holy fright.
You tell ’em”--he fingered the kiverlid, an’ his words come choked
an’ thin--
“Reddy jist to th’ minnit, boys--Grub pile! Fa-a-ll in! Fa-a-ll in!”
WATCH
The Old Prospector’s Dog
What’s that ye say? That yaller dog
Ain’t killed with handsomeness, ye low?
Well, he ain’t travellin’ on his shape,
I tell ye that right here an’ now.
Ye wouldn’t have him follerin’ _you_,
Ner be ketched dead with him beside?
Well, I don’t want no better pard
When I tramp up the Great Divide.
The beauty club shied off I guess
An’ hit him pretty middlin’ light;
But looks don’t fill no empty tanks--
An’ plain old _stay’s_ what wins a fight.
An’ that dog’s got the stayin’ powers
A long sight more’n the most o’ men;
He’s just clean grit an’ “stay there” mixed,
An’ don’t ask no odds how an’ when.
’Twas crossin’ of the Plomas Range;
I’d made a right big strike, ye see,
An’ ever’ loafer in the camp
Was hangin’ round an’ watchin’ me.
So thinks I: “You’d better pull your freight
Between two suns an’ cache that dust,
Unless ye want some knife to let
Th’ daylight in through your ol’ crust.”
Well, me an’ Watch an’ my ol’ mule
Jest humped ourselves fer three hull days,
An’ then, sez I: “We’ll rest, ol’ pard;
Nobody’s follered us this ways.”
So I just cooks a bit o’ grub
An’ lays right down an’ goes to snorin’,
An’ never knows another thing
Untell I hear ol’ Watch a-roarin’.
I jumped right up an’ into Hell--
A pair o’ Greasers chokin’ me,
An’ punchin’ of me with a knife--
Another’n fightin’ Watch--an he
Jest looks at me an’ keeps a-chawin’
The rascal’s throat, an’ growlin’ low
As if to say: “Hold on, ol’ pard--
I’m comin’ soon’s I git a show.”
I fit an’ scratched an’ dodged that knife--
An’ then my foot slipped on a stone
An’ things looked dark--but next I knowed
Ol’ Watch was playin’ it alone.
He dropped his man an’ tackled mine--
An’ when my head got clear agin
I see a pile o’ rags an’ truck
Where them three Greaser thieves had bin.
An’ that ol’ dog was guardin’ me,
An’ lickin’ of my hands an’ face--
An’ him just red with drippin’ blood--
There wasn’t nary yaller place
On his ol’ hide frum head to foot.
I’se most as bad--but I caught that mule
An’ somehow histed me an’ Watch
Up on ’er back--the night was cool--
An’ we lit out--an’ long near day
I hear ’way off a rooster crowin’--
An’ jest what happened after that
I haint no certain way o’ knowin’;
Fer next I knowed I hear a voice
That kep’ a tellin’ me: “Be still--
Jest swaller this here mighty quick,
An’ when ye’ve et an’ drunk yer fill
I’ll let ye talk. Th’ dog, ye say?
Oh! he’s all right--he saved yer skin;
Come howlin’ here ’fore break o’ day,
An’ we lit out an’ brung ye in--
Him leadin’ right to where you lay--
Down crost th’ wash an’ up th’ hill--
Live? Course he’ll live. Now you hol’ on--
This haint your talk--you jes’ keep still.”
So I lays still--an’ Watch does too--
Jest sort o’ laid up fer repairs,
Fer weeks an’ weeks--till last we got
As hearty as a pair o’ bears.
Then we lit out--a-headin’ straight
Back to th’ ol’ home in Mizzury--
An’ me an’ Watch’ll settle down
An’ take our ease, I jest assure ye.
An’ any feller that thinks our looks
Haint up to par, ner apt to mash
Th’ most o’ folks, kin have his say--
But me an’ Watch has got th’ cash.
An’ its cash that counts--clean cash an’ grit;
An’ Watch has got th’ grit, I low,
An’ me th’ cash--an’ we two’s pards--
But he’s th’ best I tell ye now.
An’ when Life’s fight is fit an’ done,
An’ we go crost th’ Great Divide,
W’y Watch an’ me has made it up
That we’ll be planted side by side.
MONTE BILL
As told by the old stage driver
See that big black zahuaro[1]
Out there alone on the hill,
With the sand piled up at its sun-bleached roots?
Well, there lies Monte Bill.
Rough? Well I reckon you’d think so!
A devil to cut an’ shoot;
He’d face all the men in Creation,
An’ the fiends in Hell to boot.
His business? Oh! that was the pasteboards,
They was just the whole o’ his game;
An’ he handled ’em like greased lightnin’--
That’s how he got his name.
(An’ a name is a durned poor measure
When you’re weighin’ th’ worth of a man;
An’ you can’t go all by his business
To git at his clean ground plan.)
Bill was stagin’ it up from Ehrenberg--
I was drivin’ the six that fall!
It was hotter’n all tarnation
An’ the desert shut in like a wall;
The mirage it was sloshin’ an’ shinin’
Like the water before an’ behind;
An’ the dust in your throat near chokin’,
An’ burnin’ your eyes fair blind.
They was only two other passengers
A-making the trip that day;
A little mite of a woman,
An’ a child like a bird at play:
She was goin’ up to Fort Whipple,
Were an officer’s wife, she said,
An’ the way her baby took to Bill
Just mighty near turned his head.
We was joggin’ along through a sand-wash,
An’ talkin’ an’ laughin’ the while,
An’ nobody s’posed an Apache
Was nearer’n fifty miles;
But the time that ye think yer safest
It’s good to be sayin’ a prayer,
An’ the yell that come from a patch o’ mesquite
Plumb raised the roots o’ my hair.
Bill gobbled the situation--
Took it all to onct at a glance;
An’ to save that woman an’ baby
He saw they was just one chance.
He yelled up the boot to warn me,
An’ out o’ the side he jumped,
An’ I swung the whip an’ swore for life,--
An’ I tell ye them six bronks humped.
Bill lit on his feet an’ runnin’
An’ down by a greasewood dropped--
He knowed he had nary a show to beat
But he wasn’t the breed that stopped.--
An’ the rest? Well, Cullin’s station
Was a long ten mile away;
’Twas a run with Death--but that baby
An’ woman wan’t hurt that day.
An’ Bill? Well, it’s no good talkin’--
You know what Apaches is!
An’ a man that they git their claws on
Had better take Hell for his
When the troop from old Camp Date Creek
Got to him they came too late--
Just a smolderin’ pile of ashes
Was left to tell his fate.
We dug out a grave on the hillside
An’ filled it with cactus an’ stones;
For we didn’t want the kiotes
To chaw what was left of his bones:
An’ that “giant” growed up above him,
An’ the wind piled the sand below--
But I reckon as how old Bill don’t care,
For he’s gone where brave men go.
[1] Giant cactus of the Southwest
BEYOND THE DESERT
THE GREATER FLAG
Fling out its folds to the winds of earth from every crest and crag,
Roll strong salute from a million throats to honor this greater flag;
The flag of a larger freedom, the flag of a wider trust,
From the Arctic snow-peaks circling to the sun-scourged desert dust:
Flower of the New World’s morning; noon promise and prophesy,
Spanning the reach of endeavor into the vast To Be:
Broadening its stripes that their shadow shelter a mightier brood,
A nation reckoned of nations, fearless of temper and mood.
Never the past forgetting, to the hope of the past still true;
But formed to a larger stature ’neath skies of a deeper blue;
Grown to a fuller being; wise with the price of the years;
The wisdom born of mistakes outwrought, the tenderness taught of
tears;
Strong with the pain of the purchase, tense muscle and sweat of brow,
When Destiny over the nation’s heart drove deep its iron plow,
Fit with the brawn of battle for guarding the ways of peace,
That the factions of evil dwindle and the forces of right increase.
Hemmed no more in the cradle by the marge of the Eastern Sea,
No more for a home-hedged people the Stars of the West float free;
As the pine to its tall pride reaches, as the man to his power and
prime,
So the life of the nation broadens, strong-souled, to its riper time:
With the might of a Titan impulse, a million hands at the wheel;
A million minds far-serving, a million hearts to feel;
Upborn as a ship sea-driven when the full tides sweep and roll,
In the track of the gods fore-destined to the one unchanging goal.
In the front of the great World-Shapers given to lead and mold,
Lining the course of the New to plumb with the tried of the Old:
On the broad foundation whose mortar was leavened with blood and
tears,
Rounding the temple fore-tokened in dreams of prophets and seers;
Wide-domed as the vault of heaven; including as heaven includes;
Puny and strong alike, full-handed or bare of goods:
Holding no caste in justice, no fief of air and light--
Not flung as a bone to beggars but ceded a primal right.
No more shall the Grail of the ages for the few be sought and won;
But alike and alike the sharing when the strife is striven and done.
Each man by the flag above him bound to his bravest and best;
To full, free chance for his making, to room for his highest quest;
Bound by the flag above him to reckon his brother’s need;
Bound by the flag above him to hearken and help and heed
The voices crying in darkness, as the crying of kind and kin;
The call of the scourged and outcast, as the call of the housed
within.
Unfurl its folds to the winds of earth from every crest and crag;
Roll strong salute from a million throats to honor this greater flag;
The flag of a larger freedom, the flag of a wider trust;
From the Arctic snow-peaks waving to the sun-scourged desert dust;
With the light of its starry halo out-tossed on the utmost seas,
And its stripes in the sunshine rippling caressed by the farthest
breeze;
With the hope of the hearts that won it our torch and beacon still,
And the blood yet red for its keeping that flowed on Bunker Hill.
THE HYMN OF THE MEN THAT FAIL
Lo, here we face the Weigher with our balance; we, who out of all our
toil have won
Only hope fore-spent and ideals vanished; only scars and sweat beneath
the sun;
All we dared, and spent our hearts in daring, grasping as a hand that
grasps a star,
Star-wise in its beauty and eluding lies beyond us still as dim and
far.
And the soul that panoplied for battle once rode bravely forth in
Fortune’s train;
Wise now by futile march and foray, knows the high adventure was in
vain:
We have gained no laurels for our striving, naught of praise from them
that sit to judge;
Yet while there is room for new endeavor life is all too full for
fret or grudge.
We have failed--and bitter was the failing; full the price we paid of
faith and trust;
Still our souls turn backward unavailing to the Gods thrown prostrate
in the dust:
For we could not keep the sight of childhood; and the Grail our hearts
set out to seek--
It was but a vessel, empty, earthen--yet we had the joy of them that
seek.
All the winds of earth have blown us backward; all her tides have
turned our course awry;
And though night be gemmed with starry splendor there is never lode
star in our sky:
Straight against the winds of Fate we venture; in the teeth of every
tide we steer;
High above the darkness that enfolds us burns our guiding hope forever
clear.
We are them that fail; our hands are empty; hall and mart and temple
know us not;
Power is not to us, nor place uplifted; wit is not of us to plan and
plot;
But the wide and lonely places know us; hill and plain and wood and
dark morrass;
And the light of homes and smoke of cities rise behind our footsteps
as we pass.