Drab light came seeping through the sullen sky.
They waited there until the morning broke,
And, like a misty moon amid the smoke,
The sun came stealing up.
They found a place
Where rain had scarred the butte wall’s western face
With many runnels; clambered upward there—
And viewed a panorama of despair.
The wind had died, and not a sound arose
Above those blackened leagues; for even crows
(The solitude embodied in a bird)
Had fled that desolation. Nothing stirred,
Save here and there a thin gray column grew
From where some draw still smouldered. And they knew
How universal quiet may appal
As violence, and, even as a wall,
Sheer vacancy confine.
No horse, no gun!
Nay, worse; no hint of water hole or run
In all the flat or back among the hills!
Mere hunger is a goad that, ere it kills,
May drive the lean far down the hardest road:
But thirst is both a snaffle and a load;
It gripped them now. When Mike made bold to speak,
His tongue was like a stranger to his cheek.
“Shure, b’y,” he croaked; “ ’tis Sunday morn in hell!”
The sound seemed profanation; on it fell
The vast, rebuking silence.
Long they gazed
About them, standing silent and amazed
Upon the summit. West and north and east
They saw too far. But mystery, at least,
Was in the south, where still the smoke concealed
The landscape. Vistas of the unrevealed
Invited Hope to stray there as it please.
And presently there came a little breeze
Out of the dawn. As of a crowd that waits
Some imminent revealment of the Fates
That toil behind the scenes, a murmur ’woke
Amid the hollow hush. And now the smoke
Mysteriously stirs, begins to flow,
And giant shadow bulks that loom below
Seem crowding dawnward. One by one they lift
Above the reek, and trail the ragged drift
About their flanks. A melancholy scene!
Gray buttes and giddy gulfs that yawn between—
A Titan’s labyrinth! But see afar
Where yonder canyon like a purple scar
Cuts zigzag through the waste! Is that a gleam
Of water in its deeps?
A stream! A stream!
Now scrambling down the runnels of the rain,
They struck across the devastated plain
Where losers of the night’s mad race were strewn
To wait the wolves and crows.
Mid-afternoon
Beheld them stripping at the river’s bank.
They wallowed in the turbid stream and drank
Delicious beakers in the liquid mud;
Nor drank alone, for here the burning flood
Had flung its panting driftage in the dark.
The valley teemed with life, as though some Ark
That rode the deluge, spewed its cargo here:
Elk, antelope, wolves, bison, rabbits, deer,
Owls, crows—the greatest mingled with the least.
And when the men had drunk, they had a feast
Of liver, bolted dripping from a cow
Dead at the water’s lip.
Blue shadow now
Was mounting slowly up the canyon steep;
So, seeking for a better place to sleep,
They wandered down the margin of the stream.
’Twas scarce more real than walking in a dream
Of lonely craters in a lunar land
That never thrilled with roots. On either hand
The dwarfing summits soared, grotesque, austere,
And jagged fissures, sentinelled with fear,
Led back to mysteries of purple gloom.
They came to where a coulee, like a flume,
Rose steeply to the prairie. Thither hurled,
A roaring freshet of the herd had swirled,
Cascading to the river bed; and there,
Among the trampelled carcasses, the mare
Lay bloated near the water. She had run
With saddle, panniers, powder-horn and gun
Against the wind-thewed fillies of the fire,
And won the heat, to perish at the wire—
A plucky little brute!
VIII
Vengeance
They made a camp
Well up above the crawling valley damp,
And where no prowling beast might chance to come.
There was no fuel; but a flask of rum,
Thanks to the buckskin, dulled the evening chill.
And both grew mellow. Memories of Bill
And other nights possessed the little man;
And on and on his reminiscence ran,
As ’twere the babble of a brook of tears
Gone groping for the ocean of dead years
Too far away to reach. And by and by
The low voice sharpened to an anguished cry:
“O Mike! I said you couldn’t miss the cup!”
Then something snapped in Fink and, leaping up,
He seized Talbeau and shook him as a rat
Is shaken by a dog. “Enough of that!”
He yelled; “And, ’faith, Til sind ye afther Bill
Per wan more wurrd! Ye fool! I mint to kill!
And, moind me now, ye’d better howld yer lip!”
Talbeau felt murder shudder in the grip
That choked and shook and flung him. Faint and dazed,
He sprawled upon the ground. And anger blazed
Within him, like the leaping Northern Light
That gives no heat. He wished to rise and fight,
But could not for the horror of it all.
Wild voices thronged the further canyon wall
As Fink raved on; and every word he said
Was like a mutilation of the dead
By some demonic mob.
And when at length
He heard Mike snoring yonder, still the strength
To rise and kill came not upon Talbeau.
So many moments of the Long Ago
Came pleading; and the gentle might thereof
United with the habit of old love
To weave a spell about the sleeping man.
Then drowsily the pondered facts began
To merge and group, as running colors will,
In new and vaguer patterns. Mike and Bill
Were bickering again. And someone said:
“Let’s flip a copper; if it’s tails, he’s dead;
If heads, he’s living. That’s the way to tell!”
A spinning copper jangled like a bell.
But even as he stooped to pick it up,
Behold! the coin became a whisky cup
Bored smoothly through the center! “Look at this!”
He seemed to shout: “I knew Mike couldn’t miss!
Bill only played at dying for a joke!”
Then laughter filled his dream, and he awoke.
The dawn was like a stranger’s cold regard
Across the lifeless land, grotesquely scarred
As by old sorrow; and the man’s dull sense
Of woe, become objective and immense,
Seemed waiting there to crush him.
Fink still slept;
And even now, it seemed, his loose mouth kept
A shape for shameless words, as though a breath,
Deep drawn, might set it gloating o’er the death
Of one who loved its jesting and its song.
And while Talbeau sat pondering the wrong
So foully done, and all that had been killed,
And how the laughter of the world was stilled
And all its wine poured out, he seemed to hear
As though a spirit whispered in his ear:
You won’t forget I gave my gun to you!
And instantly the deep conviction grew
That ’twas a
