Ah, not without a hand upon the rein,
Nor with an empty saddle, had the mare
Outrun the flame that she might carry there
The means of vengeance!
Yet—if Mike were dead!
He shuddered, gazing where the gray sky bled
With morning, like a wound. He couldn’t kill;
Nor did it seem to be the way of Bill
To bid him do it. Yet the gun was sent.
For what?—To make Mike suffer and repent?
But how?
Awhile his apathetic gaze
Explored yon thirst- and hunger-haunted maze,
As though he might surprise the answer there.
The answer came. That region of despair
Should be Mike’s Purgatory! More than Chance
Had fitted circumstance to circumstance
That this should be! He knew it! And the plan,
Thus suddenly conceived, possessed the man.
It seemed the might of Bill had been reborn
In him.
He took the gun and powder horn,
The water flasks and sun-dried bison meat
The panniers gave; then climbing to a seat
Above the sleeper, shouted down to him:
“Get up!” Along the further canyon rim
A multitude of voices swelled the shout.
Fink started up and yawned and looked about,
Bewildered. Once again the clamor ran
Along the canyon wall. The little man,
Now squinting down the pointed rifle, saw
The lifted face go pale, the stubborn jaw
Droop nervelessly. A twinge of pity stirred
Within him, and he marvelled as he heard
His own voice saying what he wished unsaid:
“It’s Bill’s own rifle pointing at your head;
Go east, and think of all the wrong you’ve done!”
Fink glanced across his shoulder where the sun
Shone level on the melancholy land;
And, feigning that he didn’t understand,
Essayed a careless grin that went awry.
“Bejasus, and we’ll not go there, me b’y,”
He said; “for shure ’tis hell widout the lights!”
That one-eyed stare along the rifle sights
Was narrowed to a slit. A sickening shock
Ran through him at the clucking of the lock.
He clutched his forehead, stammering: “Talbeau,
I’ve been yer frind—.”
“I’ll give you three to go,”
The other said, “or else you’ll follow Bill!
One—two—.”
Fink turned and scuttled down the hill;
And at the sight the watcher’s eyes grew dim,
For something old and dear had gone from him—
His pride in one who made a clown of Death.
Alas, how much the man would give for breath!
How easily Death made of him the clown!
Now scrambling for a grip, now rolling down,
Mike landed at the bottom of the steep,
And, plunging in the river belly deep,
Struck out in terror for the other shore.
At any moment might the rifle’s roar
Crash through that rearward silence, and the lead
Come snarling like a hornet at his head—
He felt the spot! Then presently the flood
Began to cool the fever in his blood,
And furtive self-derision stung his pride.
He clambered dripping up the further side
And felt himself a fool! He wouldn’t go!
That little whiffet yonder was Talbeau!
And who was this that he, Mike Fink, had feared?
He’d go and see.
A spurt of smoke appeared
Across the river, and a bullet struck—
Spat ping—beside him, spewing yellow muck
Upon his face. Then every cliff and draw
Rehearsed the sullen thunders of the law
He dared to question. Stricken strangely weak,
He clutched the clay and watched the powder reek
Trail off with glories of the level sun.
He saw Talbeau pour powder in his gun
And ram the wad. A second shot might kill!
That brooding like a woman over Bill
Had set the fellow daft. A crazy man!
The notion spurred him. Springing up, he ran
To where a gully cleft the canyon rim
And, with that one-eyed fury after him,
Fled east.
The very buttes, grotesque and weird,
Seemed startled at the sight of what he feared
And powerless to shield him in his need.
’Twas more than man he fled from; ’twas a deed,
Become alive and subtle as the air,
That turned upon the doer. Everywhere
It gibbered in the echoes as he fled.
A stream of pictures flitted through his head:
The quiet body in the hearth-lit hall,
The grinning ghost, the flight, the stallion’s fall,
The flame girt isle, the spectral morning sun,
And then the finding of the dead man’s gun
Beside the glooming river. Flowing by,
These fused and focused in the deadly eye
He felt behind him.
Suddenly the ground
Heaved up and smote him with a crashing sound;
And in the vivid moment of his fall
He thought he heard the snarling rifle ball
And felt the one-eyed fury crunch its mark.
Expectant of the swooping of the dark,
He raised his eyes.—The sun was shining still;
It peeped about the shoulder of a hill
And viewed him with a quizzifying stare.
He looked behind him. Nothing followed there;
But Silence, big with dread-begotten sound,
Dismayed him; and the steeps that hemmed him round
Seemed plotting with a more than human guile.
He rose and fled; but every little while
A sense of eyes behind him made him pause;
And always down the maze of empty draws
It seemed a sound of feet abruptly ceased.
Now trotting, walking now, he labored east;
And when at length the burning zenith beat
Upon him, and the summits swam with heat,
And on the winding gullies fell no shade,
He came to where converging gulches made
A steep-walled basin for the blinding glare.
Here, fanged and famished, crawled the prickly pear;
Malevolent with thirst, the soap weed thrust
Its barbed stilettos from the arid dust,
Defiant of the rain-withholding blue:
And in the midst a lonely scrub oak grew,
A crooked dwarf that, in the pictured bog
Of its own shadow, squatted like a frog.
Fink, panting, flung himself beneath its boughs.
A mighty magic in the noonday drowse
Allayed the driving fear. A waking dream
Fulfilled a growing wish. He saw the stream
Far off as from a space-commanding height.
And now a fantasy of rapid flight
Transported him above the sagging land,
And with a sudden swoop he seemed to stand
Once more upon the shimmering river’s brink.
His eyes drank deep; but when his mouth would drink,
A giant hornet from the other shore—
The generating center of a roar
That shook the world—snarled by.
He started up,
And saw the basin filling as a cup
With purple twilight! Gazing all around
Where still the flitting ghost of some great sound
Troubled the crags a moment, then was mute,
He saw along the shoulder of a butte,
A good three hundred paces from the oak,
A slowly spreading streak of rifle smoke
And knew the deadly eye was lurking there.
He fled again.
About him everywhere
Amid the tangled draws now growing dim,
Weird witnesses took
