About a central heap of glowing chips,
And dined on brittle bull-meat dried in strips,
With rum to wash it down.
It snowed all night.
The earth and heavens, in the morning light,
Were one white fury; and the stream ran slush.
Two days and nights the gale boomed; then a hush
Fell with the sun; and when the next dawn came—
A pale flare flanked by mockeries of flame—
The river lay as solid as the land.
Now caching half their goods, the little band
Resumed the journey, toiling under packs;
And twice they felt the morning at their backs,
A laggard traveller; and twice they saw
The sunset dwindle to a starry awe
Beyond the frozen vast, while still they pressed
The journey—bearded faces yearning west,
White as the waste they trod. Then one day more,
Southwestward, brought them to the jutting shore
That faced the goal.
A strip of poplars stretched
Along a winding stream, their bare boughs etched
Black line by line upon a flat of snow
Blue tinted in the failing afterglow.
Humped ponies ’mid the drifts and clumps of sage
Went nosing after grudging pasturage
Where’er it chanced the blizzard’s whimsic flaws
Had swept the slough grass bare. A flock of squaws
Chopped wood and chattered in the underbrush,
Their ax strokes thudding dully in the hush,
Their nasal voices rising shrill and clear:
And, circled ’neath a bluff that towered sheer
Beside the stream, snug lodges wrought of hide,
Smoke-plumed and glowing with the fires inside,
Made glad the gazers. Even as they stood,
Content to stare a moment, from the wood
The clamor deepened, and a running shout
Among the lodges brought the dwellers out,
Braves, squaws, papooses; and the wolf dogs bayed;
And up the flat the startled ponies neighed,
Pricking their ears to question what befell.
So came Fink’s party to the Musselshell,
Gaunt, bearded, yet—how gloriously young
And then, what feasts of bison fleece and tongue,
Of browned boudin and steaming humprib stew!
What roaring nights of wassailing they knew—
Gargantuan regales—when through the town
The fiery liquor ravined, melting down
The tribal hoard of beaver! How they made
Their merest gewgaws mighty in the trade!
Aye, merry men they were! Nor could they know
How even then there came that wraith of woe
Amongst them; some swift-fingered Fate that span
The stuff of sorrow, wove ’twixt man and man
The tangling mesh, that friend might ruin friend
And each go stumbling to a bitter end—
A threefold doom that now the Song recalls.
IV
The Net Is Cast
There was a woman.
What enchantment falls
Upon that far off revel! How the din
Of jangling voices, chaffering to win
The lesser values, hushes at the words,
As dies the dissonance of brawling birds
Upon a calm before the storm is hurled!
Lo, down the age-long reaches of the world
What rose-breatht wind of ghostly music creeps!
And was she fair—this woman? Legend keeps
No answer; yet we know that she was young,
If truly comes the tale by many a tongue
That one of Red Hair’s party fathered her.
What need to know her features as they were?
Was she not lovely as her lover’s thought,
And beautiful as that wild love she wrought
Was fatal? Vessel of the world’s desire,
Did she not glow with that mysterious fire
That lights the hearth or burns the rooftree down?
What face was hers who made the timeless town
A baleful torch forever? Hers who wailed
Upon the altar when the four winds failed
At Aulis? What the image that looked up
On Iseult from the contemplated cup
Of everlasting thirst? What wondrous face
Above the countless cradles of the race
Makes sudden heaven for the blinking eyes?
One face in truth! And once in Paradise
Each man shall stray unwittingly, and see—
In some unearthly valley where the Tree
With golden fruitage perilously fraught
Still stands—that image of God’s afterthought.
Then shall the world turn wonderful and strange!
Who knows how came that miracle of change
To Fink at last? For he was not of such
As tend to prize one woman overmuch;
And legend has it that, from Pittsburg down
To Baton Rouge, in many a river town
Some blowsy Ariadne pined for Mike.
“It is me rule to love ’em all alike.”
He often said, with slow, omniscient wink,
When just the proper quantity of drink
Had made him philosophic; “Glass or gourd,
Shure, now, they’re all wan liquor whin they’re poured!
Aye, rum is rum, me b’y!”
Alas, the tongue!
How glibly are its easy guesses flung
Against the knowing reticence of years,
To echo laughter in the time of tears,
Raw gusts of mocking merriment that stings!
Some logic in the seeming ruck of things
Inscrutably confutes us!
Now had come
The time when rum no longer should be rum,
But witchwine sweet with peril. It befell
In this wise, insofar as tongue may tell
And tongues repeat the little eyes may guess
Of what may happen in that wilderness,
The human heart. There dwelt a mighty man
Among the Bloods, a leader of his clan,
Around whose life were centered many lives,
For many sons had he of many wives;
And also he was rich in pony herds.
Wherefore, they say, men searched his lightest words
For hidden things, since anyone might see
That none had stronger medicine than he
To shape aright the stubborn stuff of life.
Among the women that he had to wife
Was she who knew the white man when the band
Of Red Hair made such marvel in the land,
She being younger then and little wise.
But in that she was pleasing to the eyes
And kept her fingers busy for her child
And bore a silent tongue, the great man smiled
Upon the woman, called her to his fire
And gave the Long Knife’s girl a foster sire,
So that her maidenhood was never lean,
But like a pasture that is ever green
Because it feels a mountain’s sunny flank.
Now in the season when the pale sun shrank
Far southward, like another kind of moon,
And dawns were laggard and the dark came soon,
It pleased the great man’s whim to give a feast.
’Twas five days after Carpenter went east
With eight stout ponies and a band of three
To lift the cache; a fact that well might be
Sly father to the great man’s festive mood—
A wistfully prospective gratitude,
Anticipating charity!
It chanced
That while the women sang and young men danced
About the drummers, and the pipe went round,
And ever ’twixt the songs arose the sound
Of fat dog stewing, Fink, with mournful eyes
And pious mien, lamented the demise
Of “pore owld Fido,” till his comrades choked
With stifled laughter; soberly invoked
The plopping stew
