There for weeks lay Billy, helpless,
  Racked with mad’ning fever pains,
As the burning sun of summer
  Scorches sere the desert plains. 
Then he lay with cold, white features
  And the feeble, scarce drawn breath,
As the silent winter prairie
  Lies beneath its shroud of death. 
Ofttimes when the raging sickness
  Sent the hot blood to his brain,
He would point with frantic gesture
  To the dingy window pane,
Calling in excited mutterings,
  Eyes transfixed in frenzied fright—­
“There she is!  Now, can’t you see her? 
  See her face there in the light!”

11

Then old Zach would try to soothe him
  In his simple-hearted way;
“She won’t hurt you,” he would tell him,
  “I’ll go drive her clear away. 
I’ve seen things—­now listen, pardner—­
  Those things happened once to me
Once down there in old Dodge City,
  Winding up a three weeks’ spree. 
What you see is jest a ’lusion,
  ’Cause you’re crazy in your head;
When your thinker’s runnin’ proper
  You’ll find ‘She’ is gone or dead. 
There, now, pardner, see what this is! 
  Ain’t it purty?  Your tin cup;
Found a little pinch o’ coffee. 
  That’s the boy, now, drink it up!”

12

When the breeze of spring in whispers
  Stirred the withered bunch-grass plume,
Humming hymns of resurrection
  Over nature’s silent tomb,
And the fleeing clouds of heaven,
  Bending low at God’s command,
Spilled their tribute from the ocean
  On the long-forsaken land,
And the sun, with mellow kindness
  Spread abroad his softened rays,
Calling bud and blade and blossom
  From their sleep of many days,
Billy heard, at last, the music
  Of the glad earth’s jubilee,
Felt a new strength stir within him,
  And a longing to be free.

13

One day, o’er the hill’s low summit,
  Whence the prairie dipped away,
There appeared a moving wagon
  With its canvas patched and gray,
Like a vessel on the ocean
  Under taut and close-reefed sail,
Rising slowly on the billows
  Heaped up by the driving gale. 
Veering towards the little dug-out,
  Making for a friendly shore,
Heaving to, the schooner anchored
  Close beside the open door. 
Loud and hearty were the greetings,
  For the driver of the team
Was Tom Frothingham, a neighbor,
  Who had lived near Billy’s claim.

14

Bit by bit he told the story—­
  How he’d wandered all around
Since he left his Kansas homestead
  And the folks near North Pole mound;
How he’d traveled all through Texas
  With the roving fever on,
Camping oft in strange new places,
  Where no other soul had gone. 
So the news, now half forgotten
  In his absence from the place,
Came in broken recollections—­
  Careful efforts to retrace
All the incidents of interest
  To the sick one listening there,
Who, with pale and careworn features,
  Heard the story with despair.