15

“Three weeks after you left Kansas
  I hitched up and came away. 
Still, I reckoned you intended
  To improve your claim and stay;
For your eighty was a picture—­
  Running spring and good clear land—­
Everything a body needed
  For a starter, right at hand. 
Well, some others left ’fore I did—­
  You remember Mac, of course,
How he got the moving notion
  When Bill Kelly missed his horse? 
Chased him clear to Old Man’s crossing,
  So I heard the posse say;
Thought they had him fairly cornered,
  But, by jings! he got away.

16

“There are stranger things than fiction;
  What is natural may seem queer,
So I s’pose we needn’t wonder
  At the things we see out here. 
One thing happened since you left there
  That I call a burning shame—­
Did you know that rope-necked Johnson
  Jumped your eighty-acre claim? 
Last I saw him, he was plowing,
  And he laughed and tried to joke: 
Said ’twas kind of you to leave him
  All the ground that you had broke;
Said your house was so untidy
  He was sleeping out of doors,
Till he got a girl to help him
  Wash the pans and scrub the floors.

17

“Lots of people coming in there
  From most every foreign land—­
Massachusetts and Missouri—­
  Made a mess I couldn’t stand. 
Every man that’s made of manhood
  Wants to live where he is free,
So I’m bound to keep on moving
  When they get to crowding me. 
Then another thing that happened: 
  Puzzled every one around
When they heard one morning early,
  That Bill Kelly’s horse was found. 
Aleck Rose told me about it
  After I had packed and gone;
Said the mare strayed in the dooryard
  With Mac’s steel-horn saddle on.”

18

As each day in steady conquest
  Charged the ranks of fleeing night,
Winning back the stolen hours
  With their golden spears of light;
As the living in all nature
  Felt that mighty spirit’s sway,
So the sick man caught the power
  And his illness wore away. 
One clear morning, as Aurora
  Silver-tinted all the plain,
In his weatherbeaten saddle
  Billy took the trail again. 
“Good by, boy,” old Zach repeated,
  “I’m most sure you’ll never see
Any more o’ them ’ere ’lusions,
  Anyway, what you called ‘She.’”

19

Day by day the low horizon
  Spread its narrow circle round,
As if fate had drawn a barrier,
  And forbade advance beyond. 
Though the journey dragged on slowly,
  Night time brought its sure reward,
For the added miles behind him
  Stretched at length to Mingo’s Ford,
Where the breeze bore from the upland
  Broken fragments of the song
Of the cowboy with his cattle,
  As he drove the strays along;
Where the voice of flowing water
  And the treble of the birds,
Swelled the hallowed evening anthem
  To the bass of lowing herds.