Complete Poetical Works by Bret Harte Part 33

HALF AN HOUR BEFORE SUPPER

"So she's here, your unknown Dulcinea, the lady you met on the train, And you really believe she would know you if you were to meet her again?"

"Of course," he replied, "she would know me; there never was womankind yet Forgot the effect she inspired. She excuses, but does not forget."

"Then you told her your love?" asked the elder. The younger looked up with a smile: "I sat by her side half an hour--what else was I doing the while?

"What, sit by the side of a woman as fair as the sun in the sky, And look somewhere else lest the dazzle flash back from your own to her eye?

"No, I hold that the speech of the tongue be as frank and as bold as the look, And I held up herself to herself,--that was more than she got from her book."

"Young blood!" laughed the elder; "no doubt you are voicing the mode of To-Day: But then we old fogies at least gave the lady some chance for delay.

"There's my wife (you must know),--we first met on the journey from Florence to Rome: It took me three weeks to discover who was she and where was her home;

"Three more to be duly presented; three more ere I saw her again; And a year ere my romance BEGAN where yours ended that day on the train."

"Oh, that was the style of the stage-coach; we travel to-day by express; Forty miles to the hour," he answered, "won't admit of a pa.s.sion that's less."

"But what if you make a mistake?" quoth the elder. The younger half sighed.

"What happens when signals are wrong or switches misplaced?" he replied.

"Very well, I must bow to your wisdom," the elder returned, "but submit Your chances of winning this woman your boldness has bettered no whit.

"Why, you do not at best know her name. And what if I try your ideal With something, if not quite so fair, at least more en regle and real?

"Let me find you a partner. Nay, come, I insist--you shall follow-- this way.

My dear, will you not add your grace to entreat Mr. Rapid to stay?

"My wife, Mr. Rapid-- Eh, what! Why, he's gone--yet he said he would come.

How rude! I don't wonder, my dear, you are properly crimson and dumb!"

WHAT THE BULLET SANG

O joy of creation To be!

O rapture to fly And be free!

Be the battle lost or won, Though its smoke shall hide the sun, I shall find my love,--the one Born for me!

I shall know him where he stands, All alone, With the power in his hands Not o'erthrown; I shall know him by his face, By his G.o.dlike front and grace; I shall hold him for a s.p.a.ce, All my own!

It is he--O my love!

So bold!

It is I--all thy love Foretold!

It is I. O love! what bliss!

Dost thou answer to my kiss?

O sweetheart! what is this Lieth there so cold?

THE OLD CAMP-FIRE

Now shift the blanket pad before your saddle back you fling, And draw your cinch up tighter till the sweat drops from the ring: We've a dozen miles to cover ere we reach the next divide.

Our limbs are stiffer now than when we first set out to ride, And worse, the horses know it, and feel the leg-grip tire, Since in the days when, long ago, we sought the old camp-fire.

Yes, twenty years! Lord! how we'd scent its incense down the trail, Through balm of bay and spice of spruce, when eye and ear would fail, And worn and faint from useless quest we crept, like this, to rest, Or, flushed with luck and youthful hope, we rode, like this, abreast.

Ay! straighten up, old friend, and let the mustang think he's nigher, Through looser rein and stirrup strain, the welcome old camp-fire.

You know the shout that would ring out before us down the glade, And start the blue jays like a flight of arrows through the shade, And sift the thin pine needles down like slanting, shining rain, And send the squirrels scampering back to their holes again, Until we saw, blue-veiled and dim, or leaping like desire, That flame of twenty years ago, which lit the old camp-fire.

And then that rest on Nature's breast, when talk had dropped, and slow The night wind went from tree to tree with challenge soft and low!

We lay on lazy elbows propped, or stood to stir the flame, Till up the soaring redwood's shaft our shadows danced and came, As if to draw us with the sparks, high o'er its unseen spire, To the five stars that kept their ward above the old camp-fire,--

Those picket stars whose tranquil watch half soothed, half shamed our sleep.

What recked we then what beasts or men around might lurk or creep?

We lay and heard with listless ears the far-off panther's cry, The near coyote's snarling snap, the grizzly's deep-drawn sigh, The brown bear's blundering human tread, the gray wolves' yelping choir Beyond the magic circle drawn around the old camp-fire.

And then that morn! Was ever morn so filled with all things new?

The light that fell through long brown aisles from out the kindling blue, The creak and yawn of stretching boughs, the jay-bird's early call, The rat-tat-tat of woodp.e.c.k.e.r that waked the woodland hall, The fainter stir of lower life in fern and brake and brier, Till flashing leaped the torch of Day from last night's old camp-fire!

Well, well! we'll see it once again; we should be near it now; It's scarce a mile to where the trail strikes off to skirt the slough, And then the dip to Indian Spring, the wooded rise, and--strange!

Yet here should stand the blasted pine that marked our farther range; And here--what's this? A ragged swab of ruts and stumps and mire!

Sure this is not the sacred grove that hid the old camp-fire!

Yet here's the "blaze" I cut myself, and there's the stumbling ledge, With quartz "outcrop" that lay atop, now leveled to its edge, And mounds of moss-grown stumps beside the woodman's rotting chips, And gashes in the hillside, that gape with dumb red lips.

And yet above the shattered wreck and ruin, curling higher-- Ah yes!--still lifts the smoke that marked the welcome old camp-fire!

Perhaps some friend of twenty years still lingers there to raise To weary hearts and tired eyes that beacon of old days.

Perhaps but stay; 'tis gone! and yet once more it lifts as though To meet our tardy blundering steps, and seems to MOVE, and lo!

Whirls by us in a rush of sound,--the vanished funeral pyre Of hopes and fears that twenty years burned in the old camp-fire!

For see, beyond the prospect spreads, with chimney, spire, and roof,-- Two iron bands across the trail clank to our mustang's hoof; Above them leap two blackened threads from limb-lopped tree to tree, To where the whitewashed station speeds its message to the sea.

Rein in! Rein in! The quest is o'er. The goal of our desire Is but the train whose track has lain across the old camp-fire!

THE STATION-MASTER OF LONE PRAIRIE

An empty bench, a sky of grayest etching, A bare, bleak shed in blackest silhouette, Twelve years of platform, and before them stretching Twelve miles of prairie glimmering through the wet.

North, south, east, west,--the same dull gray persistence, The tattered vapors of a vanished train, The narrowing rails that meet to pierce the distance, Or break the columns of the far-off rain.