tched 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.

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 hor