se 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.

20

Then the trail along the Solomon
Where the timber, making friends
With the ever-widening valley,
Filled the rounded river bends;
Then the rankling recollection,
As he passed some well-known place
Where before, with hope and vigor,
He had sped in fruitless chase.
Then the lonely camp at nightfall,
Where the wind in monotone
Thrummed the harp strings of the grass stems,
Breathing low its song, "Alone!"
Where the stars, fixed in the heavens,
To his upturned face would say,
With their heartless glint of distance,
"She thou seek'st is far away."

21

Then the long, far-reaching bottoms
Rank with withered blue-joint grass,
With its broken stems entangled
In a matted jungle mass;
Then across the higher prairie,
Searching out a shorter way,
To the creek that joined the river
Where Mac crossed and got away;
Then the twinge of bitter sorrow
As he neared his journey's end,
And beheld the fringe of timber
On the banks of Old Man's bend,
Where no living sign or token
Broke the gloom that brooded there,
Save a solitary buzzard
Floating idly in the air.

22

From these high and broken hilltops
He could trace the river's flow,
And the creek's untamed meandering