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tion 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. Naught but myself; nor form nor figure breaking The long hushed level and stark shining waste; Nothing that moves to fill the vision aching, When the last shadow fled in sullen haste. Nothing beyond. Ah yes! From out the station A stiff, gaunt figure thrown against the sky, Beckoning me with some wooden salutation Caught from his signals as the train flashed by; Yielding me place beside him with dumb gesture Born of that reticence of sky and air. We sit apart, yet wrapped in that one vesture Of silence, sadness, and unspoken care: Each following his own thought,--around us darkening The rain-washed boundaries and stretching track,-- Each following those dim parallels and hearkening For long-lost voices that will not come back. Until, unasked,--I knew not why or wherefore,-- He yielded, bit by bit, his dreary past, Like gathered clouds that seemed to thicken there for Some dull down-dropping of their care at last. Long had he lived there. As a boy had started From the stacked corn the Indian's painted face; Heard the wolves' howl the wearying waste that parted His father's hut from the last camping-place. Nature had mocked him: thrice had claimed the reaping, With scythe of fire, of lands she once had sown; Sent the tornado, round his hearthstone heaping Rafters, dead faces that were like his own. Then came the War Time. When its shadow beckoned He had walked dumbly where the flag had led Through swamp and fen,--unknown, unpraised, unreckoned,-- To famine, fever, and a prison bed. Till the storm passed, and the slow tide returning Cast him, a wreck, beneath his native sky; Here, at his
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