n
A thousand miles away.

From the mesquite groves a night bird calls
When the western skies grow red;
The sand storm sings his deadly song
Above the sleeper's head.
His steed has wandered to the hills
And helpless are his hands,
Yet peons curse his memory
Across the shifting sands.

The desert cricket tunes his pipes
When the half-grown moon shines dim;
The sage thrush trills her evening song--
But what are they to him?
A rude-built cross beside the trail
That follows to the west
Casts its long-drawn, ghastly shadow
Across the sleeper's breast.

A lone coyote comes by night
And sits beside his bed,
Sobbing the midnight hours away
With gaunt, up-lifted head.
The lizard trails his aimless way
Across the lonely mound,
When the star-guards of the desert
Their pickets post around.

The winter snows will heap their drifts
Among the leafless sage;
The pallid hosts of the blizzard
Will lift their voice in rage;
The gentle rains of early spring
Will woo the flowers to bloom,
And scatter their fleeting incense
O'er the border bandit's tomb.
_Charles Pitt._

THE OLD MACKENZIE TRAIL

SEE, stretching yonder o'er that low divide
Which parts the falling rain,--the eastern slope
Sends down its waters to the southern sea
Through Double Mountain's winding length of stream;
The western side spreads out into a plain,
Which sinks away o'er tawny, rolling leagues
At last into the rushing Rio Grande,--
See, faintly showing on that distant ridge,
The deep-cut pathways through the shelving crest,
Sage-matted now and rimmed with chaparral,
The dim reminders of the olden times,
The life of stir, of blood, of Indian raid,
The hunt of buffalo and antelope;
The camp, the wagon train, the sea of steers;
The cowboy's lonely vigil through the night;
The stampede and the wild ride through the storm;
The call of California's golden flood;
The impulse of the Saxon's "Westward Ho"
Which set our fathers' faces from the east,
To spread resistless o'er the barren wastes,
To people all the regions 'neath the sun--
Those vikings of the old Mackenzie Trail.

It winds--this old forgotten cattle trail--
Through valleys still and silent even now,
Save when the yellow