booze and other things.

A-a! ma-a! ba-a! eh-eh-eh!
My Minnie, don't be sad;
Next year we'll lease that splendid piece
That corners on your dad.
We'll drive to "literary," dear,
The way we used to do
And turn my lonely workin' here
To happiness for you.

Suppose, down near that rattlers' den,
While I sit here and dream,
I'd spy a bunch of ugly men
And hear a woman scream.
Suppose I'd let my rifle shout
And drop the men in rows,
And then the woman should turn out--
My Minnie!--just suppose.

A-a! ma-a! ba-a! eh-eh-eh!
The tune would then be gay;
There is, I mind, a parson kind
Just forty miles away.
Why, Eden would come back again,
With sage and sheep corrals,
And I could swing a singin' pen
To write her "pastorals."

I pack a rifle on my arm
And jump at flies that buzz;
There's nothin' here to do me harm;
I sometimes wish there was.
If through that brush above the pool
A red should creep--and creep--
Wah! cut down on 'im!--Stop, you fool!
That's nothin' but a sheep.

A-a! ma-a! ba-a!--Hell!
Oh, sky and plain and bluff!
Unless my mail comes up the trail
I'm locoed, sure enough.
What's that?--a dust-whiff near the butte
Right where my last trail ran,
A movin' speck, a--wagon! Hoot!
Thank God! here comes a man.
_Charles Badger Clark, Jr._

[3] Only such cowboys as are in desperate need of employment ever
become sheep-herders.

A COWBOY AT THE CARNIVAL

YES, o' cose it's interestin' to a feller from the range,
Mighty queerish, too, I tell you,--sich a racket fer a change;
From a life among the cattle, from a wool shirt and the chaps
To the biled shirt o' the city and the other tony traps.
Never seed sich herds o' people throwed together, every brand
O' humanity, I reckon, in this big mountain land
Rounded up right here in Denver, runnin' on new sort o' feed.
Actin' restless an' oneasy, like they threatened to stampede.

Mighty curious to a rider comin' from the range, he feels
What you'd call a lost sensation from sombrero clar to heels;
Like a critter stray that drifted in a windstorm from its range
To another run o' grazin' where the brands it sees are strange.
Then I see a city herder, a policeman, don't you know,