1. _Popple_

A river curves like a bended bow,
And over it winds of summer lightly blow;
Two boys are feeding a flame with bark
Of the pungent popple. Hark!
They are uttering dreams. "I
Will go hunt gold toward the western sky,"
Says the older lad; "I know it is there,
For the rainbow shows just where
It is. I'll go camping, and take a pan,
And shovel gold, when I'm a man."

2. _Sage Brush_

The burning day draws near its end,
And on the plain a man and his friend
Sit feeding an odorous sage-brush fire.
A lofty butte like a funeral pyre,
With the sun atop, looms high
In the cloudless, windless, saffron sky.
A snake sleeps under a grease-wood plant;
A horned toad snaps at a passing ant;
The plain is void as a polar floe,
And the limitless sky has a furnace glow.
The men are gaunt and shaggy and gray,
And their childhood river is far away;
The gold still hides at the rainbow's tip,
Yet the wanderer speaks with a resolute lip.
"I will seek till I find--or till I die,"
He mutters, and lifts his clenched hand high,
And puts behind him love and wife,
And the quiet round of a farmer's life.

3. _Pine_

The dark day ends in a bitter night.
The mighty mountains cold, and white,
And stern as avarice, still hide their gold
Deep in wild canyons fold on fold,
Both men are old, and one is grown
As gray as the snows around him sown.
He hovers over a fire of pine,
Spicy and cheering; toward the line
Of the towering peaks he lifts his eyes.
"I'd rather have a boy with shining hair,
To bear my name, than all your share
Of earth's red gold," he said;
And died, a loveless, childless man,
Before the morning light began.

CHAPTER XVIII

AT LAST THE STIKEEN

About the middle of the afternoon of the fifty-eighth day we topped a
low divide, and came in sight of the Stikeen River. Our hearts
thrilled with pleasure as we looked far over the deep blue and
purple-green spread of valley, dim with mist, in which a little
silver ribbon of water could be seen.

After weeks of rain, as if to make amend for useless severity, the
sun came out, a fresh westerly breeze sprang up, and the sky filled
with glowing clouds flooded with tender light. The bloom of fireweed
almost concealed the devastation of flame in the fallen firs, and the
grim forest se