MONTE BILL
As told by the old stage driver
See that big black zahuaro[1]
Out there alone on the hill,
With the sand piled up at its sun-bleached roots?
Well, there lies Monte Bill.
Rough? Well I reckon you’d think so!
A devil to cut an’ shoot;
He’d face all the men in Creation,
An’ the fiends in Hell to boot.
His business? Oh! that was the pasteboards,
They was just the whole o’ his game;
An’ he handled ’em like greased lightnin’—
That’s how he got his name.
(An’ a name is a durned poor measure
When you’re weighin’ th’ worth of a man;
An’ you can’t go all by his business
To git at his clean ground plan.)
Bill was stagin’ it up from Ehrenberg—
I was drivin’ the six that fall!
It was hotter’n all tarnation
An’ the desert shut in like a wall;
The mirage it was sloshin’ an’ shinin’
Like the water before an’ behind;
An’ the dust in your throat near chokin’,
An’ burnin’ your eyes fair blind.
They was only two other passengers
A-making the trip that day;
A little mite of a woman,
An’ a child like a bird at play:
She was goin’ up to Fort Whipple,
Were an officer’s wife, she said,
An’ the way her baby took to Bill
Just mighty near turned his head.
We was joggin’ along through a sand-wash,
An’ talkin’ an’ laughin’ the while,
An’ nobody s’posed an Apache
Was nearer’n fifty miles;
But the time that ye think yer safest
It’s good to be sayin’ a prayer,
An’ the yell that come from a patch o’ mesquite
Plumb raised the roots o’ my hair.
Bill gobbled the situation—
Took it all to onct at a glance;
An’ to save that woman an’ baby
He saw they was just one chance.
He yelled up the boot to warn me,
An’ out o’ the side he jumped,
An’ I swung the whip an’ swore for life,—
An’ I tell ye them six bronks humped.
Bill lit on his feet an’ runnin’
An’ down by a greasewood dropped—
He knowed he had nary a show to beat
But he wasn’t the breed that stopped.—
An’ the rest? Well, Cullin’s station
Was a long ten mile away;
’Twas a run with Death—but that baby
An’ woman wan’t hurt that day.
An’ Bill? Well, it’s no good talkin’—
You know what Apaches is!
An’ a man that they git their claws on
Had better take Hell for his
When the troop from old Camp Date Creek
Got to him they came too late—
Just a smolderin’ pile of ashes
Was left to tell his fate.
We dug out a grave on the hillside
An’ filled it with cactus an’ stones;
For we didn’t want the kiotes
To chaw what was left of his bones:
An’ that “giant” growed up above him,
An’ the wind piled the sand below—
But I reckon as how old Bill don’t care,
For he’s gone where brave men go.
[1] Giant cactus of the Southwest
BEYOND THE DESERT