| "Sing me a song of a boy that is gone— Ah, could that lad be I!" |
and which conclude:
| "All that was good, all that was fair, All that was me is gone." |
I couldn't remember the part that I craved, and so fell back on:
| "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more." |
That didn't quite do, either, for Tennyson was gazing on fading fields and thinking of Autumn, and I was gazing on budding cottonwoods and thinking of Spring—Spring! And yet it was a Spring that was gone.
"Pete," I said moodily, turning a gloomy eye to the seaward-rushing flood, "there's a lot of water gone under this bridge never to return, since you and I stood here last." The ex-Sheriff nodded in dreary acquiescence. "And, boy," he remarked with the weariness of the ages in his voice as he rubbed a finger up and down the bridge of a blue, cold nose that I remembered as having once glowed with all the hues of a sunset over the colour-splashed gorge of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone; "boy, water ain't the only thing that's gone never to return."
Arm in arm, as we had navigated "The-Street-That-is-Called-Straight" in ancient of days, we wended our way back town-ward through the gloom-drenched dusk. By devious ways and obscure Pete piloted, stopping every now and then to introduce me to certain friends as the boy who helped Livingston cop the state champeenship twenty years ago. We were treated with great deference all along the way. There was the glint of a twinkle in the ex-Sheriffian eye as Pete delivered me at the hotel. "That was just to show you, boy, that Gilead is not yet quite drained of Balm," he said, patting me on the back. "Until they give the screw a few more turns, life in little old Livingston will not be entirely without its compensayshuns."
I had dinner and spent the evening with Pete Holt's family, and a mighty wholesome interval it was after an afternoon so wild with old regrets. Holt had always been a teetotaler, and so, with nothing much to lose, faced an unclouded future. Whether, as Chief of Police, he has ever given those much-dreaded turns to the screws that would crush the last lees of pleasure from sanguine grapes of pain I have never heard. It made me think of Guelph and Ghibelline, this finding my old-time friends thus arrayed against one another. And good old Peter Nelson—I am wondering, when cock-crow sounds, if he will be found denying or denied.