Their tired horses, too, stood absolutely still. Men and animals might have been petrified figures, carved out of the desolation about them. There was a something impressive about them as they stood there in the midst of the desert glare. Silent, hawk-like, and intent. Their very poses seemed to convey a sense of menace—of danger.
Suddenly they wheeled and turned, and their mounts, as the spurs struck their damp sides, broke into a lope. As they galloped, Red Bill burst into a song. A lugubrious, melancholy thing, like most of the songs of the plainsmen.
"Bury me out on lone prair-ee
Out where the snakes and the coyotes be;
Drop not a tear on my sage brush grave
Out on the lone prair-e-e-e-e-e!"
Then the others struck in, their ponies' hoofs making an accompaniment to the gruesome words:
"The sands will shift in the desert wind;
My bones will rot in the alkali kind;
I'll be happier there than ever I be
In my grave, on the lone prair-e-e-e-e-e!"
It began to sound like a dirge, but still the leader of the hawks of the desert kept it up. He bellowed it out now in a harsh, shrill voice. It rasped uncomfortably, like rusty iron grating on rusty iron.
"Maybe upon the judgment day;
When all sinners their debt must pay;
They'll find me and bind me and judge poor me;
All in my grave, on the lone prair-e-e-e-e-e-e!"
As the last words of this dismal chant rang out, an echo seemed to be flung back at the singer from behind a neighboring ridge, upon which the lone yuccas stood upright, like, so many figures of formed bits of humanity.
"Ye-e-e-e-e-e-e!"
It came in a long drawn out wail that fairly seemed to make the desert ring with its gruesome echoes. All at once it was taken up from another point. Then another echoed it back. It seemed to be proceeding from a dozen quarters of the compass at once.