Somehow it had an eerie look about it, standing so desolate, out in those flowery wilds.
Inside it lay the body of a man, with the skin dry as parchment, and his arms beside him, a Winchester, a bow and arrows, and a lance. Eustaquio, taking up an arrow, after looking at it, said that the dead man was an Apache of the Mescalero band, and then, looking upon the ground and pointing out some marks, said, “He had let loose his horse before he died, just as the chief did in the picture-writing.”
That was his epitaph, for how death overtook him none of us could conjecture; but I liked the manner of his going off the stage.
’Tis meet and fitting to set free the horse or pen before death overtakes you, or before the gentle public turns its thumbs down and yells, “Away with him.”
Charles Lamb, when some one asked him something of his works, answered that they were to be found in the South Sea House, and that they numbered forty volumes, for he had laboured many years there, making his bricks with the least possible modicum of straw,—just like the rest of us.
Mine, if you ask me, are to be found but in the trails I left in all the years I galloped both on the prairies and the pampas of America.
Hold it not up to me for egotism, O gentle reader, for I would have you know that hardly any of the horses that I rode had shoes on them, and thus the tracks are faint.
Vale.
R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRAHAM.