Joy of the men of the Old Guard? The joy of the brave and true;
With joy they paced where Death grimaced and his icy vapors blew,
And with steady tread they bore their dead with the faith of the chosen few.
What of the men of the Old Guard? Ask of the arching skies,
The grass that waves on their leafy graves is lisping their lullabies,
And the lives they spent are their monument and their title to Paradise.
Where the farthest foothills flatten to a circle-sweeping plain,
And the cattle lands surrender to the onward march of grain,
Where the prairies stretch unbroken to the corners of the sky,
And the foremost wheat fields rustle in the warm winds droning by—
There a crippled cowboy batches in the haunts of old-time herds,
And the balance of the story is repeated in his words:
So you never heard how I lost my leg and hobble now on a crutch?
So far as the story relates to me it can't concern you much,
For it's really the story of Kid McCann and the price that a girl will pay
For the fellow she sets her fancy on, as only a woman may;
It isn't every girl who proves her faithfulness in flames,
But fellows who listen with moistened eyes speak softly of other names.
Ned McCann owned the Double Star 'way back in the early days;
He had come out here with a sickly wife and a kid he hoped to raise
Where the climate suited the feeble-lunged, but life was scarce at its brim,
Till a little mound by a [prairie] hill held half of the world for him;
And his double love would have spoiled the child had she been like me or you,
But her only thought was for her dad and the mother she scarcely knew.
'Course, she was bred to the ranges, and before she had reached her teens
She could straddle a nag with the best of us and ride in her smock and jeans
Till we all caved in, and she thought it fun to camp with the round-up bunch,
And she shared her pillow and shared our sky and shared our pipe and lunch,
And all of us mad in love with her, but she was only a kid,
And she never dreamt what our feelings were, or the love-struck things we did.
But even girls grow older, and, though always kind and sweet,
There came a day when she realized that we were at her feet,
But I had never spoken, nor anyone in the camp,
When in came a foreign puncher, a thoroughbred black-leg scamp,
And we who had known her since childhood saw, in our unbelieving eyes,
This wily sinner setting himself to carry off the prize.