Cactus and pine: Songs of the Southwest

by Sharlot Mabridth Hall

Gray pilgrims without pouch or staff,
Or dust-stained robe, or cockle shell;
Seek ye the path to some lost shrine
Here in the desert grim as Hell?
No arched cathedral dome bends down;
The earth is iron, the sky is brass;
’Tis ages since these blistered sands
Forgot the touch of flower and grass.
Stern penance do ye for old wrongs
Mayhap, or saintship seek from pain;
With suppliant hands that never win
The benison of cooling rain.
In beggar rags like that wild throng
That once in old Perugia stood,
Ye bear your serried scourges high,
A flagellante brotherhood.

IN THE BRACKEN.

Scent of the pine on the hilltops,
Rush of the mountain breeze,
And long, deep slopes of bracken fern
Like sun-lit emerald seas.
Gray old rocks where the lizards hide
And chattering chipmunks play;
Where the brown quail leads her timorous brood
Through the fronds that bend and sway.
Home of the doe and her spotted fawns,
(Shyest of woodland things.)
Haunt of the hawks that dip and dive
On circling, fearless winds.
The skies bend down with a deeper blue
Where the white clouds drift and hover;
And the tall peaks drowse in the golden haze
That dapples their forest cover.
The needles whisper an endless song
As the brown cones bend and nod:
“O rest, O rest, with the bracken and pine
In the strong, green hills of God.”

ARIZONA

In his message of December, 1905, President Roosevelt advised that Arizona and New Mexico be admitted to the Union as one state. In Arizona the opposition to this “joint-statehood” measure was bitter and determined.

No beggar she in the mighty hall where her bay-crowned sisters wait,
No empty-handed pleader for the right of a free-born State;
No child, with a child’s insistance, demanding a gilded toy;
But a fair-browed, queenly woman, strong to create or destroy.
Wise for the need of the sons she has bred in the school where weaklings fail;
Where cunning is less than manhood, and deeds, not words, avail:
With the high, unswerving purpose that measures and overcomes;
And the faith in the Farthest Vision that builded her hard-won homes.
Link her, in her clean-proved fitness, in her right to stand alone,—
Secure for whatever future in the strength that her past has won,—
Link her, in her morning beauty, with another, however fair?
And open your jealous portal and bid her enter there
With shackles on wrist and ankle and dust on her stately head,
And her proud eyes dim with weeping? No! Bar your doors instead
And seal them fast forever! But let her go her way—
Uncrowned, if you will, but unshackled, to wait for a larger day.
Ay! let her go bare-handed; bound with no grudging gift;
Back to her own free spaces, where her rock-ribbed mountains lift
Their walls like a sheltering fortress; back to her house and blood;
And we of her blood will go our way and reckon your judgment good.
We will wait outside your sullen door till the stars you wear grow dim
As the pale dawn-stars that swim and fade o’er our mighty Cañon’s rim;
We will lift no hand for the bays ye wear nor covet your robes of state—
But ah! By the skies above us all we will shame ye while we wait!
We will make ye the mould of an empire here in the land ye scorn;
While ye drowse, and dream in your well-housed ease that States at your nod are born.
Ye have blotted your own beginnings, and taught your sons to forget
That ye did not spring fat-fed and old from the powers that bear and beget;
But the while ye follow your smooth-made roads to a fireside safe of fears,
Shall come a voice from a land still young to sing in your age-dulled ears
The hero song of a strife as fine as your father’s fathers knew.
When they dared the rivers of unmapped wilds at the will of a bark canoe.
The song of the deed in the doing; of the work still hot from the hand;
Of the yoke of man laid friendly-wise on the neck of a tameless land.
While your merchandise is weighing we will bit and bridle and rein
The floods of the storm-rocked mountains and lead them down to the plain;
And the foam-ribbed, dark-hued waters, tired with that mighty race,
Shall lie at the feet of palm and vine and know their appointed place;
And out of that subtle union, desert with mountain flood,
Shall be homes for a nation’s choosing, where no home else had stood.
We will match the gold of your minting, with its mint-stamp dulled and marred
By the blood and tears that have stained it, and the hands that have clutched too hard,
With the gold that no man has lied for; the gold no woman has made
The price of her truth and honor, plying a shameless trade:
The clean, pure gold of the mountains, straight from the strong, dark earth;
With no tang or taint upon it from the hour of its primal birth.
The trick of the Money-changer, shifting his coins as he wills,
Ye may keep—no Christ was bartered for the wealth of our lavish hills.
“Yet we are a little people—too weak for the cares of state!”
Let us go our way—when ye look again ye may find us, mayhap, too great.
Cities we lack—and gutters where children snatch for bread:
Numbers—and hordes of starvelings, toiling but never fed.
Spare pains that would make us greater in the pattern that ye have set;
We hold to the larger measure of the men that ye forget—
The men who from trackless forests and prairies lone and far,
Hewed out the land where ye sit at ease and grudge us our fair-won star.
“There yet be men, my masters,”—though the net that the trickster flings
Lies wide on the land to its bitter shame, and his cunning parleyings
Have deafened the ears of Justice, that was blind and slow of old:
Yet Time, the last Great Judge, is not bought, or bribed, or sold;
And Time and the Race shall judge us—not a league of trafficking men,
Selling the trust of the people to barter it back again;
Palming the lives of millions as a handful of easy coin—
With a single heart to the narrow verge where Craft and State-craft join.

CAMP-FIRE TALES

THE HASH-WRASTLER

Being the story of the life and death of the camp cook, as told by an old cow puncher.

Of course the boss he carries some weight, tho’ the owner’s a figger-head;
(Handy fer signin’ checks an’ sich— the Lord in His pity makes some folks rich!
Fortune at best’s a skittish bitch as’ll neither be drove er led;
An’ “A fool fer luck!” is a standing rule, which I reckon Solomon said.)
There’s some as growed on the own home range, an’ some as was vented young;
An’ I’ve knowed buckaros as can’t be beat that wrastled the Greaser tongue;
An’ there’s now an’ again a tenderfoot the cinches don’t seem to rub;
But the man that the outfit hitches to is the man that hustles the grub.
It ain’t no cinch in the summer time to tighten a hungry belt,
When yer horse is lathered an’ steamin’ hot, an’ ye think yer goin’ to melt;
But that old chuck wagon’s a bigger throne than the Czar of Rushy owns
When you’ve punched a blizzard from dark to dark, an’ the marrer chilled in yer bones.
Yer chaps is froze to the saddle skirts an’ the froth on yer bridle white,
An’ the sigh ye let it ain’t no bluff when that camp-fire heaves in sight;
An’ ye see him grab up the coffee pot an’ rattle the lid like sin;
An’ holler away to beat the band: “Grub pile! Fa-all in! Fa-a-all in!”
It’s then that ye know yer friend o’ friends, an’ that wrastler gits his due—
In cussin’ an’ sich—fer a haloed saint couldn’t cook to suit the crew.
It’s: “Slushy, say, yer off yer base; them biskits is dough inside.
Did ye bile the critter that Noah milked, or only her horns an’ hide?”
“Stove?” Oh, sure! A hole in the ground on the leeward side of the camp;
The end-gate dropped fer a kneadin’ board, an’ some grease an’ rag fer a lamp:
But his kittles was slammin’ by three o’clock, along with the bosses snore;
A-knowin’ we’d polish his skillets clean an’ yell possessed fer more.
There was me an’ Jim an’ Otero’s Kid, I reckon we didn’t make
That wrastler’s life one shinin’ round of lemon pie an’ cake:
But he paid us off as slick an’ clean as ever a debt was paid—
An’ I low if our pull was better Beyond he’d git some boot on the trade.
The fall rodear was all but done an’ the beef steers waitin’ to ship,
When it seemed that the Kid an’ me an’ Jim was booked fer a longer trip.
Smallpox—an’ the way them boys lit out was worse’n the worst stampede
Of buffaloed steers on a rainy night the Old Trail ever seed.
All but that lank-jawed slinger o’ pots, that blamed hash-wrastlin’ fool;—
“I’m runnin’ this camp—you tend to biz;” he says, as stiddy an’ cool
As a chunk of ice on a Christmas tree—an’ I reckon we didn’t dispute;
Fer the Kid an’ me was as crazy as loons, an’ Jim on the cut an’ shoot.
He tied Jim up with a hackamore, an’ he pulled the three of us through—
But I swear when I think o’ the way things went, an’ him, I feel plumb blue;
Fer that same disease jist doused his glim as quick as you’d holler “Scat!”
Jist cut him out an’ afore we knew he was gone like the drop of a hat.
“Th’ boys is comin’,” he says quite wild; “an’ them beans ain’t seasoned right;
An’ Jim’ll kick at th’ bread an’ say th’ coffee’s a holy fright.
You tell ’em”—he fingered the kiverlid, an’ his words come choked an’ thin—
“Reddy jist to th’ minnit, boys—Grub pile! Fa-a-ll in! Fa-a-ll in!”