I was Zenobia in the olden time
And ruled the desert from Palmyra’s walls;
I flung my challenge to imperial Rome
So far that still across the years it calls
In proud defiance—but my halls are dust;
The jackal suns him at the temple door;
The wind-blown sands hide street and corridor
And heap the palace floor.
Forgotten is Aurelian and his might;
Above his grave the beggar children smile;
And I, who swayed the East in other days,
Am mistress now of many a Western mile:
Crowned with a coronal of snowy flowers,
And armed and guarded with a thousand spears,
I dream—while dim mirages recreate
In shimmering light the splendor of past years.
TO A HOME IN A CANON
Strength of the mighty hills, and peace of them;
Peace of white, silent peaks against the sky,
And silence of far deserts gray and wide;
Freedom of winds that blow in earth’s lone places,
And the brooding rest of night above the pines,
Are in these walls; eternal as the hills,
The desert, and the wind that goes between.
The hands will pass; the written word grow dim;
The name an echo’s echo faint and die;
But when its farthest whisper is forgot
These walls shall speak of human hope and love;
Shall say to unknown men in unguessed years:
“Here one made truce with Time a little hour;
Fought, worked; held hard-won victory—knew defeat;
Drained Life’s cup from the bubbles to the lees
And tossed it down and took him to the dust.”
THE DEATH OF THE OLD HUNTER
For a third of a century William Reavis, the “Old Hunter,” “The Hermit of Superstition Mountains,” lived alone with his traps and rifle and burros, and died at last as he had lived: “Alone with the wind and the stars and the sky.” In his life and death he was a type of frontiersman now passed and almost forgotten.
Out! Carry me out! I choke in these cabin walls!
Lay me down on the earth under the wide night sky:
Straight on the strong, clean earth—no idle blanket between;
Cheek to cheek with the dust I will watch my last lean hour go by.
Farther! Push back that bough till I face the stars:
North star—Dipper—Pointer that still holds true;
Many a night ye have led—through storm and wind-whipped cloud;
Lead still, old guides—I line my last long course by you.
Hark! The night wind sweeps through the crackling grass,
Nosing the thin, sere weeds that hide in the prairie swale;
Rattling the hunted reeds that shiver and shrink in the marsh,
With whimper and snarl and whine, like a hound that bays on the trail.
Lift me up! My soul hunts with you tonight,
Old mate of a hundred trails; speed on the eager pack;
There was never a road ye knew too wild for my feet to take—
Tonight they will keep the way when even ye turn back.
Lift me up! To my feet! A hand-clasp each!
May your trail be long as mine—knife keen—and powder dry!
Eye true to the bead! Now go—quick—while I keep my feet!
I die as I lived—alone with the wind and the stars and the sky.
THE MASS OF MANGAS
Mission San Xavier del Bac, near Tucson, Arizona.
Years had the Mission stood alone,
Its silent chapels bat-tenanted;
On its altars the gray owl nested her young,
And the ground squirrels burrowed above the dead
By the western wall, nor stirred their sleep;
Bare lay the fields, sun-scorched and white;—
As black hawks scatter the timorous quail
Padre and soldier and neophyte
Scattered before the Apache hordes
That swept the valley with death and flame—
Now back at last like quail to their nests,
Timorous, fearing, they slowly came,
Priest and people; to wring anew
From the sullen desert a grudging chance
For scanty food and room to toil,
Or a quick-won end on a blood-stained lance.
With fragrant branches of gray mesquite,
And waxen yuccas fair and tall;
Lifting their bells like hands in prayer,
Slender and snowy and virginal;
And desert lilies as frail as hope,
They wreathed the altars, and lit once more
The long-dead altars, and set the rood
Over the arrow-bitten door.
The pale Christ leaned from the iron-wood cross
High in its niche deep-walled and gray;
And under his feet, in order set,
Censer and chalice in rough-wrought clay
Where once was silver shaped in Spain—
Now spoil of fight to the savage foe,
And bandied from careless hand to hand
Unblest uses and lips to know.
The tapers flickered and tenderly
The last words whispered and echoed up
To the painted saints in the dusk above,
As the padre lifted the earthen cup
And the blessed wine—but crash it fell,
Staining the floor with a crimson tide
Unseen of the startled worshipers—
For look! where the door unbarred swings wide!
Sombre and splendid in paint and plume,
With claws of eagle and puma skin,
Mangas, the dread Apache chief,
And a hundred braves at his back crowd in;
He swept the shards of the cup aside
And its silver mate on the altar set:
“Padre, the boy you stopped to draw
From the lion’s jaw makes good his debt.
“With Death hot-heel on your track you turned
To save a child of the enemy;
Let these, beloved of your hidden God,
Be bond of peace for mine and me;
And these in thanks for that other day.”
Censer and chalice he set them down,
And bared his arms of their turquoise beads,
And stripped the robe from his shoulders brown.
Man by man his men heaped up
The pile till it grew to the Virgin’s feet;
Skin and blanket, and beads that hung
Like jeweled buds in the pale mesquite.
Then swift as they came they went again;
But, so ’tis writ in the Mission rolls,
With wine and incense the padre straight
Said holy mass for their heathen souls,
And held them saved to the Mother Church;
For a grateful heart is a thing indeed
That weighed in the palm of the Savior’s hand
Out-values penance and prayer and creed;
And year by year when the yucca bells
Like flags of truce swung tall and white,
The name of Mangas was blessed anew
With book and taper and solemn rite.