The mustang flew, and we urged him on;
There was one chance left, and you have but one —
Halt, jump to the ground, and shoot your horse;
Crouch under his carcass, and take your chance;
And if the steers in their frantic course
Don't batter you both to pieces at once,
You may thank your star; if not, goodbye
To the quickening kiss and the long-drawn sigh,
And the open air and the open sky,
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.
[p. 26]
The cattle gained on us, and, just as I felt
For my old six-shooter behind in my belt,
Down came the mustang, and down came we,
Clinging together — and, what was the rest?
A body that spread itself on my breast,
Two arms that shielded my dizzy head,
Two lips that hard to my lips were prest;
Then came thunder in my ears,
As over us surged the sea of steers,
Blows that beat blood into my eyes,
And when I could rise —
Lasca was dead!
· · · · · · ·
I gouged out a grave a few feet deep,
And there in the Earth's arms I laid her to sleep;
And there she is lying, and no one knows;
And the summer shines, and the winter snows;
For many a day the flowers have spread
A pall of petals over her head;
And the little grey hawk hangs aloft in the air,
And the sly coyote trots here and there,
And the black snake glides and glitters and slides
Into the rift of a cottonwood tree;
And the buzzard sails on,
And comes and is gone,
Stately and still, like a ship at sea.
And I wonder why I do not care
For the things that are, like the things that were.
Does half my heart lie buried there
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande?
Frank Desprez.
THE TRANSFORMATION OF A TEXAS
GIRL
SHE was a Texas maiden, she came of low degree,
Her clothes were worn and faded, her feet from shoes were free;
Her face was tanned and freckled, her hair was sun-burned, too,
Her whole darned tout ensemble was painful for to view!
She drove a lop-eared mule team attached unto a plow,
The trickling perspiration exuding from her brow;
And often she lamented her cruel, cruel fate,
As but a po' white's daughter down in the Lone Star State.
No courtiers came to woo her, she never had a beau,
Her misfit face precluded such things as that, you know,—
She was nobody's darling, no feller's solid girl,
And poets never called her an uncut Texas pearl.
Her only two companions was those two flea-bit mules,
And these she but regarded as animated tools
To plod along the furrows in patience up and down
And pull the ancient wagon when pap'd go to town.
[p. 28]
No fires of wild ambition were flaming in her soul,
Her eyes with tender passion she'd never upward roll;
The wondrous world she'd heard of, to her was but a dream
As walked she in the furrows behind that lop-eared team.
Born on that small plantation, 'twas there she thought she'd die;
She never longed for pinions that she might rise and fly
To other lands far distant, where breezes fresh and cool
Would never shake and tremble from brayings of a mule.