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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Service's Ballads of a Cheechako
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+Ballads of a Cheechako
+
+by Robert W. Service  [British-born Canadian Poet -- 1874-1958.]
+
+May 1995, [Etext 259]
+
+
+entered/proofed by A. Light, of Waxhaw <alight@cybernetics.net>
+(formerly alight@mercury.interpath.net, alight@rock.concert.net)
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+
+
+
+
+
+Ballads of a Cheechako
+
+by Robert W. Service  [British-born Canadian Poet -- 1874-1958.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Note on text:  Italicized stanzas will be indented 5 spaces.
+Italicized words or phrases will be capitalised.  Lines longer
+than 75 characters have been broken according to metre,
+and the continuation is indented two spaces.
+This etext was transcribed from an American 1909 edition.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Ballads of a Cheechako
+by
+Robert W. Service
+
+Author of "The Spell of the Yukon"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+
+To the Man of the High North
+ My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming
+
+Men of the High North
+ Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;
+
+The Ballad of the Northern Lights
+ One of the Down and Out--that's me.  Stare at me well, ay, stare!
+
+The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin
+ There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,
+
+The Ballad of Pious Pete
+ I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.
+
+The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill
+ I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,
+
+The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike
+ This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,
+
+The Ballad of the Brand
+ 'Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare,
+
+The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry
+ Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank
+
+The Man from Eldorado
+ He's the man from Eldorado, and he's just arrived in town,
+
+My Friends
+ The man above was a murderer, the man below was a thief;
+
+The Prospector
+ I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,
+
+The Black Sheep
+ Hark to the ewe that bore him:
+
+The Telegraph Operator
+ I will not wash my face;
+
+The Wood-Cutter
+ The sky is like an envelope,
+
+The Song of the Mouth-Organ
+ I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone;
+
+The Trail of Ninety-Eight
+ Gold!  We leapt from our benches.  Gold!  We sprang from our stools.
+
+The Ballad of Gum-Boot Ben
+ He was an old prospector with a vision bleared and dim.
+
+Clancy of the Mounted Police
+ In the little Crimson Manual it's written plain and clear
+
+Lost
+ "Black is the sky, but the land is white--
+
+L'Envoi
+ We talked of yesteryears, of trails and treasure,
+
+--------
+
+
+
+
+
+
+To the Man of the High North
+
+
+
+     My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming
+      I've drifted, silver-sailed, on seas of dream,
+     Hearing afar the bells of Elfland chiming,
+      Seeing the groves of Arcadie agleam.
+
+     I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices
+      From peak snow-diademed to regal star;
+     Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices,
+      The pregnant voices of the Things That Are.
+
+     The Here, the Now, the vast Forlorn around us;
+      The gold-delirium, the ferine strife;
+     The lusts that lure us on, the hates that hound us;
+      Our red rags in the patch-work quilt of Life.
+
+     The nameless men who nameless rivers travel,
+      And in strange valleys greet strange deaths alone;
+     The grim, intrepid ones who would unravel
+      The mysteries that shroud the Polar Zone.
+
+     These will I sing, and if one of you linger
+      Over my pages in the Long, Long Night,
+     And on some lone line lay a calloused finger,
+      Saying:  "It's human-true--it hits me right";
+     Then will I count this loving toil well spent;
+     Then will I dream awhile--content, content.
+
+
+
+
+Men of the High North
+
+
+
+Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;
+ Islands of opal float on silver seas;
+Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing;
+ Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.
+Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing;
+ Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky;
+Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing,
+ Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.
+
+Men of the High North, you who have known it;
+ You in whose hearts its splendors have abode;
+Can you renounce it, can you disown it?
+ Can you forget it, its glory and its goad?
+Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it?
+ Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot;
+Only remain the guerdon and gain of it;
+ Zest of the foray, and God, how you fought!
+
+You who have made good, you foreign faring;
+ You money magic to far lands has whirled;
+Can you forget those days of vast daring,
+ There with your soul on the Top o' the World?
+Nights when no peril could keep you awake on
+ Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow;
+Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon
+ Fried at the camp-fire at forty below?
+
+Can you remember your huskies all going,
+ Barking with joy and their brushes in air;
+You in your parka, glad-eyed and glowing,
+ Monarch, your subjects the wolf and the bear?
+Monarch, your kingdom unravisht and gleaming;
+ Mountains your throne, and a river your car;
+Crash of a bull moose to rouse you from dreaming;
+ Forest your couch, and your candle a star.
+
+You who this faint day the High North is luring
+ Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet;
+You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring,
+ Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat:
+Honor the High North ever and ever,
+ Whether she crown you, or whether she slay;
+Suffer her fury, cherish and love her--
+ He who would rule he must learn to obey.
+
+Men of the High North, fierce mountains love you;
+ Proud rivers leap when you ride on their breast.
+See, the austere sky, pensive above you,
+ Dons all her jewels to smile on your rest.
+Children of Freedom, scornful of frontiers,
+ We who are weaklings honor your worth.
+Lords of the wilderness, Princes of Pioneers,
+ Let's have a rouse that will ring round the earth.
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of the Northern Lights
+
+
+
+One of the Down and Out--that's me.  Stare at me well, ay, stare!
+Stare and shrink--say! you wouldn't think that I was a millionaire.
+Look at my face, it's crimped and gouged--one of them death-mask things;
+Don't seem the sort of man, do I, as might be the pal of kings?
+Slouching along in smelly rags, a bleary-eyed, no-good bum;
+A knight of the hollow needle, pard, spewed from the sodden slum.
+Look me all over from head to foot; how much would you think I was worth?
+A dollar? a dime? a nickel?  Why, I'M THE WEALTHIEST MAN ON EARTH.
+
+No, don't you think that I'm off my base.  You'll sing a different tune
+If only you'll let me spin my yarn.  Come over to this saloon;
+Wet my throat--it's as dry as chalk, and seeing as how it's you,
+I'll tell the tale of a Northern trail, and so help me God, it's true.
+I'll tell of the howling wilderness and the haggard Arctic heights,
+Of a reckless vow that I made, and how I STAKED THE NORTHERN LIGHTS.
+
+Remember the year of the Big Stampede and the trail of Ninety-eight,
+When the eyes of the world were turned to the North,
+  and the hearts of men elate;
+Hearts of the old dare-devil breed thrilled at the wondrous strike,
+And to every man who could hold a pan came the message, "Up and hike".
+Well, I was there with the best of them, and I knew I would not fail.
+You wouldn't believe it to see me now; but wait till you've heard my tale.
+
+You've read of the trail of Ninety-eight, but its woe no man may tell;
+It was all of a piece and a whole yard wide,
+  and the name of the brand was "Hell".
+We heard the call and we staked our all; we were plungers playing blind,
+And no man cared how his neighbor fared, and no man looked behind;
+For a ruthless greed was born of need, and the weakling went to the wall,
+And a curse might avail where a prayer would fail,
+  and the gold lust crazed us all.
+
+Bold were we, and they called us three the "Unholy Trinity";
+There was Ole Olson, the sailor Swede, and the Dago Kid and me.
+We were the discards of the pack, the foreloopers of Unrest,
+Reckless spirits of fierce revolt in the ferment of the West.
+We were bound to win and we revelled in the hardships of the way.
+We staked our ground and our hopes were crowned,
+  and we hoisted out the pay.
+We were rich in a day beyond our dreams,
+  it was gold from the grass-roots down;
+But we weren't used to such sudden wealth, and there was the siren town.
+We were crude and careless frontiersmen, with much in us of the beast;
+We could bear the famine worthily, but we lost our heads at the feast.
+
+The town looked mighty bright to us, with a bunch of dust to spend,
+And nothing was half too good them days, and everyone was our friend.
+Wining meant more than mining then, and life was a dizzy whirl,
+Gambling and dropping chunks of gold down the neck of a dance-hall girl;
+Till we went clean mad, it seems to me, and we squandered our last poke,
+And we sold our claim, and we found ourselves one bitter morning--broke.
+
+The Dago Kid he dreamed a dream of his mother's aunt who died--
+In the dawn-light dim she came to him, and she stood by his bedside,
+And she said:  "Go forth to the highest North till a lonely trail ye find;
+Follow it far and trust your star, and fortune will be kind."
+But I jeered at him, and then there came the Sailor Swede to me,
+And he said:  "I dreamed of my sister's son,
+  who croaked at the age of three.
+From the herded dead he sneaked and said:  `Seek you an Arctic trail;
+'Tis pale and grim by the Polar rim, but seek and ye shall not fail.'"
+And lo! that night I too did dream of my mother's sister's son,
+And he said to me:  "By the Arctic Sea there's a treasure to be won.
+Follow and follow a lone moose trail, till you come to a valley grim,
+On the slope of the lonely watershed that borders the Polar brim."
+Then I woke my pals, and soft we swore by the mystic Silver Flail,
+'Twas the hand of Fate, and to-morrow straight
+  we would seek the lone moose trail.
+
+We watched the groaning ice wrench free, crash on with a hollow din;
+Men of the wilderness were we, freed from the taint of sin.
+The mighty river snatched us up and it bore us swift along;
+The days were bright, and the morning light was sweet with jewelled song.
+We poled and lined up nameless streams, portaged o'er hill and plain;
+We burnt our boat to save the nails, and built our boat again;
+We guessed and groped, North, ever North, with many a twist and turn;
+We saw ablaze in the deathless days the splendid sunsets burn.
+O'er soundless lakes where the grayling makes a rush at the clumsy fly;
+By bluffs so steep that the hard-hit sheep falls sheer from out the sky;
+By lilied pools where the bull moose cools and wallows in huge content;
+By rocky lairs where the pig-eyed bears peered at our tiny tent.
+Through the black canyon's angry foam we hurled to dreamy bars,
+And round in a ring the dog-nosed peaks bayed to the mocking stars.
+Spring and summer and autumn went; the sky had a tallow gleam,
+Yet North and ever North we pressed to the land of our Golden Dream.
+
+So we came at last to a tundra vast and dark and grim and lone;
+And there was the little lone moose trail, and we knew it for our own.
+By muskeg hollow and nigger-head it wandered endlessly;
+Sorry of heart and sore of foot, weary men were we.
+The short-lived sun had a leaden glare and the darkness came too soon,
+And stationed there with a solemn stare was the pinched, anaemic moon.
+Silence and silvern solitude till it made you dumbly shrink,
+And you thought to hear with an outward ear
+  the things you thought to think.
+
+Oh, it was wild and weird and wan, and ever in camp o' nights
+We would watch and watch the silver dance of the mystic Northern Lights.
+And soft they danced from the Polar sky and swept in primrose haze;
+And swift they pranced with their silver feet,
+  and pierced with a blinding blaze.
+They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod;
+It was not good for the eyes of man--'twas a sight for the eyes of God.
+It made us mad and strange and sad, and the gold whereof we dreamed
+Was all forgot, and our only thought was of the lights that gleamed.
+
+Oh, the tundra sponge it was golden brown, and some was a bright blood-red;
+And the reindeer moss gleamed here and there
+  like the tombstones of the dead.
+And in and out and around about the little trail ran clear,
+And we hated it with a deadly hate and we feared with a deadly fear.
+And the skies of night were alive with light,
+  with a throbbing, thrilling flame;
+Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came.
+It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge;
+Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge.
+Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled;
+Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled.
+There in our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, uplifted eyes
+Charge and retire the hosts of fire in the battlefield of the skies.
+
+But all things come to an end at last, and the muskeg melted away,
+And frowning down to bar our path a muddle of mountains lay.
+And a gorge sheered up in granite walls, and the moose trail crept betwixt;
+'Twas as if the earth had gaped too far and her stony jaws were fixt.
+Then the winter fell with a sudden swoop, and the heavy clouds sagged low,
+And earth and sky were blotted out in a whirl of driving snow.
+
+We were climbing up a glacier in the neck of a mountain pass,
+When the Dago Kid slipped down and fell into a deep crevasse.
+When we got him out one leg hung limp, and his brow was wreathed with pain,
+And he says:  "'Tis badly broken, boys, and I'll never walk again.
+It's death for all if ye linger here, and that's no cursed lie;
+Go on, go on while the trail is good, and leave me down to die."
+He raved and swore, but we tended him with our uncouth, clumsy care.
+The camp-fire gleamed and he gazed and dreamed
+  with a fixed and curious stare.
+Then all at once he grabbed my gun and he put it to his head,
+And he says:  "I'll fix it for you, boys"--them are the words he said.
+
+So we sewed him up in a canvas sack and we slung him to a tree;
+And the stars like needles stabbed our eyes, and woeful men were we.
+And on we went on our woeful way, wrapped in a daze of dream,
+And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights
+  came forth with a mystic gleam.
+They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow;
+And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow.
+They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan;
+They spread with a blaze of rose-pink rays never yet seen of man.
+They writhed like a brood of angry snakes, hissing and sulphur pale;
+Then swift they changed to a dragon vast, lashing a cloven tail.
+It seemed to us, as we gazed aloft with an everlasting stare,
+The sky was a pit of bale and dread, and a monster revelled there.
+
+We climbed the rise of a hog-back range that was desolate and drear,
+When the Sailor Swede had a crazy fit, and he got to talking queer.
+He talked of his home in Oregon and the peach trees all in bloom,
+And the fern head-high, and the topaz sky, and the forest's scented gloom.
+He talked of the sins of his misspent life, and then he seemed to brood,
+And I watched him there like a fox a hare, for I knew it was not good.
+And sure enough in the dim dawn-light I missed him from the tent,
+And a fresh trail broke through the crusted snow,
+  and I knew not where it went.
+But I followed it o'er the seamless waste, and I found him at shut of day,
+Naked there as a new-born babe--so I left him where he lay.
+
+Day after day was sinister, and I fought fierce-eyed despair,
+And I clung to life, and I struggled on, I knew not why nor where.
+I packed my grub in short relays, and I cowered down in my tent,
+And the world around was purged of sound like a frozen continent.
+Day after day was dark as death, but ever and ever at nights,
+With a brilliancy that grew and grew, blazed up the Northern Lights.
+
+They rolled around with a soundless sound like softly bruised silk;
+They poured into the bowl of the sky with the gentle flow of milk.
+In eager, pulsing violet their wheeling chariots came,
+Or they poised above the Polar rim like a coronal of flame.
+From depths of darkness fathomless their lancing rays were hurled,
+Like the all-combining search-lights of the navies of the world.
+There on the roof-pole of the world as one bewitched I gazed,
+And howled and grovelled like a beast as the awful splendors blazed.
+My eyes were seared, yet thralled I peered
+  through the parka hood nigh blind;
+But I staggered on to the lights that shone, and never I looked behind.
+
+There is a mountain round and low that lies by the Polar rim,
+And I climbed its height in a whirl of light,
+  and I peered o'er its jagged brim;
+And there in a crater deep and vast, ungained, unguessed of men,
+The mystery of the Arctic world was flashed into my ken.
+For there these poor dim eyes of mine beheld the sight of sights--
+That hollow ring was the source and spring of the mystic Northern Lights.
+
+Then I staked that place from crown to base, and I hit the homeward trail.
+Ah, God! it was good, though my eyes were blurred,
+  and I crawled like a sickly snail.
+In that vast white world where the silent sky
+  communes with the silent snow,
+In hunger and cold and misery I wandered to and fro.
+But the Lord took pity on my pain, and He led me to the sea,
+And some ice-bound whalers heard my moan, and they fed and sheltered me.
+They fed the feeble scarecrow thing that stumbled out of the wild
+With the ravaged face of a mask of death
+  and the wandering wits of a child--
+A craven, cowering bag of bones that once had been a man.
+They tended me and they brought me back to the world, and here I am.
+
+Some say that the Northern Lights are the glare of the Arctic ice and snow;
+And some that it's electricity, and nobody seems to know.
+But I'll tell you now--and if I lie, may my lips be stricken dumb--
+It's a MINE, a mine of the precious stuff that men call radium.
+I'ts a million dollars a pound, they say,
+  and there's tons and tons in sight.
+You can see it gleam in a golden stream in the solitudes of night.
+And it's mine, all mine--and say! if you have a hundred plunks to spare,
+I'll let you have the chance of your life, I'll sell you a quarter share.
+You turn it down?  Well, I'll make it ten, seeing as you are my friend.
+Nothing doing?  Say! don't be hard--have you got a dollar to lend?
+Just a dollar to help me out, I know you'll treat me white;
+I'll do as much for you some day . . . God bless you, sir; good-night.
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin
+
+
+
+There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,
+When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name;
+Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came.
+
+His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam
+  when the brown spring freshets flow;
+Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre eyes aglow;
+They knew him far for the fitful man who spat forth blood on the snow.
+
+"Did ever you see such a skin?" quoth he;
+  "there's nought in the world so fine--
+Such fullness of fur as black as the night,
+  such lustre, such size, such shine;
+It's life to a one-lunged man like me; it's London, it's women, it's wine.
+
+"The Moose-hides called it the devil-fox, and swore that no man could kill;
+That he who hunted it, soon or late, must surely suffer some ill;
+But I laughed at them and their old squaw-tales.
+  Ha!  Ha!  I'm laughing still.
+
+"For look ye, the skin--it's as smooth as sin,
+  and black as the core of the Pit.
+By gun or by trap, whatever the hap, I swore I would capture it;
+By star and by star afield and afar, I hunted and would not quit.
+
+"For the devil-fox, it was swift and sly, and it seemed to fleer at me;
+I would wake in fright by the camp-fire light, hearing its evil glee;
+Into my dream its eyes would gleam, and its shadow would I see.
+
+"It sniffed and ran from the ptarmigan I had poisoned to excess;
+Unharmed it sped from my wrathful lead ('twas as if I shot by guess);
+Yet it came by night in the stark moonlight to mock at my weariness.
+
+"I tracked it up where the mountains hunch like the vertebrae of the world;
+I tracked it down to the death-still pits where the avalanche is hurled;
+From the glooms to the sacerdotal snows,
+  where the carded clouds are curled.
+
+"From the vastitudes where the world protrudes
+  through clouds like seas up-shoaled,
+I held its track till it led me back to the land I had left of old--
+The land I had looted many moons.  I was weary and sick and cold.
+
+"I was sick, soul-sick, of the futile chase, and there and then I swore
+The foul fiend fox might scathless go, for I would hunt no more;
+Then I rubbed mine eyes in a vast surprise--it stood by my cabin door.
+
+"A rifle raised in the wraith-like gloom, and a vengeful shot that sped;
+A howl that would thrill a cream-faced corpse--
+  and the demon fox lay dead. . . .
+Yet there was never a sign of wound, and never a drop he bled.
+
+"So that was the end of the great black fox,
+  and here is the prize I've won;
+And now for a drink to cheer me up--I've mushed since the early sun;
+We'll drink a toast to the sorry ghost of the fox whose race is run."
+
+
+II.
+
+Now Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike, bad as the worst were they;
+In their road-house down by the river-trail
+  they waited and watched for prey;
+With wine and song they joyed night long, and they slept like swine by day.
+
+For things were done in the Midnight Sun that no tongue will ever tell;
+And men there be who walk earth-free, but whose names are writ in hell--
+Are writ in flames with the guilty names of Fournier and Labelle.
+
+Put not your trust in a poke of dust would ye sleep the sleep of sin;
+For there be those who would rob your clothes ere yet the dawn comes in;
+And a prize likewise in a woman's eyes is a peerless black fox skin.
+
+Put your faith in the mountain cat if you lie within his lair;
+Trust the fangs of the mother-wolf, and the claws of the lead-ripped bear;
+But oh, of the wiles and the gold-tooth smiles
+  of a dance-hall wench beware!
+
+Wherefore it was beyond all laws that lusts of man restrain,
+A man drank deep and sank to sleep never to wake again;
+And the Yukon swallowed through a hole the cold corpse of the slain.
+
+
+III.
+
+The black fox skin a shadow cast from the roof nigh to the floor;
+And sleek it seemed and soft it gleamed, and the woman stroked it o'er;
+And the man stood by with a brooding eye, and gnashed his teeth and swore.
+
+When thieves and thugs fall out and fight there's fell arrears to pay;
+And soon or late sin meets its fate, and so it fell one day
+That Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike fanged up like dogs at bay.
+
+"The skin is mine, all mine," she cried; "I did the deed alone."
+"It's share and share with a guilt-yoked pair",
+  he hissed in a pregnant tone;
+And so they snarled like malamutes over a mildewed bone.
+
+And so they fought, by fear untaught, till haply it befell
+One dawn of day she slipped away to Dawson town to sell
+The fruit of sin, this black fox skin that had made their lives a hell.
+
+She slipped away as still he lay, she clutched the wondrous fur;
+Her pulses beat, her foot was fleet, her fear was as a spur;
+She laughed with glee, she did not see him rise and follow her.
+
+The bluffs uprear and grimly peer far over Dawson town;
+They see its lights a blaze o' nights and harshly they look down;
+They mock the plan and plot of man with grim, ironic frown.
+
+The trail was steep; 'twas at the time when swiftly sinks the snow;
+All honey-combed, the river ice was rotting down below;
+The river chafed beneath its rind with many a mighty throe.
+
+And up the swift and oozy drift a woman climbed in fear,
+Clutching to her a black fox fur as if she held it dear;
+And hard she pressed it to her breast--then Windy Ike drew near.
+
+She made no moan--her heart was stone--she read his smiling face,
+And like a dream flashed all her life's dark horror and disgrace;
+A moment only--with a snarl he hurled her into space.
+
+She rolled for nigh an hundred feet; she bounded like a ball;
+From crag to crag she carromed down through snow and timber fall; . . .
+A hole gaped in the river ice; the spray flashed--that was all.
+
+A bird sang for the joy of spring, so piercing sweet and frail;
+And blinding bright the land was dight in gay and glittering mail;
+And with a wondrous black fox skin a man slid down the trail.
+
+
+IV.
+
+A wedge-faced man there was who ran along the river bank,
+Who stumbled through each drift and slough, and ever slipped and sank,
+And ever cursed his Maker's name, and ever "hooch" he drank.
+
+He travelled like a hunted thing, hard harried, sore distrest;
+The old grandmother moon crept out from her cloud-quilted nest;
+The aged mountains mocked at him in their primeval rest.
+
+Grim shadows diapered the snow; the air was strangely mild;
+The valley's girth was dumb with mirth, the laughter of the wild;
+The still, sardonic laughter of an ogre o'er a child.
+
+The river writhed beneath the ice; it groaned like one in pain,
+And yawning chasms opened wide, and closed and yawned again;
+And sheets of silver heaved on high until they split in twain.
+
+From out the road-house by the trail they saw a man afar
+Make for the narrow river-reach where the swift cross-currents are;
+Where, frail and worn, the ice is torn and the angry waters jar.
+
+But they did not see him crash and sink into the icy flow;
+They did not see him clinging there, gripped by the undertow,
+Clawing with bleeding finger-nails at the jagged ice and snow.
+
+They found a note beside the hole where he had stumbled in:
+"Here met his fate by evil luck a man who lived in sin,
+And to the one who loves me least I leave this black fox skin."
+
+And strange it is; for, though they searched the river all around,
+No trace or sign of black fox skin was ever after found;
+Though one man said he saw the tread of HOOFS deep in the ground.
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of Pious Pete
+
+     "The North has got him." --Yukonism.
+
+
+
+I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.
+I grieved for his fate, and early and late I watched over him like a kid.
+I gave him excuse, I bore his abuse in every way that I could;
+I swore to prevail; I camped on his trail;
+  I plotted and planned for his good.
+By day and by night I strove in men's sight to gather him into the fold,
+With precept and prayer, with hope and despair,
+  in hunger and hardship and cold.
+I followed him into Gehennas of sin, I sat where the sirens sit;
+In the shade of the Pole, for the sake of his soul,
+  I strove with the powers of the Pit.
+I shadowed him down to the scrofulous town;
+  I dragged him from dissolute brawls;
+But I killed the galoot when he started to shoot electricity into my walls.
+
+God knows what I did he should seek to be rid
+  of one who would save him from shame.
+God knows what I bore that night when he swore
+  and bade me make tracks from his claim.
+I started to tell of the horrors of hell,
+  when sudden his eyes lit like coals;
+And "Chuck it," says he, "don't persecute me
+  with your cant and your saving of souls."
+I'll swear I was mild as I'd be with a child,
+  but he called me the son of a slut;
+And, grabbing his gun with a leap and a run,
+  he threatened my face with the butt.
+So what could I do (I leave it to you)?  With curses he harried me forth;
+Then he was alone, and I was alone, and over us menaced the North.
+
+Our cabins were near; I could see, I could hear;
+  but between us there rippled the creek;
+And all summer through, with a rancor that grew,
+  he would pass me and never would speak.
+Then a shuddery breath like the coming of Death
+  crept down from the peaks far away;
+The water was still; the twilight was chill; the sky was a tatter of gray.
+Swift came the Big Cold, and opal and gold the lights of the witches arose;
+The frost-tyrant clinched, and the valley was cinched
+  by the stark and cadaverous snows.
+The trees were like lace where the star-beams could chase,
+  each leaf was a jewel agleam.
+The soft white hush lapped the Northland and wrapped
+  us round in a crystalline dream;
+So still I could hear quite loud in my ear
+  the swish of the pinions of time;
+So bright I could see, as plain as could be,
+  the wings of God's angels ashine.
+
+As I read in the Book I would oftentimes look
+  to that cabin just over the creek.
+Ah me, it was sad and evil and bad, two neighbors who never would speak!
+I knew that full well like a devil in hell
+  he was hatching out, early and late,
+A system to bear through the frost-spangled air
+  the warm, crimson waves of his hate.
+I only could peer and shudder and fear--'twas ever so ghastly and still;
+But I knew over there in his lonely despair
+  he was plotting me terrible ill.
+I knew that he nursed a malice accurst,
+  like the blast of a winnowing flame;
+I pleaded aloud for a shield, for a shroud--Oh, God! then calamity came.
+
+Mad!  If I'm mad then you too are mad; but it's all in the point of view.
+If you'd looked at them things gallivantin' on wings,
+  all purple and green and blue;
+If you'd noticed them twist, as they mounted and hissed
+  like scorpions dim in the dark;
+If you'd seen them rebound with a horrible sound,
+  and spitefully spitting a spark;
+If you'd watched IT with dread, as it hissed by your bed,
+  that thing with the feelers that crawls--
+You'd have settled the brute that attempted to shoot
+  electricity into your walls.
+
+Oh, some they were blue, and they slithered right through;
+  they were silent and squashy and round;
+And some they were green; they were wriggly and lean;
+  they writhed with so hateful a sound.
+My blood seemed to freeze; I fell on my knees;
+  my face was a white splash of dread.
+Oh, the Green and the Blue, they were gruesome to view;
+  but the worst of them all were the Red.
+They came through the door, they came through the floor,
+  they came through the moss-creviced logs.
+They were savage and dire; they were whiskered with fire;
+  they bickered like malamute dogs.
+They ravined in rings like iniquitous things;
+  they gulped down the Green and the Blue.
+I crinkled with fear whene'er they drew near,
+  and nearer and nearer they drew.
+
+And then came the crown of Horror's grim crown,
+  the monster so loathsomely red.
+Each eye was a pin that shot out and in, as, squidlike, it oozed to my bed;
+So softly it crept with feelers that swept
+  and quivered like fine copper wire;
+Its belly was white with a sulphurous light,
+  it jaws were a-drooling with fire.
+It came and it came; I could breathe of its flame,
+  but never a wink could I look.
+I thrust in its maw the Fount of the Law; I fended it off with the Book.
+I was weak--oh, so weak--but I thrilled at its shriek,
+  as wildly it fled in the night;
+And deathlike I lay till the dawn of the day.
+  (Was ever so welcome the light?)
+
+I loaded my gun at the rise of the sun; to his cabin so softly I slunk.
+My neighbor was there in the frost-freighted air,
+  all wrapped in a robe in his bunk.
+It muffled his moans; it outlined his bones, as feebly he twisted about;
+His gums were so black, and his lips seemed to crack,
+  and his teeth all were loosening out.
+'Twas a death's head that peered through the tangle of beard;
+  'twas a face I will never forget;
+Sunk eyes full of woe, and they troubled me so
+  with their pleadings and anguish, and yet
+As I rested my gaze in a misty amaze on the scurvy-degenerate wreck,
+I thought of the Things with the dragon-fly wings,
+  then laid I my gun on his neck.
+He gave out a cry that was faint as a sigh, like a perishing malamute,
+And he says unto me, "I'm converted," says he;
+  "for Christ's sake, Peter, don't shoot!"
+
+     *    *    *    *    *
+
+They're taking me out with an escort about, and under a sergeant's care;
+I am humbled indeed, for I'm 'cuffed to a Swede
+  that thinks he's a millionaire.
+But it's all Gospel true what I'm telling to you--
+  up there where the Shadow falls--
+That I settled Sam Noot when he started to shoot electricity into my walls.
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill
+
+
+
+I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,
+Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die--
+Whether he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon;
+In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon;
+On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw;
+In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw;
+By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead--
+I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead.
+
+For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was mighty sot
+On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized bone-yard lot.
+And where he died or how he died, it didn't matter a damn
+So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone "epigram".
+So I promised him, and he paid the price in good cheechako coin
+(Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin).
+Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine:  "Here lies poor Bill MacKie",
+And I hung it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die.
+
+Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange,
+Of a long-deserted line of traps 'way back of the Bighorn range;
+Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still,
+Lying there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill.
+So I thought of the contract I'd made with him,
+  and I took down from the shelf
+The swell black box with the silver plate he'd picked out for hisself;
+And I packed it full of grub and "hooch", and I slung it on the sleigh;
+Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day.
+
+You know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below;
+When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads
+  through the crust of the pale blue snow;
+When the pine-trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood,
+And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood;
+When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,
+And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit;
+When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill--
+Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill.
+
+Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand,
+As I blundered blind with a trail to find
+  through that blank and bitter land;
+Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild,
+  with its grim heart-breaking woes,
+And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows!
+North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain
+Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again.
+
+River and plain and mighty peak--and who could stand unawed?
+As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed
+  at the foot of the throne of God.
+North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes,
+And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes,
+Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill,
+And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill.
+
+Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
+Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
+Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest, glittering ice in his hair,
+Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;
+Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
+I gazed at the coffin I'd brought for him,
+  and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
+And at last I spoke:  "Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
+A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies."
+
+Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,
+With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't control?
+Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,
+And that seems to say:  "You may try all day, but you'll never jam me in"?
+I'm not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue
+As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do.
+Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,
+And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.
+
+Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn't seem no good;
+His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood.
+Till at last I said:  "It ain't no use--he's froze too hard to thaw;
+He's obstinate, and he won't lie straight, so I guess I got to--SAW."
+So I sawed off poor Bill's arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight
+In the little coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate;
+And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down;
+Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh, and I started back to town.
+
+So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep,
+And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up,
+  when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep;
+And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun,
+And sometimes I wonder if they WAS, the awful things I done.
+And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law,
+I often think of poor old Bill--AND HOW HARD HE WAS TO SAW.
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike
+
+
+
+     This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,
+     As I smoked my pipe in the camp-fire light,
+       and the Glories swept the sky;
+     As the Northlights gleamed and curved and streamed,
+       and the bottle of "hooch" was dry.
+
+A man once aimed that my life be shamed, and wrought me a deathly wrong;
+I vowed one day I would well repay, but the heft of his hate was strong.
+He thonged me East and he thonged me West; he harried me back and forth,
+Till I fled in fright from his peerless spite
+  to the bleak, bald-headed North.
+
+And there I lay, and for many a day I hatched plan after plan,
+For a golden haul of the wherewithal to crush and to kill my man;
+And there I strove, and there I clove through the drift of icy streams;
+And there I fought, and there I sought for the pay-streak of my dreams.
+
+So twenty years, with their hopes and fears and smiles and tears and such,
+Went by and left me long bereft of hope of the Midas touch;
+About as fat as a chancel rat, and lo! despite my will,
+In the weary fight I had clean lost sight of the man I sought to kill.
+
+'Twas so far away, that evil day when I prayed to the Prince of Gloom
+For the savage strength and the sullen length of life to work his doom.
+Nor sign nor word had I seen or heard, and it happed so long ago;
+My youth was gone and my memory wan, and I willed it even so.
+
+It fell one night in the waning light by the Yukon's oily flow,
+I smoked and sat as I marvelled at the sky's port-winey glow;
+Till it paled away to an absinthe gray, and the river seemed to shrink,
+All wobbly flakes and wriggling snakes and goblin eyes a-wink.
+
+'Twas weird to see and it 'wildered me in a queer, hypnotic dream,
+Till I saw a spot like an inky blot come floating down the stream;
+It bobbed and swung; it sheered and hung; it romped round in a ring;
+It seemed to play in a tricksome way; it sure was a merry thing.
+
+In freakish flights strange oily lights came fluttering round its head,
+Like butterflies of a monster size--then I knew it for the Dead.
+Its face was rubbed and slicked and scrubbed as smooth as a shaven pate;
+In the silver snakes that the water makes it gleamed like a dinner-plate.
+
+It gurgled near, and clear and clear and large and large it grew;
+It stood upright in a ring of light and it looked me through and through.
+It weltered round with a woozy sound, and ere I could retreat,
+With the witless roll of a sodden soul it wantoned to my feet.
+
+And here I swear by this Cross I wear, I heard that "floater" say:
+"I am the man from whom you ran, the man you sought to slay.
+That you may note and gaze and gloat, and say `Revenge is sweet',
+In the grit and grime of the river's slime I am rotting at your feet.
+
+"The ill we rue we must e'en undo, though it rive us bone from bone;
+So it came about that I sought you out, for I prayed I might atone.
+I did you wrong, and for long and long I sought where you might live;
+And now you're found, though I'm dead and drowned, I beg you to forgive."
+
+So sad it seemed, and its cheek-bones gleamed,
+  and its fingers flicked the shore;
+And it lapped and lay in a weary way, and its hands met to implore;
+That I gently said:  "Poor, restless dead, I would never work you woe;
+Though the wrong you rue you can ne'er undo, I forgave you long ago."
+
+Then, wonder-wise, I rubbed my eyes and I woke from a horrid dream.
+The moon rode high in the naked sky, and something bobbed in the stream.
+It held my sight in a patch of light, and then it sheered from the shore;
+It dipped and sank by a hollow bank, and I never saw it more.
+
+     This was the tale he told to me, that man so warped and gray,
+     Ere he slept and dreamed, and the camp-fire gleamed
+       in his eye in a wolfish way--
+     That crystal eye that raked the sky in the weird Auroral ray.
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of the Brand
+
+
+
+'Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare,
+Tellus, the smith, had taken to wife a maiden amazingly fair;
+Tellus, the brawny worker in iron, hairy and heavy of hand,
+Saw her and loved her and bore her away from the tribe of a Southern land;
+Deeming her worthy to queen his home and mother him little ones,
+That the name of Tellus, the master smith, might live in his stalwart sons.
+
+Now there was little of law in the land, and evil doings were rife,
+And every man who joyed in his home guarded the fame of his wife;
+For there were those of the silver tongue and the honeyed art to beguile,
+Who would cozen the heart from a woman's breast
+  and damn her soul with a smile.
+And there were women too quick to heed a look or a whispered word,
+And once in a while a man was slain, and the ire of the King was stirred;
+So far and wide he proclaimed his wrath, and this was the law he willed:
+"That whosoever killeth a man, even shall he be killed."
+
+Now Tellus, the smith, he trusted his wife; his heart was empty of fear.
+High on the hill was the gleam of their hearth, a beacon of love and cheer.
+High on the hill they builded their bower,
+  where the broom and the bracken meet;
+Under a grave of oaks it was, hushed and drowsily sweet.
+Here he enshrined her, his dearest saint, his idol, the light of his eye;
+Her kisses rested upon his lips as brushes a butterfly.
+The weight of her arms around his neck was light as the thistle down;
+And sweetly she studied to win his smile, and gently she mocked his frown.
+And when at the close of the dusty day his clangorous toil was done,
+She hastened to meet him down the way all lit by the amber sun.
+
+Their dove-cot gleamed in the golden light, a temple of stainless love;
+Like the hanging cup of a big blue flower was the topaz sky above.
+The roses and lilies yearned to her,
+  as swift through their throng she pressed;
+A little white, fragile, fluttering thing
+  that lay like a child on his breast.
+Then the heart of Tellus, the smith, was proud,
+  and sang for the joy of life,
+And there in the bronzing summertide he thanked the gods for his wife.
+
+Now there was one called Philo, a scribe, a man of exquisite grace,
+Carved like the god Apollo in limb, fair as Adonis in face;
+Eager and winning in manner, full of such radiant charm,
+Womenkind fought for his favor and loved to their uttermost harm.
+Such was his craft and his knowledge, such was his skill at the game,
+Never was woman could flout him, so be he plotted her shame.
+And so he drank deep of pleasure, and then it fell on a day
+He gazed on the wife of Tellus and marked her out for his prey.
+
+Tellus, the smith, was merry, and the time of the year it was June,
+So he said to his stalwart helpers:  "Shut down the forge at noon.
+Go ye and joy in the sunshine, rest in the coolth of the grove,
+Drift on the dreamy river, every man with his love."
+Then to himself:  "Oh, Beloved, sweet will be your surprise;
+To-day will we sport like children, laugh in each other's eyes;
+Weave gay garlands of poppies, crown each other with flowers,
+Pull plump carp from the lilies, rifle the ferny bowers.
+To-day with feasting and gladness the wine of Cyprus will flow;
+To-day is the day we were wedded only a twelvemonth ago."
+
+The larks trilled high in the heavens; his heart was lyric with joy;
+He plucked a posy of lilies; he sped like a love-sick boy.
+He stole up the velvety pathway--his cottage was sunsteeped and still;
+Vines honeysuckled the window; softly he peeped o'er the sill.
+The lilies dropped from his fingers; devils were choking his breath;
+Rigid with horror, he stiffened; ghastly his face was as death.
+Like a nun whose faith in the Virgin is met with a prurient jibe,
+He shrank--'twas the wife of his bosom in the arms of Philo, the scribe.
+
+Tellus went back to his smithy; he reeled like a drunken man;
+His heart was riven with anguish; his brain was brooding a plan.
+Straight to his anvil he hurried; started his furnace aglow;
+Heated his iron and shaped it with savage and masterful blow.
+Sparks showered over and round him; swiftly under his hand
+There at last it was finished--a hideous and infamous Brand.
+
+That night the wife of his bosom, the light of joy in her eyes,
+Kissed him with words of rapture; but he knew that her words were lies.
+Never was she so beguiling, never so merry of speech
+(For passion ripens a woman as the sunshine ripens a peach).
+He clenched his teeth into silence; he yielded up to her lure,
+Though he knew that her breasts were heaving from the fire of her paramour.
+"To-morrow," he said, "to-morrow"--he wove her hair in a strand,
+Twisted it round his fingers and smiled as he thought of the Brand.
+
+The morrow was come, and Tellus swiftly stole up the hill.
+Butterflies drowsed in the noon-heat; coverts were sunsteeped and still.
+Softly he padded the pathway unto the porch, and within
+Heard he the low laugh of dalliance, heard he the rapture of sin.
+Knew he her eyes were mystic with light that no man should see,
+No man kindle and joy in, no man on earth save he.
+And never for him would it kindle.  The bloodlust surged in his brain;
+Through the senseless stone could he see them, wanton and warily fain.
+Horrible!  Heaven he sought for, gained it and gloried and fell--
+Oh, it was sudden--headlong into the nethermost hell. . . .
+
+Was this he, Tellus, this marble?  Tellus . . . not dreaming a dream?
+Ah! sharp-edged as a javelin, was that a woman's scream?
+Was it a door that shattered, shell-like, under his blow?
+Was it his saint, that strumpet, dishevelled and cowering low?
+Was it her lover, that wild thing, that twisted and gouged and tore?
+Was it a man he was crushing, whose head he beat on the floor?
+Laughing the while at its weakness, till sudden he stayed his hand--
+Through the red ring of his madness flamed the thought of the Brand.
+
+Then bound he the naked Philo with thongs that cut in the flesh,
+And the wife of his bosom, fear-frantic, he gagged with a silken mesh,
+Choking her screams into silence; bound her down by the hair;
+Dragged her lover unto her under her frenzied stare.
+In the heat of the hearth-fire embers he heated the hideous Brand;
+Twisting her fingers open, he forced its haft in her hand.
+He pressed it downward and downward; she felt the living flesh sear;
+She saw the throe of her lover; she heard the scream of his fear.
+Once, twice and thrice he forced her, heedless of prayer and shriek--
+Once on the forehead of Philo, twice in the soft of his cheek.
+Then (for the thing was finished) he said to the woman:  "See
+How you have branded your lover!  Now will I let him go free."
+He severed the thongs that bound him, laughing:  "Revenge is sweet",
+And Philo, sobbing in anguish, feebly rose to his feet.
+The man who was fair as Apollo, god-like in woman's sight,
+Hideous now as a satyr, fled to the pity of night.
+
+     Then came they before the Judgment Seat,
+       and thus spoke the Lord of the Land:
+     "He who seeketh his neighbor's wife
+       shall suffer the doom of the Brand.
+     Brutish and bold on his brow be it stamped,
+       deep in his cheek let it sear,
+     That every man may look on his shame, and shudder and sicken and fear.
+     He shall hear their mock in the market-place,
+       their fleering jibe at the feast;
+     He shall seek the caves and the shroud of night,
+       and the fellowship of the beast.
+     Outcast forever from homes of men, far and far shall he roam.
+     Such be the doom, sadder than death, of him who shameth a home."
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry
+
+
+
+Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank
+That's staked out nigh three hundred claims, and every one a blank;
+That's followed every fool stampede, and seen the rise and fall
+Of camps where men got gold in chunks and he got none at all;
+That's prospected a bit of ground and sold it for a song
+To see it yield a fortune to some fool that came along;
+That's sunk a dozen bed-rock holes, and not a speck in sight,
+Yet sees them take a million from the claims to left and right?
+Now aren't things like that enough to drive a man to booze?
+But Hard-Luck Smith was hoodoo-proof--he knew the way to lose.
+
+'Twas in the fall of nineteen four--leap-year I've heard them say--
+When Hard-Luck came to Hunker Creek and took a hillside lay.
+And lo! as if to make amends for all the futile past,
+Late in the year he struck it rich, the real pay-streak at last.
+The riffles of his sluicing-box were choked with speckled earth,
+And night and day he worked that lay for all that he was worth.
+And when in chill December's gloom his lucky lease expired,
+He found that he had made a stake as big as he desired.
+
+One day while meditating on the waywardness of fate,
+He felt the ache of lonely man to find a fitting mate;
+A petticoated pard to cheer his solitary life,
+A woman with soft, soothing ways, a confidant, a wife.
+And while he cooked his supper on his little Yukon stove,
+He wished that he had staked a claim in Love's rich treasure-trove;
+When suddenly he paused and held aloft a Yukon egg,
+For there in pencilled letters was the magic name of Peg.
+
+You know these Yukon eggs of ours--some pink, some green, some blue--
+A dollar per, assorted tints, assorted flavors too.
+The supercilious cheechako might designate them high,
+But one acquires a taste for them and likes them by-and-by.
+Well, Hard-Luck Henry took this egg and held it to the light,
+And there was more faint pencilling that sorely taxed his sight.
+At last he made it out, and then the legend ran like this--
+"Will Klondike miner write to Peg, Plumhollow, Squashville, Wis.?"
+
+That night he got to thinking of this far-off, unknown fair;
+It seemed so sort of opportune, an answer to his prayer.
+She flitted sweetly through his dreams, she haunted him by day,
+She smiled through clouds of nicotine, she cheered his weary way.
+At last he yielded to the spell; his course of love he set--
+Wisconsin his objective point; his object, Margaret.
+
+With every mile of sea and land his longing grew and grew.
+He practised all his pretty words, and these, I fear, were few.
+At last, one frosty evening, with a cold chill down his spine,
+He found himself before her house, the threshold of the shrine.
+His courage flickered to a spark, then glowed with sudden flame--
+He knocked; he heard a welcome word; she came--his goddess came.
+Oh, she was fair as any flower, and huskily he spoke:
+"I'm all the way from Klondike, with a mighty heavy poke.
+I'm looking for a lassie, one whose Christian name is Peg,
+Who sought a Klondike miner, and who wrote it on an egg."
+
+The lassie gazed at him a space, her cheeks grew rosy red;
+She gazed at him with tear-bright eyes, then tenderly she said:
+"Yes, lonely Klondike miner, it is true my name is Peg.
+It's also true I longed for you and wrote it on an egg.
+My heart went out to someone in that land of night and cold;
+But oh, I fear that Yukon egg must have been mighty old.
+I waited long, I hoped and feared; you should have come before;
+I've been a wedded woman now for eighteen months or more.
+I'm sorry, since you've come so far, you ain't the one that wins;
+But won't you take a step inside--I'LL LET YOU SEE THE TWINS."
+
+
+
+
+The Man from Eldorado
+
+
+
+He's the man from Eldorado, and he's just arrived in town,
+ In moccasins and oily buckskin shirt.
+He's gaunt as any Indian, and pretty nigh as brown;
+ He's greasy, and he smells of sweat and dirt.
+He sports a crop of whiskers that would shame a healthy hog;
+ Hard work has racked his joints and stooped his back;
+He slops along the sidewalk followed by his yellow dog,
+ But he's got a bunch of gold-dust in his sack.
+
+He seems a little wistful as he blinks at all the lights,
+ And maybe he is thinking of his claim
+And the dark and dwarfish cabin where he lay and dreamed at nights,
+ (Thank God, he'll never see the place again!)
+Where he lived on tinned tomatoes, beef embalmed and sourdough bread,
+ On rusty beans and bacon furred with mould;
+His stomach's out of kilter and his system full of lead,
+ But it's over, and his poke is full of gold.
+
+He has panted at the windlass, he has loaded in the drift,
+ He has pounded at the face of oozy clay;
+He has taxed himself to sickness, dark and damp and double shift,
+ He has labored like a demon night and day.
+And now, praise God, it's over, and he seems to breathe again
+ Of new-mown hay, the warm, wet, friendly loam;
+He sees a snowy orchard in a green and dimpling plain,
+ And a little vine-clad cottage, and it's--Home.
+
+
+II.
+
+He's the man from Eldorado, and he's had a bite and sup,
+ And he's met in with a drouthy friend or two;
+He's cached away his gold-dust, but he's sort of bucking up,
+ So he's kept enough to-night to see him through.
+His eye is bright and genial, his tongue no longer lags;
+ His heart is brimming o'er with joy and mirth;
+He may be far from savory, he may be clad in rags,
+ But to-night he feels as if he owns the earth.
+
+Says he:  "Boys, here is where the shaggy North and I will shake;
+ I thought I'd never manage to get free.
+I kept on making misses; but at last I've got my stake;
+ There's no more thawing frozen muck for me.
+I am going to God's Country, where I'll live the simple life;
+ I'll buy a bit of land and make a start;
+I'll carve a little homestead, and I'll win a little wife,
+ And raise ten little kids to cheer my heart."
+
+They signified their sympathy by crowding to the bar;
+ They bellied up three deep and drank his health.
+He shed a radiant smile around and smoked a rank cigar;
+ They wished him honor, happiness and wealth.
+They drank unto his wife to be--that unsuspecting maid;
+ They drank unto his children half a score;
+And when they got through drinking very tenderly they laid
+ The man from Eldorado on the floor.
+
+
+III.
+
+He's the man from Eldorado, and he's only starting in
+ To cultivate a thousand-dollar jag.
+His poke is full of gold-dust and his heart is full of sin,
+ And he's dancing with a girl called Muckluck Mag.
+She's as light as any fairy; she's as pretty as a peach;
+ She's mistress of the witchcraft to beguile;
+There's sunshine in her manner, there is music in her speech,
+ And there's concentrated honey in her smile.
+
+Oh, the fever of the dance-hall and the glitter and the shine,
+ The beauty, and the jewels, and the whirl,
+The madness of the music, the rapture of the wine,
+ The languorous allurement of a girl!
+She is like a lost madonna; he is gaunt, unkempt and grim;
+ But she fondles him and gazes in his eyes;
+Her kisses seek his heavy lips, and soon it seems to him
+ He has staked a little claim in Paradise.
+
+"Who's for a juicy two-step?" cries the master of the floor;
+ The music throbs with soft, seductive beat.
+There's glitter, gilt and gladness; there are pretty girls galore;
+ There's a woolly man with moccasins on feet.
+They know they've got him going; he is buying wine for all;
+ They crowd around as buzzards at a feast,
+Then when his poke is empty they boost him from the hall,
+ And spurn him in the gutter like a beast.
+
+He's the man from Eldorado, and he's painting red the town;
+ Behind he leaves a trail of yellow dust;
+In a whirl of senseless riot he is ramping up and down;
+ There's nothing checks his madness and his lust.
+And soon the word is passed around--it travels like a flame;
+ They fight to clutch his hand and call him friend,
+The chevaliers of lost repute, the dames of sorry fame;
+ Then comes the grim awakening--the end.
+
+
+IV.
+
+He's the man from Eldorado, and he gives a grand affair;
+ There's feasting, dancing, wine without restraint.
+The smooth Beau Brummels of the bar, the faro men, are there;
+ The tinhorns and purveyors of red paint;
+The sleek and painted women, their predacious eyes aglow--
+ Sure Klondike City never saw the like;
+Then Muckluck Mag proposed the toast, "The giver of the show,
+ The livest sport that ever hit the pike."
+
+The "live one" rises to his feet; he stammers to reply--
+ And then there comes before his muddled brain
+A vision of green vastitudes beneath an April sky,
+ And clover pastures drenched with silver rain.
+He knows that it can never be, that he is down and out;
+ Life leers at him with foul and fetid breath;
+And then amid the revelry, the song and cheer and shout,
+ He suddenly grows grim and cold as death.
+
+He grips the table tensely, and he says:  "Dear friends of mine,
+ I've let you dip your fingers in my purse;
+I've crammed you at my table, and I've drowned you in my wine,
+ And I've little left to give you but--my curse.
+I've failed supremely in my plans; it's rather late to whine;
+ My poke is mighty weasened up and small.
+I thank you each for coming here; the happiness is mine--
+ And now, you thieves and harlots, take it all."
+
+He twists the thong from off his poke; he swings it o'er his head;
+ The nuggets fall around their feet like grain.
+They rattle over roof and wall; they scatter, roll and spread;
+ The dust is like a shower of golden rain.
+The guests a moment stand aghast, then grovel on the floor;
+ They fight, and snarl, and claw, like beasts of prey;
+And then, as everybody grabbed and everybody swore,
+ The man from Eldorado slipped away.
+
+
+V.
+
+He's the man from Eldorado, and they found him stiff and dead,
+ Half covered by the freezing ooze and dirt.
+A clotted Colt was in his hand, a hole was in his head,
+ And he wore an old and oily buckskin shirt.
+His eyes were fixed and horrible, as one who hails the end;
+ The frost had set him rigid as a log;
+And there, half lying on his breast, his last and only friend,
+ There crouched and whined a mangy yellow dog.
+
+
+
+
+My Friends
+
+
+
+The man above was a murderer, the man below was a thief;
+And I lay there in the bunk between, ailing beyond belief;
+A weary armful of skin and bone, wasted with pain and grief.
+
+My feet were froze, and the lifeless toes were purple and green and gray;
+The little flesh that clung to my bones,
+  you could punch it in holes like clay;
+The skin on my gums was a sullen black, and slowly peeling away.
+
+I was sure enough in a direful fix, and often I wondered why
+They did not take the chance that was left and leave me alone to die,
+Or finish me off with a dose of dope--so utterly lost was I.
+
+But no; they brewed me the green-spruce tea,
+  and nursed me there like a child;
+And the homicide he was good to me, and bathed my sores and smiled;
+And the thief he starved that I might be fed,
+  and his eyes were kind and mild.
+
+Yet they were woefully wicked men, and often at night in pain
+I heard the murderer speak of his deed and dream it over again;
+I heard the poor thief sorrowing for the dead self he had slain.
+
+I'll never forget that bitter dawn, so evil, askew and gray,
+When they wrapped me round in the skins of beasts
+  and they bore me to a sleigh,
+And we started out with the nearest post an hundred miles away.
+
+I'll never forget the trail they broke, with its tense, unuttered woe;
+And the crunch, crunch, crunch as their snowshoes sank
+  through the crust of the hollow snow;
+And my breath would fail, and every beat of my heart was like a blow.
+
+And oftentimes I would die the death, yet wake up to life anew;
+The sun would be all ablaze on the waste, and the sky a blighting blue,
+And the tears would rise in my snow-blind eyes
+  and furrow my cheeks like dew.
+
+And the camps we made when their strength outplayed
+  and the day was pinched and wan;
+And oh, the joy of that blessed halt, and how I did dread the dawn;
+And how I hated the weary men who rose and dragged me on.
+
+And oh, how I begged to rest, to rest--the snow was so sweet a shroud;
+And oh, how I cried when they urged me on, cried and cursed them aloud;
+Yet on they strained, all racked and pained,
+  and sorely their backs were bowed.
+
+And then it was all like a lurid dream, and I prayed for a swift release
+From the ruthless ones who would not leave me to die alone in peace;
+Till I wakened up and I found myself at the post of the Mounted Police.
+
+And there was my friend the murderer, and there was my friend the thief,
+With bracelets of steel around their wrists, and wicked beyond belief:
+But when they come to God's judgment seat--may I be allowed the brief.
+
+
+
+
+The Prospector
+
+
+
+I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,
+ A-purpose to revisit the old claim.
+I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,
+ And the lads who once were with me in the game.
+Poor boys, they're down-and-outers, and there's scarcely one to-day
+ Can show a dozen colors in his poke;
+And me, I'm still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,
+ And I'm looking for a grub-stake, and I'm broke.
+
+I strolled up old Bonanza.  The same old moon looked down;
+ The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;
+But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,
+ Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.
+There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,
+ And turning round a bend I heard a roar,
+And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan
+ Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore.
+
+It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;
+ It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;
+Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;
+ It glared around with fierce electric eyes.
+Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more;
+ It looked like some great monster in the gloom.
+With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score,
+ And I sighed:  "Ah, old-time miner, here's your doom!"
+
+The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls;
+ The holes you digged are water to the brim;
+Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls
+ Are deathly now and mouldering and dim.
+The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;
+ The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold;
+But there's a little army that they'll never put to rout--
+ The men who simply live to seek the gold.
+
+The men who can't remember when they learned to swing a pack,
+ Or in what lawless land the quest began;
+The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back,
+ The restless buccaneer of pick and pan.
+On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North,
+ You will find us, changed in face but still the same;
+And it isn't need, it isn't greed that sends us faring forth--
+ It's the fever, it's the glory of the game.
+
+For once you've panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
+ Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
+It's little else you care about; you go because you must,
+ And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
+You'd follow it in hunger, and you'd follow it in cold;
+ You'd follow it in solitude and pain;
+And when you're stiff and battened down let someone whisper "Gold",
+ You're lief to rise and follow it again.
+
+Yet look you, if I find the stuff it's just like so much dirt;
+ I fling it to the four winds like a child.
+It's wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt,
+ Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild.
+Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent--
+ There's a city, there's an army (hear them shout).
+There's the gold in millions, millions, but I haven't got a cent;
+ And oh, it's me, it's me that found it out.
+
+It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go
+ To lands of dread and death disprized of man;
+But oh, I've known a glory that their hearts will never know,
+ When I picked the first big nugget from my pan.
+It's still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more
+ To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast;
+That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before--
+ My dream that will uplift me to the last.
+
+Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there's none of you too sane;
+ It's just a little matter of degree.
+My hobby is to hunt out gold; it's fortressed in my brain;
+ It's life and love and wife and home to me.
+And I'll strike it, yes, I'll strike it; I've a hunch I cannot fail;
+ I've a vision, I've a prompting, I've a call;
+I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,
+ To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all.
+
+Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky
+ There's a lowering land no white man ever struck;
+There's gold, there's gold in millions, and I'll find it if I die,
+ And I'm going there once more to try my luck.
+Maybe I'll fail--what matter?  It's a mandate, it's a vow;
+ And when in lands of dreariness and dread
+You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now,
+ You will find the old prospector, silent, dead.
+
+     You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it;
+      You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod;
+     You will find the claim I'm seeking,
+       with my bones as stakes to show it;
+      But I've sought the last Recorder, and He's--God.
+
+
+
+
+The Black Sheep
+
+"The aristocratic ne'er-do-well in Canada frequently finds his way
+into the ranks of the Royal North-West Mounted Police." --Extract.
+
+
+
+     Hark to the ewe that bore him:
+      "What has muddied the strain?
+     Never his brothers before him
+      Showed the hint of a stain."
+     Hark to the tups and wethers;
+      Hark to the old gray ram:
+     "We're all of us white, but he's black as night,
+      And he'll never be worth a damn."
+
+I'm up on the bally wood-pile at the back of the barracks yard;
+"A damned disgrace to the force, sir", with a comrade standing guard;
+Making the bluff I'm busy, doing my six months hard.
+
+"Six months hard and dismissed, sir."  Isn't that rather hell?
+And all because of the liquor laws and the wiles of a native belle--
+Some "hooch" I gave to a siwash brave who swore that he wouldn't tell.
+
+At least they SAY that I did it.  It's so in the town report.
+All that I can recall is a night of revel and sport,
+When I woke with a "head" in the guard-room,
+  and they dragged me sick into court.
+
+And the O. C. said:  "You are guilty", and I said never a word;
+For, hang it, you see I couldn't--I didn't know WHAT had occurred,
+And, under the circumstances, denial would be absurd.
+
+But the one that cooked my bacon was Grubbe, of the City Patrol.
+He fagged for my room at Eton, and didn't I devil his soul!
+And now he is getting even, landing me down in the hole.
+
+Plugging away on the wood-pile; doing chores round the square.
+There goes an officer's lady--gives me a haughty stare--
+Me that's an earl's own nephew--that is the hardest to bear.
+
+To think of the poor old mater awaiting her prodigal son.
+Tho' I broke her heart with my folly, I was always the white-haired one.
+(That fatted calf that they're cooking will surely be overdone.)
+
+I'll go back and yarn to the Bishop; I'll dance with the village belle;
+I'll hand round tea to the ladies, and everything will be well.
+Where I have been won't matter; what I have seen I won't tell.
+
+I'll soar to their ken like a comet.  They'll see me with never a stain;
+But will they reform me? --far from it.  We pay for our pleasure with pain;
+But the dog will return to his vomit, the hog to his wallow again.
+
+I've chewed on the rind of creation, and bitter I've tasted the same;
+Stacked up against hell and damnation, I've managed to stay in the game;
+I've had my moments of sorrow; I've had my seasons of shame.
+
+That's past; when one's nature's a cracked one,
+  it's too jolly hard to mend.
+So long as the road is level, so long as I've cash to spend.
+I'm bound to go to the devil, and it's all the same in the end.
+
+The bugle is sounding for stables; the men troop off through the gloom;
+An orderly laying the tables sings in the bright mess-room.
+(I'll wash in the prison bucket, and brush with the prison broom.)
+
+I'll lie in my cell and listen; I'll wish that I couldn't hear
+The laugh and the chaff of the fellows swigging the canteen beer;
+The nasal tone of the gramophone playing "The Bandolier".
+
+And it seems to me, though it's misty, that night of the flowing bowl,
+That the man who potlatched the whiskey and landed me into the hole
+WAS GRUBBE, THAT UNMERCIFUL BOUNDER, GRUBBE, OF THE CITY PATROL.
+
+
+
+
+The Telegraph Operator
+
+
+
+I will not wash my face;
+ I will not brush my hair;
+I "pig" around the place--
+ There's nobody to care.
+Nothing but rock and tree;
+ Nothing but wood and stone,
+Oh, God, it's hell to be
+ Alone, alone, alone!
+
+Snow-peaks and deep-gashed draws
+ Corral me in a ring.
+I feel as if I was
+ The only living thing
+On all this blighted earth;
+ And so I frowst and shrink,
+And crouching by my hearth
+ I hear the thoughts I think.
+
+I think of all I miss--
+ The boys I used to know;
+The girls I used to kiss;
+ The coin I used to blow:
+The bars I used to haunt;
+ The racket and the row;
+The beers I didn't want
+ (I wish I had 'em now).
+
+Day after day the same,
+ Only a little worse;
+No one to grouch or blame--
+ Oh, for a loving curse!
+Oh, in the night I fear,
+ Haunted by nameless things,
+Just for a voice to cheer,
+ Just for a hand that clings!
+
+Faintly as from a star
+ Voices come o'er the line;
+Voices of ghosts afar,
+ Not in this world of mine;
+Lives in whose loom I grope;
+ Words in whose weft I hear
+Eager the thrill of hope,
+ Awful the chill of fear.
+
+I'm thinking out aloud;
+ I reckon that is bad;
+(The snow is like a shroud)--
+ Maybe I'm going mad.
+Say! wouldn't that be tough?
+ This awful hush that hugs
+And chokes one is enough
+ To make a man go "bugs".
+
+There's not a thing to do;
+ I cannot sleep at night;
+No wonder I'm so blue;
+ Oh, for a friendly fight!
+The din and rush of strife;
+ A music-hall aglow;
+A crowd, a city, life--
+ Dear God, I miss it so!
+
+Here, you have moped enough!
+ Brace up and play the game!
+But say, it's awful tough--
+ Day after day the same
+(I've said that twice, I bet).
+ Well, there's not much to say.
+I wish I had a pet,
+ Or something I could play.
+
+Cheer up! don't get so glum
+ And sick of everything;
+The worst is yet to come;
+ God help you till the Spring.
+God shield you from the Fear;
+ Teach you to laugh, not moan.
+Ha! ha! it sounds so queer--
+ Alone, alone, alone!
+
+
+
+
+The Wood-Cutter
+
+
+
+     The sky is like an envelope,
+      One of those blue official things;
+     And, sealing it, to mock our hope,
+      The moon, a silver wafer, clings.
+     What shall we find when death gives leave
+     To read--our sentence or reprieve?
+
+I'm holding it down on God's scrap-pile, up on the fag-end of earth;
+ O'er me a menace of mountains, a river that grits at my feet;
+Face to face with my soul-self, weighing my life at its worth;
+ Wondering what I was made for, here in my last retreat.
+
+Last!  Ah, yes, it's the finish.  Have ever you heard a man cry?
+ (Sobs that rake him and rend him, right from the base of the chest.)
+That's how I've cried, oh, so often; and now that my tears are dry,
+ I sit in the desolate quiet and wait for the infinite Rest.
+
+Rest!  Well, it's restful around me; it's quiet clean to the core.
+ The mountains pose in their ermine, in golden the hills are clad;
+The big, blue, silt-freighted Yukon seethes by my cabin door,
+ And I think it's only the river that keeps me from going mad.
+
+By day it's a ruthless monster, a callous, insatiate thing,
+ With oily bubble and eddy, with sudden swirling of breast;
+By night it's a writhing Titan, sullenly murmuring,
+ Ever and ever goaded, and ever crying for rest.
+
+It cries for its human tribute, but me it will never drown.
+ I've learned the lore of my river; my river obeys me well.
+I hew and I launch my cordwood, and raft it to Dawson town,
+ Where wood means wine and women, and, incidentally, hell.
+
+Hell and the anguish thereafter.  Here as I sit alone
+ I'd give the life I have left me to lighten some load of care:
+(The bitterest part of the bitter is being denied to atone;
+ Lips that have mocked at Heaven lend themselves ill to prayer.)
+
+     Impotent as a beetle pierced on the needle of Fate;
+      A wretch in a cosmic death-cell, peaks for my prison bars;
+     'Whelmed by a world stupendous, lonely and listless I wait,
+      Drowned in a sea of silence, strewn with confetti of stars.
+
+See! from far up the valley a rapier pierces the night,
+ The white search-ray of a steamer.  Swiftly, serenely it nears;
+A proud, white, alien presence, a glittering galley of light,
+ Confident-poised, triumphant, freighted with hopes and fears.
+
+I look as one looks on a vision; I see it pulsating by;
+ I glimpse joy-radiant faces; I hear the thresh of the wheel.
+Hoof-like my heart beats a moment; then silence swoops from the sky.
+ Darkness is piled upon darkness.  God only knows how I feel.
+
+Maybe you've seen me sometimes; maybe you've pitied me then--
+ The lonely waif of the wood-camp, here by my cabin door.
+Some day you'll look and see not; futile and outcast of men,
+ I shall be far from your pity, resting forevermore.
+
+     My life was a problem in ciphers, a weary and profitless sum.
+      Slipshod and stupid I worked it, dazed by negation and doubt.
+     Ciphers the total confronts me.  Oh, Death, with thy moistened thumb,
+      Stoop like a petulant schoolboy, wipe me forever out!
+
+
+
+
+The Song of the Mouth-Organ
+
+(With apologies to the singer of the "Song of the Banjo".)
+
+
+
+I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone;
+ I'm beloved by the Legion of the Lost;
+I haven't got a "vox humana" tone,
+ And a dime or two will satisfy my cost.
+I don't attempt your high-falutin' flights;
+ I am more or less uncertain on the key;
+But I tell you, boys, there's lots and lots of nights
+ When you've taken mighty comfort out of me.
+
+I weigh an ounce or two, and I'm so small
+ You can pack me in the pocket of your vest;
+And when at night so wearily you crawl
+ Into your bunk and stretch your limbs to rest,
+You take me out and play me soft and low,
+ The simple songs that trouble your heartstrings;
+The tunes you used to fancy long ago,
+ Before you made a rotten mess of things.
+
+Then a dreamy look will come into your eyes,
+ And you break off in the middle of a note;
+And then, with just the dreariest of sighs,
+ You drop me in the pocket of your coat.
+But somehow I have bucked you up a bit;
+ And, as you turn around and face the wall,
+You don't feel quite so spineless and unfit--
+ You're not so bad a fellow after all.
+
+Do you recollect the bitter Arctic night;
+ Your camp beside the canyon on the trail;
+Your tent a tiny square of orange light;
+ The moon above consumptive-like and pale;
+Your supper cooked, your little stove aglow;
+ You tired, but snug and happy as a child?
+Then 'twas "Turkey in the Straw" till your lips were nearly raw,
+ And you hurled your bold defiance at the Wild.
+
+Do you recollect the flashing, lashing pain;
+ The gulf of humid blackness overhead;
+The lightning making rapiers of the rain;
+ The cattle-horns like candles of the dead
+You sitting on your bronco there alone,
+ In your slicker, saddle-sore and sick with cold?
+Do you think the silent herd did not hear "The Mocking Bird",
+ Or relish "Silver Threads among the Gold"?
+
+Do you recollect the wild Magellan coast;
+ The head-winds and the icy, roaring seas;
+The nights you thought that everything was lost;
+ The days you toiled in water to your knees;
+The frozen ratlines shrieking in the gale;
+ The hissing steeps and gulfs of livid foam:
+When you cheered your messmates nine with "Ben Bolt" and "Clementine",
+ And "Dixie Land" and "Seeing Nellie Home"?
+
+Let the jammy banjo voice the Younger Son,
+ Who waits for his remittance to arrive;
+I represent the grimy, gritty one,
+ Who sweats his bones to keep himself alive;
+Who's up against the real thing from his birth;
+ Whose heritage is hard and bitter toil;
+I voice the weary, smeary ones of earth,
+ The helots of the sea and of the soil.
+
+I'm the Steinway of strange mischief and mischance;
+ I'm the Stradivarius of blank defeat;
+In the down-world, when the devil leads the dance,
+ I am simply and symbolically meet;
+I'm the irrepressive spirit of mankind;
+ I'm the small boy playing knuckle down with Death;
+At the end of all things known, where God's rubbish-heap is thrown,
+ I shrill impudent triumph at a breath.
+
+I'm a humble little bit of tin and horn;
+ I'm a byword, I'm a plaything, I'm a jest;
+The virtuoso looks on me with scorn;
+ But there's times when I am better than the best.
+Ask the stoker and the sailor of the sea;
+ Ask the mucker and the hewer of the pine;
+Ask the herder of the plain, ask the gleaner of the grain--
+ There's a lowly, loving kingdom--and it's mine.
+
+
+
+
+The Trail of Ninety-Eight
+
+
+
+I.
+
+Gold!  We leapt from our benches.  Gold!  We sprang from our stools.
+Gold!  We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
+Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
+Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure--Gold!
+
+Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
+Men from the farms and the cities, into the Northland we pressed.
+Graybeards and striplings and women, good men and bad men and bold,
+Leaving our homes and our loved ones, crying exultantly--"Gold!"
+
+Never was seen such an army, pitiful, futile, unfit;
+Never was seen such a spirit, manifold courage and grit.
+Never has been such a cohort under one banner unrolled
+As surged to the ragged-edged Arctic, urged by the arch-tempter--Gold.
+
+"Farewell!" we cried to our dearests; little we cared for their tears.
+"Farewell!" we cried to the humdrum and the yoke of the hireling years;
+Just like a pack of school-boys, and the big crowd cheered us good-bye.
+Never were hearts so uplifted, never were hopes so high.
+
+The spectral shores flitted past us, and every whirl of the screw
+Hurled us nearer to fortune, and ever we planned what we'd do--
+Do with the gold when we got it--big, shiny nuggets like plums,
+There in the sand of the river, gouging it out with our thumbs.
+
+And one man wanted a castle, another a racing stud;
+A third would cruise in a palace yacht like a red-necked prince of blood.
+And so we dreamed and we vaunted, millionaires to a man,
+Leaping to wealth in our visions long ere the trail began.
+
+
+II.
+
+We landed in wind-swept Skagway.  We joined the weltering mass,
+Clamoring over their outfits, waiting to climb the Pass.
+We tightened our girths and our pack-straps; we linked on the Human Chain,
+Struggling up to the summit, where every step was a pain.
+
+Gone was the joy of our faces, grim and haggard and pale;
+The heedless mirth of the shipboard was changed to the care of the trail.
+We flung ourselves in the struggle, packing our grub in relays,
+Step by step to the summit in the bale of the winter days.
+
+Floundering deep in the sump-holes, stumbling out again;
+Crying with cold and weakness, crazy with fear and pain.
+Then from the depths of our travail, ere our spirits were broke,
+Grim, tenacious and savage, the lust of the trail awoke.
+
+"Klondike or bust!" rang the slogan; every man for his own.
+Oh, how we flogged the horses, staggering skin and bone!
+Oh, how we cursed their weakness, anguish they could not tell,
+Breaking their hearts in our passion, lashing them on till they fell!
+
+For grub meant gold to our thinking, and all that could walk must pack;
+The sheep for the shambles stumbled, each with a load on its back;
+And even the swine were burdened, and grunted and squealed and rolled,
+And men went mad in the moment, huskily clamoring "Gold!"
+
+Oh, we were brutes and devils, goaded by lust and fear!
+Our eyes were strained to the summit; the weaklings dropped to the rear,
+Falling in heaps by the trail-side, heart-broken, limp and wan;
+But the gaps closed up in an instant, and heedless the chain went on.
+
+Never will I forget it, there on the mountain face,
+Antlike, men with their burdens, clinging in icy space;
+Dogged, determined and dauntless, cruel and callous and cold,
+Cursing, blaspheming, reviling, and ever that battle-cry--"Gold!"
+
+Thus toiled we, the army of fortune, in hunger and hope and despair,
+Till glacier, mountain and forest vanished, and, radiantly fair,
+There at our feet lay Lake Bennett, and down to its welcome we ran:
+The trail of the land was over, the trail of the water began.
+
+
+III.
+
+We built our boats and we launched them.  Never has been such a fleet;
+A packing-case for a bottom, a mackinaw for a sheet.
+Shapeless, grotesque, lopsided, flimsy, makeshift and crude,
+Each man after his fashion builded as best he could.
+
+Each man worked like a demon, as prow to rudder we raced;
+The winds of the Wild cried "Hurry!" the voice of the waters, "Haste!"
+We hated those driving before us; we dreaded those pressing behind;
+We cursed the slow current that bore us; we prayed to the God of the wind.
+
+Spring! and the hillsides flourished, vivid in jewelled green;
+Spring! and our hearts' blood nourished envy and hatred and spleen.
+Little cared we for the Spring-birth; much cared we to get on--
+Stake in the Great White Channel, stake ere the best be gone.
+
+The greed of the gold possessed us; pity and love were forgot;
+Covetous visions obsessed us; brother with brother fought.
+Partner with partner wrangled, each one claiming his due;
+Wrangled and halved their outfits, sawing their boats in two.
+
+Thuswise we voyaged Lake Bennett, Tagish, then Windy Arm,
+Sinister, savage and baleful, boding us hate and harm.
+Many a scow was shattered there on that iron shore;
+Many a heart was broken straining at sweep and oar.
+
+We roused Lake Marsh with a chorus, we drifted many a mile;
+There was the canyon before us--cave-like its dark defile;
+The shores swept faster and faster; the river narrowed to wrath;
+Waters that hissed disaster reared upright in our path.
+
+Beneath us the green tumult churning, above us the cavernous gloom;
+Around us, swift twisting and turning, the black, sullen walls of a tomb.
+We spun like a chip in a mill-race; our hearts hammered under the test;
+Then--oh, the relief on each chill face!--we soared into sunlight and rest.
+
+Hand sought for hand on the instant.  Cried we, "Our troubles are o'er!"
+Then, like a rumble of thunder, heard we a canorous roar.
+Leaping and boiling and seething, saw we a cauldron afume;
+There was the rage of the rapids, there was the menace of doom.
+
+The river springs like a racer, sweeps through a gash in the rock;
+Buts at the boulder-ribbed bottom, staggers and rears at the shock;
+Leaps like a terrified monster, writhes in its fury and pain;
+Then with the crash of a demon springs to the onset again.
+
+Dared we that ravening terror; heard we its din in our ears;
+Called on the Gods of our fathers, juggled forlorn with our fears;
+Sank to our waists in its fury, tossed to the sky like a fleece;
+Then, when our dread was the greatest, crashed into safety and peace.
+
+But what of the others that followed, losing their boats by the score?
+Well could we see them and hear them, strung down that desolate shore.
+What of the poor souls that perished?  Little of them shall be said--
+On to the Golden Valley, pause not to bury the dead.
+
+Then there were days of drifting, breezes soft as a sigh;
+Night trailed her robe of jewels over the floor of the sky.
+The moonlit stream was a python, silver, sinuous, vast,
+That writhed on a shroud of velvet--well, it was done at last.
+
+There were the tents of Dawson, there the scar of the slide;
+Swiftly we poled o'er the shallows, swiftly leapt o'er the side.
+Fires fringed the mouth of Bonanza; sunset gilded the dome;
+The test of the trail was over--thank God, thank God, we were Home!
+
+
+
+
+The Ballad of Gum-Boot Ben
+
+
+
+     He was an old prospector with a vision bleared and dim.
+     He asked me for a grubstake, and the same I gave to him.
+     He hinted of a hidden trove, and when I made so bold
+     To question his veracity, this is the tale he told.
+
+"I do not seek the copper streak, nor yet the yellow dust;
+I am not fain for sake of gain to irk the frozen crust;
+Let fellows gross find gilded dross, far other is my mark;
+Oh, gentle youth, this is the truth--I go to seek the Ark.
+
+"I prospected the Pelly bed, I prospected the White;
+The Nordenscold for love of gold I piked from morn till night;
+Afar and near for many a year I led the wild stampede,
+Until I guessed that all my quest was vanity and greed.
+
+"Then came I to a land I knew no man had ever seen,
+A haggard land, forlornly spanned by mountains lank and lean;
+The nitchies said 'twas full of dread, of smoke and fiery breath,
+And no man dare put foot in there for fear of pain and death.
+
+"But I was made all unafraid, so, careless and alone,
+Day after day I made my way into that land unknown;
+Night after night by camp-fire light I crouched in lonely thought;
+Oh, gentle youth, this is the truth--I knew not what I sought.
+
+"I rose at dawn; I wandered on.  'Tis somewhat fine and grand
+To be alone and hold your own in God's vast awesome land;
+Come woe or weal, 'tis fine to feel a hundred miles between
+The trails you dare and pathways where the feet of men have been.
+
+"And so it fell on me a spell of wander-lust was cast.
+The land was still and strange and chill, and cavernous and vast;
+And sad and dead, and dull as lead, the valleys sought the snows;
+And far and wide on every side the ashen peaks arose.
+
+"The moon was like a silent spike that pierced the sky right through;
+The small stars popped and winked and hopped in vastitudes of blue;
+And unto me for company came creatures of the shade,
+And formed in rings and whispered things that made me half afraid.
+
+"And strange though be, 'twas borne on me that land had lived of old,
+And men had crept and slain and slept where now they toiled for gold;
+Through jungles dim the mammoth grim had sought the oozy fen,
+And on his track, all bent of back, had crawled the hairy men.
+
+"And furthermore, strange deeds of yore in this dead place were done.
+They haunted me, as wild and free I roamed from sun to sun;
+Until I came where sudden flame uplit a terraced height,
+A regnant peak that seemed to seek the coronal of night.
+
+"I scaled the peak; my heart was weak, yet on and on I pressed.
+Skyward I strained until I gained its dazzling silver crest;
+And there I found, with all around a world supine and stark,
+Swept clean of snow, a flat plateau, and on it lay--the Ark.
+
+"Yes, there, I knew, by two and two the beasts did disembark,
+And so in haste I ran and traced in letters on the Ark
+My human name--Ben Smith's the same.  And now I want to float
+A syndicate to haul and freight to town that noble boat."
+
+     I met him later in a bar and made a gay remark
+     Anent an ancient miner and an option on the Ark.
+     He gazed at me reproachfully, as only topers can;
+     But what he said I can't repeat--he was a bad old man.
+
+
+
+
+Clancy of the Mounted Police
+
+
+
+In the little Crimson Manual it's written plain and clear
+That who would wear the scarlet coat shall say good-bye to fear;
+Shall be a guardian of the right, a sleuth-hound of the trail--
+In the little Crimson Manual there's no such word as "fail"--
+Shall follow on though heavens fall, or hell's top-turrets freeze,
+Half round the world, if need there be, on bleeding hands and knees.
+It's duty, duty, first and last, the Crimson Manual saith;
+The Scarlet Rider makes reply:  "It's duty--to the death."
+And so they sweep the solitudes, free men from all the earth;
+And so they sentinel the woods, the wilds that know their worth;
+And so they scour the startled plains and mock at hurt and pain,
+And read their Crimson Manual, and find their duty plain.
+Knights of the lists of unrenown, born of the frontier's need,
+Disdainful of the spoken word, exultant in the deed;
+Unconscious heroes of the waste, proud players of the game,
+Props of the power behind the throne, upholders of the name:
+For thus the Great White Chief hath said, "In all my lands be peace",
+And to maintain his word he gave his West the Scarlet Police.
+
+Livid-lipped was the valley, still as the grave of God;
+ Misty shadows of mountain thinned into mists of cloud;
+Corpselike and stark was the land, with a quiet that crushed and awed,
+ And the stars of the weird sub-arctic glimmered over its shroud.
+
+Deep in the trench of the valley two men stationed the Post,
+ Seymour and Clancy the reckless, fresh from the long patrol;
+Seymour, the sergeant, and Clancy--Clancy who made his boast
+ He could cinch like a bronco the Northland,
+   and cling to the prongs of the Pole.
+
+Two lone men on detachment, standing for law on the trail;
+ Undismayed in the vastness, wise with the wisdom of old--
+Out of the night hailed a half-breed telling a pitiful tale,
+ "White man starving and crazy on the banks of the Nordenscold."
+
+Up sprang the red-haired Clancy, lean and eager of eye;
+ Loaded the long toboggan, strapped each dog at its post;
+Whirled his lash at the leader; then, with a whoop and a cry,
+ Into the Great White Silence faded away like a ghost.
+
+The clouds were a misty shadow, the hills were a shadowy mist;
+ Sunless, voiceless and pulseless, the day was a dream of woe;
+Through the ice-rifts the river smoked and bubbled and hissed;
+ Behind was a trail fresh broken, in front the untrodden snow.
+
+Ahead of the dogs ploughed Clancy, haloed by steaming breath;
+ Through peril of open water, through ache of insensate cold;
+Up rivers wantonly winding in a land affianced to death,
+ Till he came to a cowering cabin on the banks of the Nordenscold.
+
+Then Clancy loosed his revolver, and he strode through the open door;
+ And there was the man he sought for, crouching beside the fire;
+The hair of his beard was singeing, the frost on his back was hoar,
+ And ever he crooned and chanted as if he never would tire:--
+
+     "I panned and I panned in the shiny sand,
+       and I sniped on the river bar;
+     But I know, I know, that it's down below
+       that the golden treasures are;
+     So I'll wait and wait till the floods abate,
+       and I'll sink a shaft once more,
+     And I'd like to bet that I'll go home yet
+       with a brass band playing before."
+
+He was nigh as thin as a sliver, and he whined like a Moose-hide cur;
+ So Clancy clothed him and nursed him as a mother nurses a child;
+Lifted him on the toboggan, wrapped him in robes of fur,
+ Then with the dogs sore straining started to face the Wild.
+
+Said the Wild, "I will crush this Clancy, so fearless and insolent;
+ For him will I loose my fury, and blind and buffet and beat;
+Pile up my snows to stay him; then when his strength is spent,
+ Leap on him from my ambush and crush him under my feet.
+
+"Him will I ring with my silence, compass him with my cold;
+ Closer and closer clutch him unto mine icy breast;
+Buffet him with my blizzards, deep in my snows enfold,
+ Claiming his life as my tribute, giving my wolves the rest."
+
+Clancy crawled through the vastness; o'er him the hate of the Wild;
+ Full on his face fell the blizzard; cheering his huskies he ran;
+Fighting, fierce-hearted and tireless, snows that drifted and piled,
+ With ever and ever behind him singing the crazy man.
+
+     "Sing hey, sing ho, for the ice and snow,
+      And a heart that's ever merry;
+     Let us trim and square with a lover's care
+      (For why should a man be sorry?)
+     A grave deep, deep, with the moon a-peep,
+      A grave in the frozen mould.
+     Sing hey, sing ho, for the winds that blow,
+     And a grave deep down in the ice and snow,
+      A grave in the land of gold."
+
+Day after day of darkness, the whirl of the seething snows;
+ Day after day of blindness, the swoop of the stinging blast;
+On through a blur of fury the swing of staggering blows;
+ On through a world of turmoil, empty, inane and vast.
+
+Night with its writhing storm-whirl, night despairingly black;
+ Night with its hours of terror, numb and endlessly long;
+Night with its weary waiting, fighting the shadows back,
+ And ever the crouching madman singing his crazy song.
+
+Cold with its creeping terror, cold with its sudden clinch;
+ Cold so utter you wonder if 'twill ever again be warm;
+Clancy grinned as he shuddered, "Surely it isn't a cinch
+ Being wet-nurse to a looney in the teeth of an arctic storm."
+
+The blizzard passed and the dawn broke, knife-edged and crystal clear;
+ The sky was a blue-domed iceberg, sunshine outlawed away;
+Ever by snowslide and ice-rip haunted and hovered the Fear;
+ Ever the Wild malignant poised and panted to slay.
+
+The lead-dog freezes in harness--cut him out of the team!
+ The lung of the wheel-dog's bleeding--shoot him and let him lie!
+On and on with the others--lash them until they scream!
+ "Pull for your lives, you devils!  On!  To halt is to die."
+
+There in the frozen vastness Clancy fought with his foes;
+ The ache of the stiffened fingers, the cut of the snowshoe thong;
+Cheeks black-raw through the hood-flap, eyes that tingled and closed,
+ And ever to urge and cheer him quavered the madman's song.
+
+Colder it grew and colder, till the last heat left the earth,
+ And there in the great stark stillness the bale fires glinted and gleamed,
+And the Wild all around exulted and shook with a devilish mirth,
+ And life was far and forgotten, the ghost of a joy once dreamed.
+
+Death!  And one who defied it, a man of the Mounted Police;
+ Fought it there to a standstill long after hope was gone;
+Grinned through his bitter anguish, fought without let or cease,
+ Suffering, straining, striving, stumbling, struggling on.
+
+Till the dogs lay down in their traces, and rose and staggered and fell;
+ Till the eyes of him dimmed with shadows,
+   and the trail was so hard to see;
+Till the Wild howled out triumphant, and the world was a frozen hell--
+ Then said Constable Clancy:  "I guess that it's up to me."
+
+Far down the trail they saw him,
+  and his hands they were blanched like bone;
+ His face was a blackened horror, from his eyelids the salt rheum ran;
+His feet he was lifting strangely, as if they were made of stone,
+ But safe in his arms and sleeping he carried the crazy man.
+
+So Clancy got into Barracks, and the boys made rather a scene;
+ And the O. C. called him a hero, and was nice as a man could be;
+But Clancy gazed down his trousers at the place where his toes had been,
+ And then he howled like a husky, and sang in a shaky key:
+
+     "When I go back to the old love that's true to the finger-tips,
+     I'll say:  `Here's bushels of gold, love,'
+       and I'll kiss my girl on the lips;
+     `It's yours to have and to hold, love.'
+       It's the proud, proud boy I'll be,
+     When I go back to the old love that's waited so long for me."
+
+
+
+
+Lost
+
+
+
+     "Black is the sky, but the land is white--
+      (O the wind, the snow and the storm!)--
+     Father, where is our boy to-night?
+      Pray to God he is safe and warm."
+
+     "Mother, mother, why should you fear?
+      Safe is he, and the Arctic moon
+     Over his cabin shines so clear--
+      Rest and sleep, 'twill be morning soon."
+
+"It's getting dark awful sudden.  Say, this is mighty queer!
+ Where in the world have I got to?  It's still and black as a tomb.
+I reckoned the camp was yonder, I figured the trail was here--
+ Nothing!  Just draw and valley packed with quiet and gloom;
+Snow that comes down like feathers, thick and gobby and gray;
+Night that looks spiteful ugly--seems that I've lost my way.
+
+"The cold's got an edge like a jackknife--it must be forty below;
+ Leastways that's what it seems like--it cuts so fierce to the bone.
+The wind's getting real ferocious; it's heaving and whirling the snow;
+ It shrieks with a howl of fury, it dies away to a moan;
+Its arms sweep round like a banshee's, swift and icily white,
+And buffet and blind and beat me.  Lord! it's a hell of a night.
+
+"I'm all tangled up in a blizzard.  There's only one thing to do--
+ Keep on moving and moving; it's death, it's death if I rest.
+Oh, God! if I see the morning, if only I struggle through,
+ I'll say the prayers I've forgotten since I lay on my mother's breast.
+I seem going round in a circle; maybe the camp is near.
+ Say! did somebody holler?  Was it a light I saw?
+Or was it only a notion?  I'll shout, and maybe they'll hear--
+ No! the wind only drowns me--shout till my throat is raw.
+
+"The boys are all round the camp-fire wondering when I'll be back.
+ They'll soon be starting to seek me; they'll scarcely wait for the light.
+What will they find, I wonder, when they come to the end of my track--
+ A hand stuck out of a snowdrift, frozen and stiff and white.
+That's what they'll strike, I reckon; that's how they'll find their pard,
+ A pie-faced corpse in a snowbank--curse you, don't be a fool!
+Play the game to the finish; bet on your very last card;
+ Nerve yourself for the struggle.  Oh, you coward, keep cool!
+
+I'm going to lick this blizzard; I'm going to live the night.
+ It can't down me with its bluster--I'm not the kind to be beat.
+On hands and knees will I buck it; with every breath will I fight;
+ It's life, it's life that I fight for--never it seemed so sweet.
+I know that my face is frozen; my hands are numblike and dead;
+ But oh, my feet keep a-moving, heavy and hard and slow;
+They're trying to kill me, kill me, the night that's black overhead,
+ The wind that cuts like a razor, the whipcord lash of the snow.
+Keep a-moving, a-moving; don't, don't stumble, you fool!
+ Curse this snow that's a-piling a-purpose to block my way.
+It's heavy as gold in the rocker, it's white and fleecy as wool;
+ It's soft as a bed of feathers, it's warm as a stack of hay.
+Curse on my feet that slip so, my poor tired, stumbling feet--
+ I guess they're a job for the surgeon, they feel so queerlike to lift--
+I'll rest them just for a moment--oh, but to rest is sweet!
+ The awful wind cannot get me, deep, deep down in the drift."
+
+     "Father, a bitter cry I heard,
+      Out of the night so dark and wild.
+     Why is my heart so strangely stirred?
+      'Twas like the voice of our erring child."
+
+     "Mother, mother, you only heard
+      A waterfowl in the locked lagoon--
+     Out of the night a wounded bird--
+      Rest and sleep, 'twill be morning soon."
+
+Who is it talks of sleeping?  I'll swear that somebody shook
+ Me hard by the arm for a moment, but how on earth could it be?
+See how my feet are moving--awfully funny they look--
+ Moving as if they belonged to a someone that wasn't me.
+The wind down the night's long alley bowls me down like a pin;
+ I stagger and fall and stagger, crawl arm-deep in the snow.
+Beaten back to my corner, how can I hope to win?
+ And there is the blizzard waiting to give me the knockout blow.
+
+Oh, I'm so warm and sleepy!  No more hunger and pain.
+ Just to rest for a moment; was ever rest such a joy?
+Ha! what was that?  I'll swear it, somebody shook me again;
+ Somebody seemed to whisper:  "Fight to the last, my boy."
+Fight!  That's right, I must struggle.  I know that to rest means death;
+ Death, but then what does death mean? --ease from a world of strife.
+Life has been none too pleasant; yet with my failing breath
+ Still and still must I struggle, fight for the gift of life.
+
+     *    *    *    *    *
+
+Seems that I must be dreaming!  Here is the old home trail;
+ Yonder a light is gleaming; oh, I know it so well!
+The air is scented with clover; the cattle wait by the rail;
+ Father is through with the milking; there goes the supper-bell.
+
+     *    *    *    *    *
+
+Mother, your boy is crying, out in the night and cold;
+ Let me in and forgive me, I'll never be bad any more:
+I'm, oh, so sick and so sorry:  please, dear mother, don't scold--
+ It's just your boy, and he wants you. . . .  Mother, open the door. . . .
+
+     "Father, father, I saw a face
+      Pressed just now to the window-pane!
+     Oh, it gazed for a moment's space,
+      Wild and wan, and was gone again!"
+
+     "Mother, mother, you saw the snow
+      Drifted down from the maple tree
+     (Oh, the wind that is sobbing so!
+      Weary and worn and old are we)--
+     Only the snow and a wounded loon--
+     Rest and sleep, 'twill be morning soon."
+
+
+
+
+L'Envoi
+
+
+
+     We talked of yesteryears, of trails and treasure,
+      Of men who played the game and lost or won;
+     Of mad stampedes, of toil beyond all measure,
+      Of camp-fire comfort when the day was done.
+     We talked of sullen nights by moon-dogs haunted,
+      Of bird and beast and tree, of rod and gun;
+     Of boat and tent, of hunting-trip enchanted
+      Beneath the wonder of the midnight sun;
+     Of bloody-footed dogs that gnawed the traces,
+      Of prisoned seas, wind-lashed and winter-locked;
+     The ice-gray dawn was pale upon our faces,
+      Yet still we filled the cup and still we talked.
+
+     The city street was dimmed.  We saw the glitter
+      Of moon-picked brilliants on the virgin snow,
+     And down the drifted canyon heard the bitter,
+      Relentless slogan of the winds of woe.
+     The city was forgot, and, parka-skirted,
+      We trod that leagueless land that once we knew;
+     We saw stream past, down valleys glacier-girted,
+      The wolf-worn legions of the caribou.
+     We smoked our pipes, o'er scenes of triumph dwelling;
+      Of deeds of daring, dire defeats, we talked;
+     And other tales that lost not in the telling,
+      Ere to our beds uncertainly we walked.
+
+     And so, dear friends, in gentler valleys roaming,
+      Perhaps, when on my printed page you look,
+     Your fancies by the firelight may go homing
+      To that lone land that haply you forsook.
+     And if perchance you hear the silence calling,
+      The frozen music of star-yearning heights,
+     Or, dreaming, see the seines of silver trawling
+      Across the sky's abyss on vasty nights,
+     You may recall that sweep of savage splendor,
+      That land that measures each man at his worth,
+     And feel in memory, half fierce, half tender,
+      The brotherhood of men that know the North.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Ballads of a Cheechako
+
+
+
+