"A poet's mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to mention,--one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of golden time.
But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. It was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,--brothers and friends.