When my old soul hunts range and rest Beyond the last divide, Just plant me in some stretch of West That's sunny, lone and wide. Let cattle rub my tombstone down And coyotes mourn their kin, Let hawses paw and tramp the moun',-- But don't you fence it in!
Oh, it's squeak! squeak! squeak! And they pen the land with wire. They figure fence and copper cents Where we laughed round the fire. Job cussed his birthday, night and morn In his old land of Uz, But I'm just glad I wasn't born No later than I wuz! _Charles Badger Clark, Jr._
THE lingering sunset across the plain Kissed the rear-end door of an east-bound train, And shone on a passing track close by Where a ding-bat sat on a rotting tie.
He was ditched by a shock and a cruel fate. The con high-balled, and the manifest freight Pulled out on the stem behind the mail, And she hit the ball on a sanded rail.
As she pulled away in the falling light He could see the gleam of her red tail-light. Then the moon arose and the stars came out-- He was ditched on the Gila Monster Route.
Nothing in sight but sand and space; No chance for a gink to feed his face; Not even a shack to beg for a lump, Or a hen-house to frisk for a single gump.
He gazed far out on the solitude; He drooped his head and began to brood; He thought of the time he lost his mate In a hostile burg on the Nickle Plate.
They had mooched the stem and threw their feet, And speared four-bits on which to eat; But deprived themselves of daily bread And shafted their coin for "dago red."
Down by the track in the jungle's glade, In the cool green grass, in the tules' shade, They shed their coats and ditched their shoes And tanked up full of that colored booze.
Then they took a flop with their skins plumb full, And they did not hear the harnessed bull, Till he shook them out of their boozy nap, With a husky voice and a loaded sap.
They were charged with "vag," for they had no kale, And the judge said, "Sixty days in jail." But the John had a bindle,--a worker's plea,-- So they gave him a floater and set him free.
They had turned him up, but ditched his mate, So he grabbed the guts of an east-bound freight, He flung his form on a rusty rod, Till he heard the shack say, "Hit the sod!"