| Share page | Visit Us On FB |
|
Frontier Ballads
But Black Bear's horse still holds the course, Though her breath is a thick-drawn moan,
And a length behind is the straining stride Of the Captain's steel-limbed roan.
The Sergeant rides with a loose-thrown rein,
Nor sabre nor shoot will he Till the pony has pitched at a gopher mound
And flung her rider free;
And Ross has wrenched the knife from his hand
And smitten him to the ground: — "Did ye think to win to the Bijou Hills,
Ye whelp of a Blackfoot hound?
"I had riddled your carcass this six miles back
And left ye to rot on the plain, Had the blood of the slaughtered not called on me
That I hail ye to Peska again,
"To point this lesson to all your tribe, That the price of a white man's soul
No longer goes, in the mart of death, Unpaid to its last dark goal.
"Wherefore, that your tribesmen may see and feel
The cost of a white man's wrong, And to sweeten the rest of my mess-mate's kin,
Ye shall swing from a hempen thong."
He has slung the chief to the saddle-bow,
Triced up in his own raw-hide, And has borne him back to the stage-house yard,
All bleak on the green hillside.
And they swung him at dawn from a scaffold stout,
As a warning to all his kind, To fatten the birds and to scare the herds
And to sport with the prairie wind. |
||
|
|
||
|
24 |
||