I tramped again ’neath a blazing sky,
In a Western land where the deserts lie:
But the rush and roar, and the life we knew,
When the ’Nineties echoed the whole world through,
Were silent, or uttered their speech alone
With a drab and dreary monotone.
I sought a field where a thousand men,
Stout-limbed, strong-hearted, toiled madly then;
But the hessian flapped on the rotting camps,
And the rust was eating the silent stamps;
And of all the throng of that mildewed past
There was only one who stuck to the last.
Just one old man, and his beard of grey
Kept time with his chatter the live-long day.
“What luck, old friend?”—and he turned around,
Where his hopperings fell in a cone-shaped mound;
And he rested his arm on the shaker’s side,
With the air of a man when the world was wide—
And his tongue ran off with a ceaseless flow,
For the hermits talk of their cronies so.
He spoke, with a digger’s quenchless zest,
Of the early days of the Golden West:
Of a surging wave, of a seething tide,
That rolled to the fields from the Eastern side;
Of the wondrous slugs and the mighty men
Who answer not to the call again.
“And I was right in their midst,” said he,
“For I followed Bayley in ’Ninety-three.”
Then he led the way, and he led me far
With the changing trend of each dip and bar,
And he pointed out with a palsied hand
All the work he’d done, all the plans he’d planned;
“For there’s gold,” he yelled, “that would pave a street,
At the spot where the slate and granite meet.”
I chanced that track on my way once more,
And I sought my friend of a year before;
But his shaker cracked in the midday sun,
And the old man’s search for the joint was done,
For he’d stacked his tools, and had drawn his stake.
And had followed the army in Bayley’s wake.
Oh, I trust he’s gone—as the priests insist—
Where the streets are paved with the gold he missed;
And they’ll weave his crown, and they’ll string his lyre,
From the trusty strands of his shaker wire;
And they’ll let him fossick for dip and bar
In the likely places ’twixt star and star.
It will please old Dan, for a man was he
Not planned for an angel minstrelsy.