Where the farthest foothills flatten to a circle-sweeping plain,
And the cattle lands surrender to the onward march of grain,
Where the prairies stretch unbroken to the corners of the sky,
And the foremost wheat fields rustle in the warm winds droning by—
There a crippled cowboy batches in the haunts of old-time herds,
And the balance of the story is repeated in his words:
So you never heard how I lost my leg and hobble now on a crutch?
So far as the story relates to me it can't concern you much,
For it's really the story of Kid McCann and the price that a girl will pay
For the fellow she sets her fancy on, as only a woman may;
It isn't every girl who proves her faithfulness in flames,
But fellows who listen with moistened eyes speak softly of other names.
Ned McCann owned the Double Star 'way back in the early days;
He had come out here with a sickly wife and a kid he hoped to raise
Where the climate suited the feeble-lunged, but life was scarce at its brim,
Till a little mound by a prairie hill held half of the world for him;
And his double love would have spoiled the child had she been like me or you,
But her only thought was for her dad and the mother she scarcely knew.
'Course, she was bred to the ranges, and before she had reached her teens
She could straddle a nag with the best of us and ride in her smock and jeans
Till we all caved in, and she thought it fun to camp with the round-up bunch,
And she shared her pillow and shared our sky and shared our pipe and lunch,
And all of us mad in love with her, but she was only a kid,
And she never dreamt what our feelings were, or the love-struck things we did.
But even girls grow older, and, though always kind and sweet,
There came a day when she realized that we were at her feet,
But I had never spoken, nor anyone in the camp,
When in came a foreign puncher, a thoroughbred black-leg scamp,
And we who had known her since childhood saw, in our unbelieving eyes,
This wily sinner setting himself to carry off the prize.
Of course it couldn't be stood for, and little as I might like,
It fell to my lot to intimate to him it was time to hike,
Which I did in straightforward manner, in a way to be understood,
And he looked at me with a sulky scowl that boded none of us good;
But he did as he was ordered, to be absent before night,
And we lost his form in the shadowy East as he cantered out of sight.
Next day, as I rode on my cayuse, apart from the rest of the gang,
I felt a sudden rip in my leg like the jab of a red-hot tang;
And my horse went down below me, with my leg crushed in the clay,
And over me leered that fiendish face, and he grinned, and rode away;
Rode away to the eastward,—I saw him fade in the sky,
And crushed and pinned from hip to heel I counted the hours to die.
How long I lay I could never tell, for the hours were days to me,
Till struck with sudden terror I tore at my wounded knee,
For the east wind carried a smoky smell, and I read in its fiery breath
That half-a-mile of sun-dried grass was all between me and death;
With my hunting-knife I hacked my leg, but I couldn't cut the bone,
So I set myself as best I could to face my fate alone.
The fire came on like a hungry fiend on the wings of the rising wind,
And I wouldn't care to tell you all the things that were in my mind;
I saw the sun through the swirling smoke and the blue sky far above,
And I bade good-bye to the things of earth and the dearer hopes of love;
And I figured that I had closed accounts for life's uncertain span,
When a smoke-blind broncho galloped up and there sat Kid McCann!
There wasn't much time for talking, with the death-roll in our ears,
But we sometimes live in seconds more than we could in a thousand of years,
And before I could guess her meaning she had thrown herself on my face,
And spread her leather jacket, which her warm hands held in place;
I felt her breath in my nostrils and her fingertips in my hair,
And through the roar of the burning grass I fancied I heard a prayer.
'Twas but for a moment; the flames were gone; unharmed they had passed me by;
God knows why the useless are spared to live while the faithful are called to die,
But the form that had sheltered me shivered, and seemed to shrivel away,
And when I had raised it clear of my face I looked into lifeless clay. . . .
And darkness fell, and the world was black, and the last of my reason fled,
And when I came to myself again I was back at the ranch, in bed.
That was back in the Eighties, and still I am living here;
I built this shanty on the spot; her grave is lying near;
And when at nights my nostrils sense the smoke-smell in the air
I seem to feel her form again, and hear again her prayer;
And then the darkness settles down and wild night-creatures cry,
But stars come out in heaven and there's comfort in the sky.