Augustin S. Macdonald, comp. A Collection of Verse by California Poets. 1914.
By F. Bret HarteLuke
W
You a man grown and bearded and histin’ such stuff ez that in,—
Stuff about gals and their sweethearts! No wonder you’re thin ez a knife.
Look at me!—clar two hundred,—and never read one in my life!
They belonged to the Jedge’s daughter,—the Jedge who came up last year
On account of his lungs and the mountains and the balsam o’ pine and fir;
And his daughter,—well, she read novels, and that’s what’s the matter with her.
Alone in the cabin up yer,—till she grew like a ghost, all white.
She wus only a slip of a thing, ez light and ez up and away
Ez rifle-smoke blown through the woods, but she wasn’t my kind,—no way!
A mile and a half from White’s, and jist above Mattingly’s mill?
You do? Well now thar’s a gal! What, you saw her? Oh, come now, thar, quit!
She was only bedevilin’ you boys, for to me she don’t cotton one bit.
Teeth ez white ez a hound’s and they’d go through a tenpenny nail;
Eyes that kin snap like a cap. So she asked to know “whar I was hid.”
She did! Oh, it’s jist like her sass, for she’s peart ez a Katy-did.
Novels the whole day long, and I reckon she read them abed,
And sometimes she read them out loud to the Jedge on the porch where he sat,
And ’t was how “Lord Augustus” said this, and how “Lady Blanche” she said that.
“Leather-stocking” by name, and a hunter chock full o’ the greenest o’ sap;
And they asked me to hear, but I says, “Miss Mabel, not any for me;
When I likes I kin sling my own lies, and thet chap and I shouldn’t agree.”
Of folks about whom she had read, or suthin belike of thet kind,
And thar warn’t no end o’ the names that she give me thet summer up there,
“Robin Hood,” “Leather-stocking,” “Rob Roy,”—Oh, I tell you, the critter was queer.
She could jabber in French to her dad, and they said that she knew how to play,
And she worked me that shot-pouch up thar,—which the man doesn’t live ez kin use,
And slippers—you see ’em down yer—ez would cradle an Injin’s pappoose.
And then she got shy with her tongue, and at last she had nothin’ to say;
And whenever I happened around, her face it was hid by a book,
And it was n’t until she left that she give me ez much ez a look.
To say to ’em all “good by,” for I reckoned to go for deer
At “sun up” the day they left. So I shook ’em all round by the hand,
’Cept Mabel, and she was sick, ez they give me to understand.
Like a little waver o’ mist, got up on the hill with the sun;
Miss Mabel it was, all alone,—wrapped up in a mantle o’ lace,—
And she stood there straight in the road, with a touch o’ the sun in her face.
When I hunted a wounded doe to the edge o’ the Clear Lake shore,
And I had my knee on its neck, and jist was a raisin’ my knife
When it give me a look like that, and—well, it got off with its life.
To you in your own house, Luke,—these woods, and the bright blue sky!
You ’ve always been kind to us, Luke, and papa has found you still
As good as the air he breathes, and wholesome as Laurel Tree Hill.
The balsam that dwells in the woods, the rainbow that lives in the spray.
And you’ll sometimes think of me, Luke, as you know you once used to say,
A rifle-smoke blown through the woods, a moment, but never to stay.”
And I caught her sharp by the waist, and held her a minit,—well,
It was only a minit, you know, that ez cold and ez white she lay
Ez a snow-flake here on my breast, and then—well, she melted away—
Good enough may be for some, but them and I might n ’t agree.
They spiled a decent gal ez might hev made some chap a wife,
And look at me!—clar two hundred,—and never read one in my life!