My pony knickers at the corral bars,
The fog drifts landward from the evening sea:
The trail we rode is dim beneath the stars...
...
Twenty abreast down the golden street, ten thousand riders marched;
Bow-legged boys in their swinging chaps, all clumsily keeping time;
...
A song of the range, an old-time song,
To the patter of pony's feet,
That he used to sing as we rode along,
In the hush of the noonday heat;
...
Once I heard a Hobo, singing by the tie-trail,
Squatting by the red rail rusty with the dew:
Singing of the firelight, singing of the high-trail
...
The rabbit's ears are flattened and he's squattin' scared and still,
Ag'inst the dripping cedar; and the quail below the hill
...
Did you ever wait for daylight
when the stars along the river
Floated thick and white as snowflakes
in the water deep and strange,
...
Only a few of us understood his ways and his outfit queer,
His saddle horse and his pack-horse, as lean as a winter steer,
...
On the silver edge of a vacant star near the trembling Pleiades,
A Hobo, lately arrived from earth sat rubbing his rusty chin,
...
The scattering sage stands thin and tense
As though afraid of the barbed-wire fence;
A windmill purrs in the lazy breeze
...
My dam was a mustang white and proud,
My sire was as black as a thunder cloud;
I was foaled on the mesas cold and high,
...