_Sing 'er out, my buckeroos! Let the desert hear the news. Tell the stars the way we rubbed the haughty down. We're the fiercest wolves a-prowlin' and it's just our night for howlin' When we're ridin' up the rocky trail from town._ Since the days that Lot and Abram split the Jordan range in halves, Just to fix it so their punchers wouldn't fight, Since old Jacob skinned his dad-in-law of six years' crop of calves And then hit the trail for Canaan in the night, There has been a taste for battle 'mong the men that follow cattle And a love of doin' things that's wild and strange. And the warmth of Laban's words when he missed his speckled herds Still is useful in the language of the range. _Sing 'er out, my bold coyotes! leather fists and leather throats, For we wear the brand of Ishm'el like a crown. We're the sons o' desolation, we're the outlaws of creation-- Ee-Yow! a-ridin' up the rocky trail from town!_ [5] This fragment is not included in Mr. Clark's poem. THE DISAPPOINTED TENDERFOOT HE reached the West in a palace car where the writers tell us the cowboys are, With the redskin bold and the centipede and the rattlesnake and the loco weed. He looked around for the Buckskin Joes and the things he'd seen in the Wild West shows-- The cowgirls gay and the bronchos wild and the painted face of the Injun child. He listened close for the fierce war-whoop, and his pent-up spirits began to droop, And he wondered then if the hills and nooks held none of the sights of the story books. He'd hoped he would see the marshal pot some bold bad man with a pistol shot, And entered a low saloon by chance, where the tenderfoot is supposed to dance While the cowboy shoots at his bootheels there and the smoke of powder begrims the air, But all was quiet as if he'd strayed to that silent spot where the dead are laid. Not even a faro game was seen, and none flaunted the long, long green. 'Twas a blow for him who had come in quest of a touch of the real wild woolly West. He vainly sought for a bad cayuse and the swirl and swish of the flying noose, And the cowboy's yell as he roped a steer, but nothing of this fell on his ear. Not even a wide-brimmed hat he spied, but derbies flourished on every side, And the spurs and the "chaps" and the flannel shirts, the high-heeled boots and the guns and the quirts, The cowboy saddles and silver bits and fancy bridles and swell outfits He'd read about in the novels grim, were not on hand for the likes of him.