_Low in the mystic purple of the west The weird moon hangs, a tarnished silver slug: Vast, vast the hollow empty night curves down, Stabbed with the glass-like glinting of the stars, And, save when that wild cry grows up anon, No sound but this dull murmur of the hush— The winter hush._ _Hark! once again thy cry!_ _Thy strange, sharp, ice-like, tenuous complaint, As though the spirit of this frozen waste Pinched with the cruel frost yearned summerward!_ _I know thou art a wolf that criest so: Though hidden in the shadow, I can see Thy four feet huddled in the numbing frost, Thy snout, breath-whitened, pointing to the sky: Poor pariah of the plains, I know ’tis thou._ _And yet—and yet—I heard a kinsman shout! Down through the intricate centuries it came, A far-blown cry! From old-world graves it grew, Up through the tumbled walls of ancient realms, Up through the lizard-haunted heaps of stone, Up through the choking ashes of old fanes, The pitiful debris where Grandeur dwelt, Out of the old-world wilderness it grew— The cry I know! And I have heard my Kin!_ I THE ALIEN THROUGH the quiet night, crystalline with the pervading spirit of the frost, under prairie skies of mystic purple pierced with the glass-like glinting of the stars, fled Antoine. Huge and hollow-sounding with the clatter of the pinto’s hoofs hung the night above and about—lonesome, empty, bitter as the soul of him who fled. A weary age of flight since sunset; and now the midnight saw the thin-limbed, long-haired pony slowly losing his nerve, tottering, rasping in the throat. With pitiless spike-spurred heels the rider hurled the beast into the empty night. “Gwan! you blasted cayuse! you overgrown wolf-dog! you pot-bellied shonga! Keep up that tune; I’m goin’ somewheres. What’d I steal you fer? Pleasure? He, he, he, ho, ho, ho! I reckon; pleasure for the half-breed! Gwan!” Suddenly rounding a bank of sand, the pinto sighted the broad, ice-bound river, an elysian stream of glinting silver under the stars. Sniffing and crouching upon its haunches at the sudden glow that dwindled a gleaming thread into the further dusk, the jaded beast received a series of vicious jabs from the spike-spurred heels. It groaned and lunged forward again, taking with uncertain feet the glaring path ahead, and awakening dull, snarling thunder in the under regions of the ice. Slipping, struggling, doing its brute best to overcome fatigue and the uncertainty of its path, the pinto covered the ice. “Doin’ a war dance, eh?” growled the man with bitter mirth, and gouging the foaming bloody flanks of the animal. “Gwan! Set up that tune; I want fast music, ’cause I’m goin’ somewheres—don’t know where—somewheres out there in the shadders! Come here, will you? Take that and that and _that_! Now will you kick the scen’ry back’ards? By the——!”