He
Was poor as me,
An' I was poor
As any beaver workin' in the wet,
Excursionin' ashore
His grub to get.
We dug like beavers, too,
As workers do.
But now I know
That all I worked for was a bed an' food,
But he had dreams
An', in the solitude,
He saw the gleams
Of golden dollars grow
To riches even in the long ago.
The thing success
That come to many in the wilderness
Was not the luck that envy says it was—
It had a cause.
We both were young,
We both were young an' strong.
I worked as hard,
I know I worked as long,
But dollars clung
To him. Long afterward
I knew the reason why:
He had a dream, an' not a dream had I.
First thing I knew
He was the boss. Yet, of the two,
I was the better cruiser. I could cruise
A tract of timber an' the sections choose
Where wealth was waitin' in the hills of pine;
So bossin' was his job, an' cruisin' mine.
I cruised for him an', when my cash was gone,
Was mighty grateful that he took me on.
An' then the woman come—they always come
In each man's life,
To some a wife
An' just a dream to some—
An' that was when
I started dreamin' dreams like other men.
She was no timid, blue-eyed, baby thing;
She was a queen, fit for a forest king,
She was a woman big of hip an' arm,
A farmer's daughter on a buckwheat farm.
On the trail
I used to wonder why some fellahs fail
An' others win;
An' I made up my mind
The reason I would find
An' buckle in.
But then again
There was the difference in different men:
He had the start
In dreamin' an' in doin'—an' a heart
Was like a stand of pine,
To take when I had found it. She was mine,
My sky, my sun,
An' yet he won.
I did not kill him, curse him, even hate—
For it was fate.
But sometimes when I leave the woods a spell,
An' it is seldom, an' the fellahs tell
How well he's done,
The man who always won,
Somehow all right it seems—
For he had dreams.
One time I even suppered at his place,
When in to talk about some timberland,
A house so grand
I wondered that I ever had the face
To think that she
Would take the likes of me.
Yet all the same,
There come a thought that took away the shame
That I had dared
To want her, raven-haired—
A thought that these,
The luxuries,
The gold, the glass, the auto, an' the fur,
The costly goods,
An' husband, too,
A cruiser in the woods
Had given her—
Although she never knew.