THE LITTLE HOUSE OF MARY
Throughout the desert region of the Southwest are abandoned mining camps; shafts caved, machinery silent and rusting away, sand drifted in the long-empty cabins. In one such deserted camp a child’s play-house was found beside a great bowlder, the little toys and treasures undisturbed through all the years.
The hoof-worn pack trails still wind down past barren cliff and ledge,And fail and fade like water spilled at the sage gray desert’s edge;Lost in the shifting sand banks, clear where the long dykes liftTheir rough, brown, sun-burned shoulders out of the wind-blown drift.Like scars long-healed the weed-grown dumps where the miners plied their craft,And the tuna drops its crimson fruit down the mouth of the caving shaft.A broken shovel, a worn-out pick—and down in the gulch belowA lean coyote homes her whelps where the stamps beat blow on blow.Where the tent camp took its careless way to the rocky cañon’s brink,The plumed quail leads her covey, and the wild deer come to drink;But then the mule bells tinkled, and, proud of her rank and place,The old white bell mare took the lead, setting the train its pace.And close by a gray-ribbed bowlder, shading her eyes with her hands,Watching the ore trains passing out to the unknown lands,A little, wistful figure with dreaming, gentle face,Like a flower from some old-time garden abloom in that rugged place.Child of the sun-white desert; no other land she knew;Its cactus and sage were her greenest green; its skies were her deepest blue;The shy, wild things were her playmates, and under the old cleft stoneShe builded a little kingdom for her and them alone.And here are her guarded treasures, quaint little shapes of clay,Fashioned by small brown fingers as she sang at her lonely play;—But the dust lies thick upon them, and sand drifts bar the door,And only a swift green lizard shimmers across the floor.Like memories worn too deep to lose the pack trail still winds down,Out past the old gray bowlder and the ledges seamed and brown;Till here it swerves a hand-width back, where once the rough cross stood,With a child’s brief name and a child’s scant years carved in the sun-bleached wood.The cross is fallen and crumbling, but still the wild quails callAs if they missed a comrade through the sage brush thick and tall;And where the love vine tangles and the wind croons low at even,The little playhouse waits for her, for “Mary, aged seven.”