Page:The trail of the golden horn.djvu/298

294 you go to bed you must listen to what Rolfe has written. He has finished his poem of inspiration and is waiting to read it. Come on, Tom, and get through with it.”

“It isn’t much,” the constable replied, “but merely a sample of what I shall do when I get time. These are just a few hurried thoughts I have been turning over in my mind ever since I came to The Gap and saw the old missionary standing bravely at his post of duty. It applies not only to him but to others of his kind. Later I shall lick the verses into proper shape. I have called this poem ‘Across the Marches,’ suggested by some words I read in an old paper which I happened to pick up in this very house. It was a report of an address given by the Archbishop of Canterbury to a number of missionaries leaving for their distant fields of work. ‘We from across the Marches stand by you in your great endeavours,’ he said. Those words appealed to me. This is what I have written as my humble tribute:

“Where the land lies dumb in winter, and the mountain trail is steep,

Where the frost bites like hot iron, and the snow-shoes gall the feet;

Where the wind rips down the valley with its deadly, hurtling sting,

And the snow drifts like long breakers in its blinding, maddening fling,

There across the great lone Marches press the Heralds of the King.”

“Where the frontier shelves to vagueness, and the trails lead God knows where,

Where the Great Lights hurl their magic through the twanging midnight air,