, a poet rhymeless and
inarticulate, who huddled behind the shield of untrimmed currant bushes,
and thought of the girl he would never see again.

He was hungry, but he did not eat. He was cramped, but he did not move.
He picked up the books she had given him. He was quickened by the
powdery beauty of _Youth's Encounter_; by the vision of laughter and
dancing steps beneath a streaky gas-glow in the London fog; of youth not
"roughhousing" and wanting to "be a sport," yet in frail beauty and
faded crimson banners finding such exaltation as Schoenstrom had never
known. But every page suggested Claire, and he tucked the book away.

In Vachel Lindsay's _Congo_, in a poem called "The Santa Fe Trail," he
found his own modern pilgrimage from another point of view. Here was
the poet, disturbed by the honking hustle of passing cars. But Milt
belonged to the honking and the hustle, and it was not the soul of the
grass that he read in the poem, but his own sun-flickering flight:

Swiftly the brazen car comes on.
It burns in the East as the sunrise burns.
I see great flashes where the far trail turns.
Butting through the delicate mists of the morning,
It comes like lightning, goes past roaring,
It will hail all the windmills, taunting, ringing,
On through the ranges the prairie-dog tills--
Scooting past the cattle on the thousand hills.
Ho for the tear-horn, scare-horn, dare-horn,
Ho for the gay-horn, bark-horn, bay-horn.

Milt did not reflect that if the poet had watched the Teal bug go by, he
would not have recorded a scare-horn, a dare-horn, or anything mightier
than a yip-horn. Milt saw himself a cross-continent racer, with the
envious poet, left behind as a dot on the hill, celebrating his passing.

"Lord!" he cried. "I didn't know there were books like these! Thought
poetry was all like Longfellow and Byron. Old boys. Europe. And rhymed
bellyachin' about hard luck. But these books--they're me." Very
carefully: "No; they're I! And she gave 'em to me! I will see her again!
But she won't know it. Now be sensible, son! What do you expect?
Oh--nothing. I'll just go on, and sneak in one more glimpse of her to
take back with me where I belong."

Half an hour after Claire had innocently passed his ambush, he began to
follow her. But not for days was he careless. If he saw her on the
horizon he paused until she was out of sight. That he might not fail her
in need, he bought a ridiculously