took on exquisite
overtones of gray meaning, and I worked up those overtones until I had a
perfectly wrought melancholy poem of one word--"_Baconless_." For, after
all, a poem never existed upon paper, but lives subtly in the
consciousness of the poet, and in the minds of those who understand the
poet through the suggestiveness of his written symbols, and their own
remembered experiences.

But during the next morning, poetic justice worked. A rider mounted on a
piebald pony appeared on the bank and shouted for us to pull in.

I suddenly realized why a dog wags his tail at a stranger. But the
feeling I had was bigger than that. This mounted man became at once for
me the incarnation of the meaning of bacon!

When two parties meet and each wants what the other can give, it doesn't
take long to get acquainted. The rider was a youth of about seventeen.
One glance at his face told you the story of his rearing. He was
unmistakably city-bred, and his hands showed that his life had begun too
easy for his own good.

"From the East?" he questioned joyously. "Say, you know little old New
York, don't you? When were you there last?"

The lad was hungry, but not for bacon. Alas! Our hunger was the
healthier one! We talked of New York. "Mother's in Paris," he
volunteered, "and Dad's in New York meeting her bills. But the Old Man's
got a grouch at me, and so he sent me 'way out here in this God-forsaken
country! Say, what did they make this country for? Got any tailor-made
cigarettes about you? How did Broadway look when you were there last?
Lights all there yet at night? I've been here two years--it seems like
two hundred! Talk about Robinson Crusoe! Say, I've got him distanced!"

I helped him build up a momentary Broadway there in the wilderness--the
lights, the din, the hurrying, jostling theater crowds, the cafes,
faces, faces--anguished faces, eager faces, weary faces, painted faces,
squalor, brilliance. For me the memory of it only made me feel the pity
of it all. But the lad's eyes beamed. He was homesick for Broadway.

I changed the subject from prose to poetry; that is, from Broadway to
bacon.

"Wait here till I come back," said the lad, mounting. He spurred up a
gulch and disappeared. In an hour he reappeared with a half strip of the
precious stuff. "Take money for it? Not on your life!" he insisted.
"You've been down there, and that goes for a meal ticket with me!"

Fried bacon! And flapjacks sopped in the grease o