The Feud

Rocks, trees and rocks; and down a mossy stone     The murmuring ooze and trickle of a stream     Through bushes, where the mountain spring lies lone,     A gleaming cairngorm where the shadows dream,     And one wild road winds like a saffron seam.     Here sang the thrush, whose pure, mellifluous note     Dropped golden sweetness on the fragrant June;     Here cat and blue-bird and wood-sparrow wrote     Their presence on the silence with a tune;     And here the fox drank 'neath the mountain moon.     Frail ferns and dewy mosses and dark brush     Impenetrable briers, deep and dense,     And wiry bushes, brush, that seemed to crush     The struggling saplings with its tangle, whence     Sprawled out the ramble of an old rail-fence.     A wasp buzzed by; and then a butterfly     In orange and amber, like a floating flame;     And then a man, hard-eyed and very sly,     Gaunt-checked and haggard and a little lame,     With an old rifle, down the mountain came.     He listened, drinking from a flask he took     Out of the ragged pocket of his coat;     Then all around him cast a stealthy look;     Lay down; and watched an eagle soar and float,     His fingers twitching at his hairy throat.     The shades grew longer; and each Cumberland height     Loomed, framed in splendours of the dolphin dusk.     Around the road a horseman rode in sight;     Young, tall, blonde-bearded. Silent, grim, and brusque,     He in the thicket aimed The gun ran husk;     And echoes barked among the hills and made     Repeated instants of the shot's distress.     then silence and the trampled bushes swayed;     Then silence, packed with murder and the press     Of distant hoofs that galloped riderless.