Proportionate Deserts

Apache Fredric Remington

The prisoner left behind today

Could neither walk nor ride

We feared he would starve to death where he lay

So to telegraph pole we left word,

near the rail

Struck bloody lines across his feet.

It was a charity

It was all we could do

We were on the move

His incoherent gratitude and his mental nakedness in this place…

We hoped he might crawl to the shadow in the rock till the sun was low.

That he might live

To kill him seemed unimaginative then

And not worth of a hundred men

Bring the men down from the high desert

To the upper valley

In the show of the Oregon Range

Suffer the conscripts

We waste our men

Take the rifle, run off downhill

To the tents to triumph before the women

We are a proud band

We wear the colors of the land

Mescalero Minutemen

We are patriots in our own land

Two stone houses

One obscuring the other

The women sing without disquietude

We returned to the place on the way North

To find the picked bones

Lying scatted on the old camping ground

To kill him seemed unimaginative then

And not worthy of a hundred men

But you cannot take from us

What was never ours

Mescalero Minutemen

We are patriots in our own land

Our impotence

And cease fire

Like guilty sheep

Plundering pause and panic

Eastward across the nowhere

Came a trolley and the four men.