frontier of Romance, where a new race, a new people--hardy,
brave, and passionate--were building an empire; where the
tumultuous life ran like fire from dawn to dark, and from dark to
dawn again, primitive, brutal, honest, and without fear.
Something (to his idea not much) had been done to catch at that
life in passing, but its poet had not yet arisen. The few
sporadic attempts, thus he told himself, had only touched the
keynote. He strove for the diapason, the great song that should
embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an
entire people, wherein all people should be included--they and
their legends, their folk lore, their fightings, their loves and
their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their stoicism under
stress, their adventures, their treasures found in a day and
gambled in a night, their direct, crude speech, their generosity
and cruelty, their heroism and bestiality, their religion and
profanity, their self-sacrifice and obscenity--a true and
fearless setting forth of a passing phase of history, un-
compromising, sincere; each group in its proper environment; the
valley, the plain, and the mountain; the ranch, the range, and
the mine--all this, all the traits and types of every community
from the Dakotas to the Mexicos, from Winnipeg to Guadalupe,
gathered together, swept together, welded and riven together in
one single, mighty song, the Song of the West. That was what he
dreamed, while things without names--thoughts for which no man
had yet invented words, terrible formless shapes, vague figures,
colossal, monstrous, distorted-- whirled at a gallop through his
imagination.

As Harran came up, Presley reached down into the pouches of the
sun-bleached shooting coat he wore and drew out and handed him