MOONRISE
163
I peered between the ferny cowls; I clasped my hands aboveThe heart that ached to cry aloud thanksgiving for its love.I saw him black against the red. How blood-red was the moon!And more of summer was the air than like a night in June,A frosty night. And clear the sound of hoof-beats on the track:And he a target on the moon, the red beyond the black.
A curlew whistled from the plain; a mopoke flapped; and then—The night was full of spitting oaths, and pistol shots, and men.I thought the troopers watched the hills. Ah, God, how could I knowAmong the laces of the fern they, too, were crouching low?I saw a trooper's grim-set face across a fallen log.My Man? Among the shattered gorse they trapped him like a dog!
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The sergeant got his stripes for this. My man hanged yesterday.. . . The sergeant with his new-won stripes to-night will pass this way.The red moon will be full to-night, and very bright and bigAcross her face the boughs will stand, clean-cut in every twig;
