While Presley had been reflecting upon all this, Vanamee had
continued to speak. Presley, however, had not been wholly
inattentive. While his memory was busy reconstructing the
details of the drama of the shepherd's life, another part of his
brain had been swiftly registering picture after picture that
Vanamee's monotonous flow of words struck off, as it were, upon a
steadily moving scroll. The music of the unfamiliar names that
occurred in his recital was a stimulant to the poet's
imagination. Presley had the poet's passion for expressive,
sonorous names. As these came and went in Vanamee's monotonous
undertones, like little notes of harmony in a musical
progression, he listened, delighted with their resonance. -
Navajo, Quijotoa, Uintah, Sonora, Laredo, Uncompahgre--to him
they were so many symbols. It was his West that passed,
unrolling there before the eye of his mind: the open, heat-
scourged round of desert; the mesa, like a vast altar, shimmering
purple in the royal sunset; the still, gigantic mountains,
heaving into the sky from out the canyons; the strenuous, fierce
life of isolated towns, lost and forgotten, down there, far off,
below the horizon. Abruptly his great poem, his Song of the
West, leaped up again in his imagination. For the moment, he all
but held it. It was there, close at hand. In another instant he
would grasp it.

"Yes, yes," he exclaimed, "I can see it all. The desert, the
mountains, all wild, primordial, untamed. How I should have
loved to have been with you. Then, perhaps, I should have got
hold of my idea."

"Your idea?"