title: Bone-Songs and Sanctuaries: New and Selected Poems
author:  Michael Jennings 
description: MICHAEL JENNINGS is the author of six previous books of poems, including The Hardman County Sequence (based on the photographs of Dorothea Lange with a Foreword by W. D. Snodgrass) and Silky Thefts.
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  The Ferguson Rifle
  
  by Louis L'Amour
  
  CHAPTER 1
  
  My name is Ronan Chantry, and I am alone upon this land. I have long since
  crossed the Mississippi. No other rides with me, and the plains lie vast
  about. My eyes are toward the horizon where the sun sets in gold and crimson,
  an enormous sun like none my eyes have seen in the thirty years that have been
  mine.
  
  What I loved is gone. What I lived for, vanished. I ride westward into an
  unknown land, toward what destiny I know not. It has ever been our way, we
  Chantrys, to turn westward when faced with grief and desolation.
  
  I ride to lose myself, but can a man ever lose that which is in him? That
  which is blood and bone to him?
  
  That which has been his life?
  
  Men have told me that I am a fool, that I ride only to my death; but if it is
  to be, then let it be.
  
  My wife, my dearly beloved, is dead.
  
  My son, who was to grow tall and sire yet another generation of our family, is
  also gone