Bill’s in Trouble

I’ve got a letter, parson, from my son away out West,
An’ my ol’ heart is heavy as an anvil in my breast,
To think the boy whose future I had once so proudly planned
Should wander from the path of right an’ come to such an end!
I told him when he left his home, not three short years ago,
He’d find himself a plowin’ in a mighty crooked row—
He’d miss his father’s counsel, an’ his mother’s prayers, too;
But he said the farm was hateful, an’ he guessed he’d have to go.

I know thar’s big temptation for a youngster in the West,
But I believed our Billy had the courage to resist,
An’ when he left I warned him o’ the ever waitin’ snares
That lie like hidden sarpints in life’s pathway everywheres.
But Bill he promised faithful to be keerful, an’ allowed
He’d build a reputation that’d make us mighty proud;
But it seems as how my counsel sort o’ faded from his mind,
An’ now the boy’s in trouble o’ the very wustest kind!

His letters came so seldom that I somehow sort o’ knowed
That Billy was a trampling on a mighty rocky road,
But never once imagined he would bow my head in shame,
An’ in the dust’d waller his ol’ daddy’s honored name.
He writes from out in Denver, an’ the story’s mighty short;
I just can’t tell his mother, it’ll crush her poor ol’ heart!
An’ so I reckoned, parson, you might break the news to her—
Bill’s in the legislatur’, but he doesn’t say what fur.

by James Barton Adams (1843-1918), from Breezy Western Verse, 1899