Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous MacKie
Whenever wherever or whatsoever the of death he die
Whether he die in the o' day or under the peak-faced moon
In cabin or dance-hall or dive mucklucks or patent shoon

On velvet tundra or virgin by glacier drift or draw
In muskeg hollow or gloom by avalanche fang or claw
By battle murder or wealth by pestilence hooch or lead
I swore on the Book I would and look till I found my tombless dead

For Bill was a dainty of cuss and his mind was mighty sot
On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a boneyard lot
And where he died or how he died it didn't matter a
So long as he had a grave with frills and a epigram

So I promised him and he the price in good cheechako coin
Which the same I blowed in that night down in the Tenderloin
Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine here poor Bill MacKie
And I hung it up on my cabin wall and for Bill to die

Years away and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange
Of a long-deserted line of way back of the Bighorn range
Of a little hut by the great and a white man stiff and still
Lying there by his lonesome and I figured it must be Bill

So I thought of the contract I'd made with him and I took from the shelf
The swell black box with the silver he'd picked out for hisself
And I packed it full of grub and and I slung it on the sleigh
Then I up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day

You know what it's in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below
When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue
When the pine trees like little guns in the silence of the wood
And the icicles hang down like tusks under the hood

When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off and the sky is lit
And the careless feel of a bit of burns like a red-hot spit
When the mercury is a frozen and the frost-fiend stalks to kill
Well it was just like that that day I set out to look for Bill

Oh the awful hush seemed to crush me down on every hand
As I blundered blind a trail to find through that blank and bitter land
Half dazed half in the winter wild with its grim heartbraking woes
And the ruthless strife for a on life that only the sourdough knows

North by the compass North I river and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I to lose and I waked to dream again
River and plain and mighty and who could stand unawed
As summits blazed he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God

North aye through a land accurst shunned by the scouring brutes
And all I heard was my own harsh word and the of the malamutes
Till at last I came to a cabin squat built in the side of a
And I burst in the door and there on the floor to death lay Bill

Ice white ice a winding-sheet sheathing each smoke-grimed wall
Ice on the stove-pipe ice on the bed ice over all
Sparkling ice on the dead chest glittering ice in his hair
Ice on his fingers ice in his heart ice in his stare

as a log and trussed like a frog with his arms and legs outspread
I at the coffin I'd brought for him and I gazed at the gruesome dead
And at last I spoke Bill liked his joke but still his eyes
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and

you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that at you with a grin
And seems to say you may try all day but you'll never jam me in

I'm not a man of the quitting kind but I never felt so
As I sat there gazing at stiff and studying what I'd do
Then I rose and I kicked off the dogs that were nosing round about
And I lit a fire in the stove and I started to thaw Bill out

Well I thawed and I thawed for thirteen days but it didn't no good
His arms and his legs out like pegs as if they were made of wood
Till at I said it ain't no use he's froze too hard to thaw
He's obstinate and he won't lie so I guess I got to saw

So I sawed off poor Bill's and legs and I laid him snug and straight
In the little coffin he hisself with the dinky silver plate
And I came nigh near to shedding a as I nailed him safely down
Then I stowed him away in my Yukon and I started back to town

So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and
And there he's waiting the Great when the the Judgment sluice-heads sweep
And I my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun
And sometimes I wonder if they was the awful things I

And as I sit and the parson expounding of the Law
I often think of poor old and how hard he was to saw