Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

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

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

For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss and his mind was sot
On a dinky patch with and grass in a civilized 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 tombstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 that looks at you with a grin
And that seems to say you may try all day but never jam me in

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

Well I and I thawed for thirteen days but it didn't seem 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 coffin he picked hisself with the dinky silver plate
And I came nigh to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down
Then I him away in my Yukon sleigh and I started back to town

So I buried him as the was in a narrow grave and deep
And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up when the the 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 talks expounding of the Law
I often of poor old Bill and how hard he was to saw