Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

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

On velvet tundra or virgin peak by glacier 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 I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead

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

So I promised him and he paid the price in cheechako coin
Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the
Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine here poor Bill MacKie
And I it up on my cabin wall and waited 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 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 made with him and I down from the shelf
The swell black box the silver plate he'd picked 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 it's like in the Yukon wild when sixty-nine below
the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow
When the trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood
And the icicles hang down like under the parka hood

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

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

North by the compass North I pressed and peak and plain
Passed a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again
River and plain and mighty peak and who stand unawed
As their summits 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 heard was my own harsh and the whine of the malamutes
Till at I came to a cabin squat built in the side of a hill
And I in the door and there on the floor frozen to death lay Bill

Ice white ice a winding-sheet sheathing each smoke-grimed wall
Ice on the ice on the bed ice gleaming over all
Sparkling ice on the dead man's glittering ice in his hair
Ice on his fingers ice in his heart ice in his glassy

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

Have you stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole
With a little coffin six by three and a you can't control
Have you sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin
And that to say you may try all day but you'll 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 and studying what I'd do
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that nosing round about
And I lit a roaring in the stove and I started to thaw Bill out

Well I thawed and I for thirteen days but it didn't seem no good
His arms and his legs stuck out pegs as if they were made of wood
Till at last I said it no use he's froze too hard to thaw
He's obstinate and he won't lie straight so I 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 picked hisself the dinky silver plate
And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely
Then I stowed him 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 the the Judgment sluice-heads sweep
And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Sun
And sometimes I wonder if they was the awful I done

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