Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

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

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

For Bill was a dainty kind of and his mind was mighty sot
On a patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot
And he died or how he died it didn't matter a damn
So long as he had a grave with 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 here lies poor Bill MacKie
And I hung it up on my cabin wall and waited for to die

passed away and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange
Of a long-deserted of traps 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 self and I figured it must be

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

You know what it's like in the wild when it's sixty-nine below
When the 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 like tusks under the parka hood

When the stove-pipe breaks sudden off and the sky is weirdly lit
And the feel of a bit of steel 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 day when I set out to look for Bill

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

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

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

Ice white ice like a winding-sheet sheathing each smoke-grimed
Ice on the ice on the bed ice gleaming over 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 frog with his and legs outspread
I gazed at the coffin I'd for him and I gazed 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 ever in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole
With a little six by three and a grief you can't control
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 you'll jam me in

I'm not a man of the quitting kind but I felt so blue
As I sat gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky that were nosing round about
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove and I started to Bill out

Well I thawed and I thawed for thirteen but it didn't seem no good
His arms and his legs stuck out like pegs as if they were made of
at last I said it ain't 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 arms and legs and I laid him snug and
In the little he picked hisself with the dinky silver plate
And I came nigh near to shedding a as I nailed him safely down
Then I him away in my Yukon sleigh and I started back to town

So I him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep
And there waiting the Great Clean-up when 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 things I

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