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 o' day or under the peak-faced moon
In cabin or dance-hall or dive mucklucks or patent shoon

On velvet tundra or virgin peak by drift or draw
In hollow or canyon gloom by avalanche fang or claw
By battle murder or 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 kind of cuss and his mind was mighty sot
On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a boneyard lot
And where he or how he died it didn't matter a damn
So as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone epigram

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

Years passed and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange
Of a long-deserted line of traps way of the Bighorn range
Of a little hut by the divide and a white man stiff and still
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 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 in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below
When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the blue snow
When the pine crack like little guns in the silence of the wood
And the icicles hang down like tusks under the hood

When the smoke breaks sudden off and the sky is weirdly lit
And the careless feel of a bit of steel like a red-hot spit
When the mercury is a ball and the frost-fiend stalks to kill
it was just like that 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 crazed in the winter wild its grim heartbraking woes
And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the knows

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

North aye North through a land accurst shunned by the scouring
And all I heard was my own word and the whine of the malamutes
Till at last I to a cabin squat built in the side of a hill
And I burst in the and there on the floor frozen 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

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

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 corpse that looks at you 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 that stiff and what I'd do
Then I and I kicked off the husky dogs 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 days but it seem no good
His arms and his legs stuck out like pegs as if they were made of
Till at last I said it ain't no use froze too hard to thaw
He's and he won't lie straight so I guess 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 tear as I nailed him down
Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh and I started back to

So I him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep
And there he's waiting the 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 if they was the awful things I done

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