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
he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon
In cabin or dance-hall camp or mucklucks or patent shoon

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

For Bill was a dainty of cuss and his mind was mighty sot
On a patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot
And where he died or how he died it matter a damn
So long as he had a grave frills and a tombstone epigram

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

Years passed away and at last one day a squaw with a story strange
Of a line 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 self and I figured it must be Bill

So I thought of the contract I'd made with him and I took down 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
I harnessed 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 ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the of the pale blue snow
When the pine trees crack like little guns in the silence of the
And the hang down like tusks under the parka hood

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

Oh the awful hush that to crush me down on every hand
As I blundered blind with a trail to 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 pressed and peak and plain
Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream
River and and mighty peak and who could 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 word and the whine of the malamutes
Till at last I came to a squat built in the side of a hill
And I burst in the door and there on the floor frozen to death lay

Ice white ice like a winding-sheet each smoke-grimed wall
Ice on the stove-pipe ice on the bed ice over all
Sparkling ice on the man's chest 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 with his arms and legs outspread
I gazed at the coffin I'd brought for him and I gazed at the dead
And at last I spoke Bill liked his joke but still his eyes
A man had ought to his mates in the way he goes and dies

Have you ever stood in an hut in the shadow of the Pole
With a little six by three and a grief you can't control
you ever sat by a frozen corpse 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 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 husky that were nosing round about
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove and I to thaw Bill out

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

So I buried him as the 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 of the Midnight Sun
And sometimes I wonder if they was the awful I done

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