Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

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

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

For Bill was a kind of cuss and his mind was mighty sot
On a dinky patch with flowers and 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 frills and a epigram

So I promised him and he paid the in good cheechako coin
Which the same I blowed in that very down in the Tenderloin
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

Years away and at last one day came 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 lonesome self and I it must be Bill

So I thought of the contract I'd made with him and I took down from the
The swell black box with the silver plate he'd picked out for
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 like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below
When the ice-worms wriggle their purple through the crust of the pale blue snow
When the pine trees crack like little guns in the silence of the
And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka

When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off and the sky is lit
And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a spit
When the 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 me down on every hand
As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that and bitter land
Half dazed half crazed in the winter wild with its heartbraking woes
And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough

North by the compass North I pressed and peak and plain
Passed like a 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 through a land accurst shunned by the brutes
And all I heard was my own harsh word and the of the malamutes
Till at last I came to a cabin squat in the side of a hill
And I burst in the door and on the floor frozen to death lay Bill

Ice white ice like a winding-sheet sheathing smoke-grimed wall
Ice on the stove-pipe ice on the bed ice gleaming all
Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest ice in his hair
Ice on his fingers ice in his ice in his glassy stare

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

Have you stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole
With a coffin six by three and a grief you can't control
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse 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 but I never felt so blue
As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying I'd do
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs were nosing round about
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove and I started to thaw out

Well I thawed and I thawed for days but it didn't seem no good
His arms and his stuck out like pegs as if they were made of wood
Till at last I said it ain't no use he's too hard to thaw
He's obstinate and he 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 coffin he picked hisself with the silver plate
And I came nigh near to a tear as I nailed him safely down
I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh and I started back to town

So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and
And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up when the the Judgment sluice-heads
And I my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun
And sometimes I wonder if was the awful things I done

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