Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

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

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

For was a dainty kind of cuss and his mind was mighty sot
On a dinky patch with flowers and in a civilized boneyard lot
And where he or how he died it didn't 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
the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin
Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine here poor Bill MacKie
And I hung it up on my wall and waited for Bill to die

Years passed away and at last one day 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 down 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 slung it on the
I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day

You know it's 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 in the silence of the wood
And the icicles down like tusks under the parka hood

When the stove-pipe smoke sudden off and the sky is weirdly lit
And the careless feel of a bit of burns like a red-hot spit
When the is a frozen ball and the frost-fiend stalks to kill
Well it was like 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 that blank and bitter land
Half dazed half crazed in the winter wild with its grim 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 and I waked to dream again
River and plain and mighty peak and who could stand
As their summits he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God

North aye North through a land accurst by the scouring brutes
And all I heard was my own harsh word and the of the malamutes
Till at last I 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 stove-pipe ice on the bed ice gleaming all
Sparkling ice on the dead man's 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 frog with his and legs outspread
I gazed at the I'd brought 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 ought to consider his in the way he goes and dies

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

I thawed and I thawed 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 ain't no use froze too hard to thaw
He's obstinate and he lie straight so I guess I got to saw

So I sawed off Bill's arms and legs and I laid him snug and straight
In the coffin he picked hisself with the dinky silver 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 contract was in a narrow grave and
And he's waiting the Great Clean-up when the the Judgment sluice-heads sweep
And I smoke my pipe and I in the light of the Midnight Sun
And sometimes I wonder if they was the awful things I

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