Luyện nghe bài hát Ballad Of Basphemous Bill

I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous MacKie
wherever 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 camp or dive mucklucks or patent

On velvet tundra or peak by glacier drift or draw
In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom by avalanche or claw
By battle murder or sudden by pestilence 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 dinky patch with flowers and in a civilized boneyard lot
And where he died or how he died it didn't matter a
So long as he had a grave with frills and a epigram

So I promised him and he paid the price in good coin
Which the same I blowed in very night down in the Tenderloin
Then I a three-foot slab of pine here lies poor Bill MacKie
And I hung it up on my cabin 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 and still
there by his lonesome self and I figured it must be Bill

So I of the contract I'd made with him and I took down from the shelf
The swell black box the silver 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 team of dogs and was off at of day

You know what it's in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below
When the wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow
When the pine trees crack like guns in the silence of the wood
And the icicles hang 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 mercury is a frozen 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 to crush 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 its grim heartbraking woes
And the ruthless for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows

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

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

Ice white ice a winding-sheet sheathing each smoke-grimed wall
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 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 joke but goldarn his eyes
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and

Have you ever stood in an hut in the shadow of the Pole
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you 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 kind but I never felt so blue
As I sat there gazing at that stiff and 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 days but it didn't seem no
His arms and his legs stuck out like pegs as if they made of wood
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 coffin he picked hisself with the dinky silver
And I came near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down
Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh and I back to town

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

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