Luyện nghe bài hát The Ballad of Blasphemous 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 under the moon;
In cabin or dance-hall, or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon;
On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or
In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, or claw;
By battle, or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead
I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I my tombless dead.

For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was sot
On a dinky patch with and grass in a civilized bone-yard lot.
And where he or how he died, it didn't matter a damn
So long as he had a with frills and a tombstone "epigram".
So I promised him, and he the price in good cheechako coin
(Which the same I in that very night down in the Tenderloin).
Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine: "Here lies Bill MacKie",
And I it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die.

Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw a story strange,
Of a long-deserted line of traps 'way back of the Bighorn
Of a hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still,
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 silver he'd picked out for hisself;
And I packed it full of and "hooch", and I slung it on the sleigh;
Then I up my team 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 through the crust of the pale blue snow;
When the crack like little guns in the silence of the wood,
And the icicles hang down like tusks the parka hood;
When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is lit,
And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns a red-hot spit;
the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill
Well, it was just like 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 through that blank and bitter land;
dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heart-breaking woes,
And the ruthless strife for a grip on that only the sourdough knows!
North by the compass, North I river and peak and plain
like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again.

River and plain and mighty peak--and who stand unawed?
As their blazed, 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,
at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill,
And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, 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 over
ice on the dead man's chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his stare;
Hard as a log and like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the I'd brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at I spoke: "Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies."

you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,
With a little coffin six by three and a you can't control?
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse looks at you with a grin,
And that seems to "You may try all day, but you'll never jam me in"?
I'm not a man of the quitting kind, but I felt so blue
As I sat gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were round about,
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I to thaw Bill out.

Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn't no good;
His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was of wood.
Till at last I said: "It ain't no use--he's froze too hard to
obstinate, and he won't lie straight, so I guess I got to saw."
So I off poor Bill's arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight
In the little coffin he hisself, with the dinky silver plate;
And I came near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down;
Then I stowed him away in my sleigh, and I started back to town.

So I buried him as the contract was in a grave and deep,
And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up, when the sluice-heads sweep;
And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Sun,
And sometimes I wonder if they was, the awful I done.
And as I sit and the talks, expounding of the Law,
I often think of old Bill--and how hard he was to saw.