Luyện nghe bài hát The Ballad of Blasphemous 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 dive, mucklucks or shoon;
On velvet tundra or peak, by glacier, drift or draw;
In hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw;
By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, or lead
I swore on the Book I would follow and look I found my tombless dead.

For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his was mighty sot
On a patch with flowers and grass in a civilized bone-yard lot.
And where he died or how he died, it matter a damn
So as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone "epigram".
So I promised him, and he the price in good cheechako coin
(Which the same I blowed in that very 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 wall and I waited for to die.

Years passed away, and at one day came a squaw with a story strange,
Of a long-deserted of traps 'way back of the Bighorn range;
Of a little hut by the divide, and a white man stiff and still,
there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill.
So I thought of the I'd made with him, and I took down from the shelf
The swell black box with the plate he'd picked out for hisself;
And I packed it full of and "hooch", and I slung it on the sleigh;
Then I harnessed up my team of 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 heads through the of the pale blue snow;
When the pine-trees crack little guns in the silence of the wood,
And the icicles hang down tusks under the parka hood;
When the stove-pipe smoke sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,
And the careless of a bit of steel burns like 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 crush me down on hand,
As I blundered blind with a trail to through that blank and bitter land;
Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, its grim heart-breaking woes,
And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the knows!
North by the compass, North I pressed; 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 could unawed?
As their summits blazed, he could stand 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 I came to a cabin squat, built 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, each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over
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 frog, his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the coffin I'd for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at last I "Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to his mates in the way he goes and dies."

Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the of the Pole,
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't
Have you ever sat by a corpse that looks at you with a grin,
And that to say: "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 there gazing at stiff and studying what I'd do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs were nosing round about,
And I lit a roaring in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.

Well, I thawed and thawed for days, but it didn't seem no good;
His arms and stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood.
Till at last I said: "It ain't no froze too hard to thaw;
obstinate, and he won't 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 coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate;
And I nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down;
Then I him away in my Yukon 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 Judgment sweep;
And I smoke my pipe and I in the light of the Midnight Sun,
And sometimes I if they was, the awful things 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.