Luyện nghe bài hát The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill

I took a contract to bury the body of Bill MacKie,
Whenever, wherever or the manner of death he die
Whether he die in the light o' day or under the moon;
In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, or patent shoon;
On velvet tundra or peak, by glacier, drift or draw;
In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or
By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or
I swore on the Book I would follow and till I found my tombless dead.

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

Years passed away, and at last one day a squaw with a story strange,
Of a long-deserted line of traps 'way back of the Bighorn
Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man and still,
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 he'd picked out for hisself;
And I packed it full of grub and "hooch", and I slung it on the
Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at of day.

You what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below;
When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the blue snow;
When the pine-trees crack little guns in the silence of the wood,
And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka
the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,
And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns a red-hot spit;
When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend to kill
Well, it was just that that day when I set out to look for Bill.

Oh, the hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand,
As I blundered blind with a trail to through that blank and bitter land;
Half dazed, half in the winter wild, with its grim heart-breaking woes,
And the strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows!
North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and
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 blazed, he could stand at the foot of the throne of God.
North, aye, North, through a accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes,
And all I heard was my own harsh and the whine of the malamutes,
Till at last I came to a cabin squat, in the side of a hill,
And I in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill.

Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over
Sparkling ice on the dead chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his stare;
Hard as a log and trussed 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 last I spoke: "Bill liked his but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he 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 that 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 kind, but I never felt so blue
As I sat there at that stiff and studying what I'd do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the dogs that 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 legs out like pegs, as if they was made of wood.
Till at last I said: "It 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 Bill's arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight
In the little he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate;
And I came nigh to shedding 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 was in a narrow grave and deep,
And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up, when the Judgment sweep;
And I my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun,
And sometimes I wonder if they was, the things I done.
And as I sit and the parson talks, of the Law,
I often think of poor old how hard he was to saw.