Ballad of Basphemous Bill

I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie

Whenever wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die

Whether he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon

In cabin or dance-hall camp or dive mucklucks or patent shoon.

On velvet tundra or virgin peak by glacier drift or draw

In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom by avalanche fang or claw

By battle murder or sudden wealth by pestilence hooch or lead

I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead.

For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss and his mind was mighty sot

On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot

And where he died or how he died it didn't matter a damn

So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone epigram.

So I promised him and he paid the price in good cheechako coin

Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin

Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine here lies poor Bill MacKie

And I hung it up on my cabin wall and waited for Bill to die.

Years passed away and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange

Of a long-deserted line of traps way back of the Bighorn range

Of a little hut by the great divide and a white man stiff and still

Lying there by his lonesome self and I figured it must be Bill.

So I thought of the contract I'd made with him and I took down from the shelf

The swell black box with the silver plate he'd picked out for hisself

And I packed 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 dawn of day.

You know 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 pale blue snow

When the pine trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood

And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood.

When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off and the sky is weirdly lit

And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit

When the mercury is a frozen ball and the frost-fiend stalks to kill

Well it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill.

Oh the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand

As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land

Half dazed half crazed in the winter wild with its grim heartbraking woes

And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows.

North by the compass North I pressed river and peak and plain

Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again

River and plain and mighty peak and who could stand unawed

As their summits blazed he could stand undazed

At the foot of the throne of God.

North aye North through a land accurst shunned by the scouring brutes

And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes

Till 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 frozen to death lay Bill.

Ice white ice like a winding-sheet sheathing each smoke-grimed wall

Ice on the stove-pipe ice on the bed ice gleaming over all

Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest glittering ice in his hair

Ice on his fingers ice in his heart ice in his glassy stare.

Hard as a log and trussed like a frog with his arms and legs outspread

I gazed at the coffin I'd brought for him and I gazed at the gruesome dead

And at last I spoke Bill liked his joke but still goldarn his eyes

A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.

Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole

With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't control

Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin

And that seems 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 never felt so blue

As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do

Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about

And I lit a roaring fire in the stove and I started to thaw Bill out.

Well I thawed and I thawed for thirteen days but it didn't seem no good

His arms and his legs stuck out like pegs as if they were made of wood

Till 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 guess I got to saw.

So I sawed off poor Bill's arms and legs and I laid him snug and straight

In the little coffin he picked hisself with the dinky silver plate

And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down

Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh and I started back to town.

So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep

And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up when the the Judgment sluice-heads sweep

And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun

And sometimes I wonder if they was the awful things I done.

And as I sit and the parson talks expounding of the Law

I often think of poor old Bill and how hard he was to saw...