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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Ballad Of Blasphemous Bill</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,<br>Whenever, wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die--<br>Whether he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon;<br>In cabin or dance-hall, camp or dive, mucklucks or patent shoon;<br>On velvet tundra or virgin peak, by glacier, drift or draw;<br>In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom, by avalanche, fang or claw;<br>By battle, murder or sudden wealth, by pestilence, hooch or lead--<br>I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss, and his mind was mighty sot<br>On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized bone-yard lot.<br>And where he died or how he died, it didn't matter a damn<br>So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone "epigram".<br>So I promised him, and he paid the price in good cheechako coin<br>(Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin).<br>Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine: "Here lies poor Bill MacKie",<br>And I hung it up on my cabin wall and I waited for Bill to die.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Years passed away, and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange,<br>Of a long-deserted line of traps 'way back of the Bighorn range;<br>Of a little hut by the great divide, and a white man stiff and still,<br>Lying there by his lonesome self, and I figured it must be Bill.<br>So I thought of the contract I'd made with him, and I took down from the shelf<br>The swell black box with the silver plate he'd picked out for hisself;<br>And I packed it full of grub and "hooch", and I slung it on the sleigh;<br>Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">You know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below;<br>When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow;<br>When the pine-trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood,<br>And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood;<br>When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off, and the sky is weirdly lit,<br>And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit;<br>When the mercury is a frozen ball, and the frost-fiend stalks to kill--<br>Well, it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Oh, the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand,<br>As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land;<br>Half dazed, half crazed in the winter wild, with its grim heart-breaking woes,<br>And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows!<br>North by the compass, North I pressed; river and peak and plain<br>Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">River and plain and mighty peak--and who could stand unawed?<br>As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God.<br>North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes,<br>And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes,<br>Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill,<br>And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to death, lay Bill.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;<br>Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;<br>Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest, glittering ice in his hair,<br>Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;<br>Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.<br>I gazed at the coffin I'd brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,<br>And at last I spoke: "Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,<br>A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies."</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,<br>With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't control?<br>Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,<br>And that seems to say: "You may try all day, but you'll never jam me in"?<br>I'm not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue<br>As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do.<br>Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,<br>And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Well, I thawed and thawed for thirteen days, but it didn't seem no good;<br>His arms and legs stuck out like pegs, as if they was made of wood.<br>Till at last I said: "It ain't no use--he's froze too hard to thaw;<br>He's obstinate, and he won't lie straight, so I guess I got to--saw."<br>So I sawed off poor Bill's arms and legs, and I laid him snug and straight<br>In the little coffin he picked hisself, with the dinky silver plate;<br>And I came nigh near to shedding a tear as I nailed him safely down;<br>Then I stowed him away in my Yukon sleigh, and I started back to town.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=508689" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep,<br>And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up, when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep;<br>And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun,<br>And sometimes I wonder if they was, the awful things I done.<br>And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law,<br>I often think of poor old Bill--and how hard he was to saw.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Robert+William+Service">Robert William Service</a></strong></div>