I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie
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Whenever wherever or whatsoever the manner of death he die
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Whether he die in the light o' day or under the peak-faced moon
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In cabin or dance-hall camp or dive mucklucks or patent shoon
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On velvet tundra or virgin peak by glacier drift or draw
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In muskeg hollow or canyon gloom by avalanche fang or claw
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By battle murder or sudden wealth by pestilence hooch or lead
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I swore on the Book I would follow and look till I found my tombless dead
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For Bill was a dainty kind of cuss and his mind was mighty sot
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On a dinky patch with flowers and grass in a civilized boneyard lot
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And where he died or how he died it didn't matter a damn
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So long as he had a grave with frills and a tombstone epigram
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So I promised him and he paid the price in good cheechako coin
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Which the same I blowed in that very night down in the Tenderloin
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Then I painted a three-foot slab of pine here lies poor Bill MacKie
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And I hung it up on my cabin wall and waited for Bill to die
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Years passed away and at last one day came a squaw with a story strange
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Of a long-deserted line of traps way back of the Bighorn range
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Of a little hut by the great divide and a white man stiff and still
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Lying there by his lonesome self and I figured it must be Bill
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So I thought of the contract I'd made with him and I took down from the shelf
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The swell black box with the silver plate he'd picked out for hisself
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And I packed it full of grub and hooch and I slung it on the sleigh
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Then I harnessed up my team of dogs and was off at dawn of day
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You know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's sixty-nine below
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When the ice-worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow
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When the pine trees crack like little guns in the silence of the wood
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And the icicles hang down like tusks under the parka hood
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When the stove-pipe smoke breaks sudden off and the sky is weirdly lit
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And the careless feel of a bit of steel burns like a red-hot spit
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When the mercury is a frozen ball and the frost-fiend stalks to kill
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Well it was just like that that day when I set out to look for Bill
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Oh the awful hush that seemed to crush me down on every hand
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As I blundered blind with a trail to find through that blank and bitter land
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Half dazed half crazed in the winter wild with its grim heartbraking woes
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And the ruthless strife for a grip on life that only the sourdough knows
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North by the compass North I pressed river and peak and plain
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Passed like a dream I slept to lose and I waked to dream again
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River and plain and mighty peak and who could stand unawed
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As their summits blazed he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God
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North aye North through a land accurst shunned by the scouring brutes
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And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes
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Till at last I came to a cabin squat built in the side of a hill
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And I burst in the door and there on the floor frozen to death lay Bill
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Ice white ice like a winding-sheet sheathing each smoke-grimed wall
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Ice on the stove-pipe ice on the bed ice gleaming over all
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Sparkling ice on the dead man's chest glittering ice in his hair
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Ice on his fingers ice in his heart ice in his glassy stare
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Hard as a log and trussed like a frog with his arms and legs outspread
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I gazed at the coffin I'd brought for him and I gazed at the gruesome dead
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And at last I spoke Bill liked his joke but still goldarn his eyes
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A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies
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Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole
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With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can't control
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Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin
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And that seems to say you may try all day but you'll never jam me in
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I'm not a man of the quitting kind but I never felt so blue
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As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I'd do
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Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about
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And I lit a roaring fire in the stove and I started to thaw Bill out
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