Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank
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That's staked out nigh three hundred claims, and every one a blank;
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That's followed every fool stampede, and seen the rise and fall
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Of camps where men got gold in chunks and he got none at all;
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That's prospected a bit of ground and sold it for a song
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To see it yield a fortune to some fool that came along;
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That's sunk a dozen bed-rock holes, and not a speck in sight,
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Yet sees them take a million from the claims to left and right?
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Now aren't things like that enough to drive a man to booze?
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But Hard-Luck Smith was hoodoo-proof--he knew the way to lose.
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'Twas in the fall of nineteen four--leap-year I've heard them say--
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When Hard-Luck came to Hunker Creek and took a hillside lay.
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And lo! as if to make amends for all the futile past,
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Late in the year he struck it rich, the real pay-streak at last.
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The riffles of his sluicing-box were choked with speckled earth,
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And night and day he worked that lay for all that he was worth.
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And when in chill December's gloom his lucky lease expired,
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He found that he had made a stake as big as he desired.
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One day while meditating on the waywardness of fate,
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He felt the ache of lonely man to find a fitting mate;
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A petticoated pard to cheer his solitary life,
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A woman with soft, soothing ways, a confidant, a wife.
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And while he cooked his supper on his little Yukon stove,
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He wished that he had staked a claim in Love's rich treasure-trove;
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When suddenly he paused and held aloft a Yukon egg,
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For there in pencilled letters was the magic name of Peg.
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You know these Yukon eggs of ours--some pink, some green, some blue--
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A dollar per, assorted tints, assorted flavors too.
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The supercilious cheechako might designate them high,
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But one acquires a taste for them and likes them by-and-by.
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Well, Hard-Luck Henry took this egg and held it to the light,
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And there was more faint pencilling that sorely taxed his sight.
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At last he made it out, and then the legend ran like this--
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"Will Klondike miner write to Peg, Plumhollow, Squashville, Wis.?"
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That night he got to thinking of this far-off, unknown fair;
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It seemed so sort of opportune, an answer to his prayer.
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She flitted sweetly through his dreams, she haunted him by day,
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She smiled through clouds of nicotine, she cheered his weary way.
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At last he yielded to the spell; his course of love he set--
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Wisconsin his objective point; his object, Margaret.
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With every mile of sea and land his longing grew and grew.
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He practised all his pretty words, and these, I fear, were few.
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At last, one frosty evening, with a cold chill down his spine,
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He found himself before her house, the threshold of the shrine.
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His courage flickered to a spark, then glowed with sudden flame--
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He knocked; he heard a welcome word; she came--his goddess came.
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Oh, she was fair as any flower, and huskily he spoke:
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"I'm all the way from Klondike, with a mighty heavy poke.
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I'm looking for a lassie, one whose Christian name is Peg,
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Who sought a Klondike miner, and who wrote it on an egg."
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The lassie gazed at him a space, her cheeks grew rosy red;
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She gazed at him with tear-bright eyes, then tenderly she said:
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"Yes, lonely Klondike miner, it is true my name is Peg.
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It's also true I longed for you and wrote it on an egg.
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My heart went out to someone in that land of night and cold;
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But oh, I fear that Yukon egg must have been mighty old.
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I waited long, I hoped and feared; you should have come before;
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I've been a wedded woman now for eighteen months or more.
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I'm sorry, since you've come so far, you ain't the one that wins;
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But won't you take a step inside--I'll let you see the twins."
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The Ballad of Hard Luck Henry
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| Hank Snow |
