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 bone-yard 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 I 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 heart-breaking 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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