Abraham LIncthun (@AbrahamLincthun)

SWEARING ON THE BOOK & MEDITATING ON THE LAW (OF MOSES) The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill part 1 By Robert W. Service 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 I 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 heartbreaking 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.