So I buried him as the contract was in a narrow grave and deep,
And there he's waiting the Great Clean-up,
when the Judgment sluice-heads sweep;
And I smoke my pipe and I meditate in the light of the Midnight Sun,
And sometimes I wonder if they WAS, the awful things I done.
And as I sit and the parson talks, expounding of the Law,
I often think of poor old Bill--AND HOW HARD HE WAS TO SAW.




The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike



This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,
As I smoked my pipe in the camp-fire light,
and the Glories swept the sky;
As the Northlights gleamed and curved and streamed,
and the bottle of "hooch" was dry.

A man once aimed that my life be shamed, and wrought me a deathly wrong;
I vowed one day I would well repay, but the heft of his hate was strong.
He thonged me East and he thonged me West; he harried me back and forth,
Till I fled in fright from his peerless spite
to the bleak, bald-headed North.

And there I lay, and for many a day I hatched plan after plan,
For a golden haul of the wherewithal to crush and to kill my man;
And there I strove, and there I clove through the drift of icy streams;