Read Ebook: Ballads of a Cheechako by Service Robert W Robert William

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Ebook has 303 lines and 31905 words, and 7 pages

: To the Man of the High North My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming

Men of the High North Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;

The Ballad of the Northern Lights One of the Down and Out--that's me. Stare at me well, ay, stare!

The Ballad of the Black Fox Skin There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,

The Ballad of Pious Pete I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.

The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill I took a contract to bury the body of blasphemous Bill MacKie,

The Ballad of One-Eyed Mike This is the tale that was told to me by the man with the crystal eye,

The Ballad of the Brand 'Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare,

The Ballad of Hard-Luck Henry Now wouldn't you expect to find a man an awful crank

The Man from Eldorado He's the man from Eldorado, and he's just arrived in town,

My Friends The man above was a murderer, the man below was a thief;

The Prospector I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,

The Black Sheep Hark to the ewe that bore him:

The Telegraph Operator I will not wash my face;

The Wood-Cutter The sky is like an envelope,

The Song of the Mouth-Organ I'm a homely little bit of tin and bone;

The Trail of Ninety-Eight Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.

The Ballad of Gum-Boot Ben He was an old prospector with a vision bleared and dim.

Clancy of the Mounted Police In the little Crimson Manual it's written plain and clear

Lost "Black is the sky, but the land is white--

L'Envoi We talked of yesteryears, of trails and treasure,

To the Man of the High North

My rhymes are rough, and often in my rhyming I've drifted, silver-sailed, on seas of dream, Hearing afar the bells of Elfland chiming, Seeing the groves of Arcadie agleam.

I was the thrall of Beauty that rejoices From peak snow-diademed to regal star; Yet to mine aerie ever pierced the voices, The pregnant voices of the Things That Are.

The Here, the Now, the vast Forlorn around us; The gold-delirium, the ferine strife; The lusts that lure us on, the hates that hound us; Our red rags in the patch-work quilt of Life.

The nameless men who nameless rivers travel, And in strange valleys greet strange deaths alone; The grim, intrepid ones who would unravel The mysteries that shroud the Polar Zone.

These will I sing, and if one of you linger Over my pages in the Long, Long Night, And on some lone line lay a calloused finger, Saying: "It's human-true--it hits me right"; Then will I count this loving toil well spent; Then will I dream awhile--content, content.

Men of the High North

Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing; Islands of opal float on silver seas; Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing; Pale ports of amber, golden argosies. Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing; Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky; Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing, Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.

Men of the High North, you who have known it; You in whose hearts its splendors have abode; Can you renounce it, can you disown it? Can you forget it, its glory and its goad? Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it? Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot; Only remain the guerdon and gain of it; Zest of the foray, and God, how you fought!

You who have made good, you foreign faring; You money magic to far lands has whirled; Can you forget those days of vast daring, There with your soul on the Top o' the World? Nights when no peril could keep you awake on Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow; Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon Fried at the camp-fire at forty below?

Can you remember your huskies all going, Barking with joy and their brushes in air; You in your parka, glad-eyed and glowing, Monarch, your subjects the wolf and the bear? Monarch, your kingdom unravisht and gleaming; Mountains your throne, and a river your car; Crash of a bull moose to rouse you from dreaming; Forest your couch, and your candle a star.

You who this faint day the High North is luring Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet; You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring, Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat: Honor the High North ever and ever, Whether she crown you, or whether she slay; Suffer her fury, cherish and love her-- He who would rule he must learn to obey.

Men of the High North, fierce mountains love you; Proud rivers leap when you ride on their breast. See, the austere sky, pensive above you, Dons all her jewels to smile on your rest. Children of Freedom, scornful of frontiers, We who are weaklings honor your worth. Lords of the wilderness, Princes of Pioneers, Let's have a rouse that will ring round the earth.

The Ballad of the Northern Lights

One of the Down and Out--that's me. Stare at me well, ay, stare! Stare and shrink--say! you wouldn't think that I was a millionaire. Look at my face, it's crimped and gouged--one of them death-mask things; Don't seem the sort of man, do I, as might be the pal of kings? Slouching along in smelly rags, a bleary-eyed, no-good bum; A knight of the hollow needle, pard, spewed from the sodden slum. Look me all over from head to foot; how much would you think I was worth? A dollar? a dime? a nickel? Why, I'M THE WEALTHIEST MAN ON EARTH.

No, don't you think that I'm off my base. You'll sing a different tune If only you'll let me spin my yarn. Come over to this saloon; Wet my throat--it's as dry as chalk, and seeing as how it's you, I'll tell the tale of a Northern trail, and so help me God, it's true. I'll tell of the howling wilderness and the haggard Arctic heights, Of a reckless vow that I made, and how I STAKED THE NORTHERN LIGHTS.

Remember the year of the Big Stampede and the trail of Ninety-eight, When the eyes of the world were turned to the North, and the hearts of men elate; Hearts of the old dare-devil breed thrilled at the wondrous strike, And to every man who could hold a pan came the message, "Up and hike". Well, I was there with the best of them, and I knew I would not fail. You wouldn't believe it to see me now; but wait till you've heard my tale.

You've read of the trail of Ninety-eight, but its woe no man may tell; It was all of a piece and a whole yard wide, and the name of the brand was "Hell". We heard the call and we staked our all; we were plungers playing blind, And no man cared how his neighbor fared, and no man looked behind; For a ruthless greed was born of need, and the weakling went to the wall, And a curse might avail where a prayer would fail, and the gold lust crazed us all.

Bold were we, and they called us three the "Unholy Trinity"; There was Ole Olson, the sailor Swede, and the Dago Kid and me. We were the discards of the pack, the foreloopers of Unrest, Reckless spirits of fierce revolt in the ferment of the West. We were bound to win and we revelled in the hardships of the way. We staked our ground and our hopes were crowned, and we hoisted out the pay. We were rich in a day beyond our dreams, it was gold from the grass-roots down; But we weren't used to such sudden wealth, and there was the siren town. We were crude and careless frontiersmen, with much in us of the beast; We could bear the famine worthily, but we lost our heads at the feast.

The town looked mighty bright to us, with a bunch of dust to spend, And nothing was half too good them days, and everyone was our friend. Wining meant more than mining then, and life was a dizzy whirl, Gambling and dropping chunks of gold down the neck of a dance-hall girl; Till we went clean mad, it seems to me, and we squandered our last poke, And we sold our claim, and we found ourselves one bitter morning--broke.

Oh, it was wild and weird and wan, and ever in camp o' nights We would watch and watch the silver dance of the mystic Northern Lights. And soft they danced from the Polar sky and swept in primrose haze; And swift they pranced with their silver feet, and pierced with a blinding blaze. They danced a cotillion in the sky; they were rose and silver shod; It was not good for the eyes of man--'twas a sight for the eyes of God. It made us mad and strange and sad, and the gold whereof we dreamed Was all forgot, and our only thought was of the lights that gleamed.

Oh, the tundra sponge it was golden brown, and some was a bright blood-red; And the reindeer moss gleamed here and there like the tombstones of the dead. And in and out and around about the little trail ran clear, And we hated it with a deadly hate and we feared with a deadly fear. And the skies of night were alive with light, with a throbbing, thrilling flame; Amber and rose and violet, opal and gold it came. It swept the sky like a giant scythe, it quivered back to a wedge; Argently bright, it cleft the night with a wavy golden edge. Pennants of silver waved and streamed, lazy banners unfurled; Sudden splendors of sabres gleamed, lightning javelins were hurled. There in our awe we crouched and saw with our wild, uplifted eyes Charge and retire the hosts of fire in the battlefield of the skies.

But all things come to an end at last, and the muskeg melted away, And frowning down to bar our path a muddle of mountains lay. And a gorge sheered up in granite walls, and the moose trail crept betwixt; 'Twas as if the earth had gaped too far and her stony jaws were fixt. Then the winter fell with a sudden swoop, and the heavy clouds sagged low, And earth and sky were blotted out in a whirl of driving snow.

We were climbing up a glacier in the neck of a mountain pass, When the Dago Kid slipped down and fell into a deep crevasse. When we got him out one leg hung limp, and his brow was wreathed with pain, And he says: "'Tis badly broken, boys, and I'll never walk again. It's death for all if ye linger here, and that's no cursed lie; Go on, go on while the trail is good, and leave me down to die." He raved and swore, but we tended him with our uncouth, clumsy care. The camp-fire gleamed and he gazed and dreamed with a fixed and curious stare. Then all at once he grabbed my gun and he put it to his head, And he says: "I'll fix it for you, boys"--them are the words he said.

So we sewed him up in a canvas sack and we slung him to a tree; And the stars like needles stabbed our eyes, and woeful men were we. And on we went on our woeful way, wrapped in a daze of dream, And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights came forth with a mystic gleam. They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow; And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow. They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan; They spread with a blaze of rose-pink rays never yet seen of man. They writhed like a brood of angry snakes, hissing and sulphur pale; Then swift they changed to a dragon vast, lashing a cloven tail. It seemed to us, as we gazed aloft with an everlasting stare, The sky was a pit of bale and dread, and a monster revelled there.

We climbed the rise of a hog-back range that was desolate and drear, When the Sailor Swede had a crazy fit, and he got to talking queer. He talked of his home in Oregon and the peach trees all in bloom, And the fern head-high, and the topaz sky, and the forest's scented gloom. He talked of the sins of his misspent life, and then he seemed to brood, And I watched him there like a fox a hare, for I knew it was not good. And sure enough in the dim dawn-light I missed him from the tent, And a fresh trail broke through the crusted snow, and I knew not where it went. But I followed it o'er the seamless waste, and I found him at shut of day, Naked there as a new-born babe--so I left him where he lay.

Day after day was sinister, and I fought fierce-eyed despair, And I clung to life, and I struggled on, I knew not why nor where. I packed my grub in short relays, and I cowered down in my tent, And the world around was purged of sound like a frozen continent. Day after day was dark as death, but ever and ever at nights, With a brilliancy that grew and grew, blazed up the Northern Lights.

They rolled around with a soundless sound like softly bruised silk; They poured into the bowl of the sky with the gentle flow of milk. In eager, pulsing violet their wheeling chariots came, Or they poised above the Polar rim like a coronal of flame. From depths of darkness fathomless their lancing rays were hurled, Like the all-combining search-lights of the navies of the world. There on the roof-pole of the world as one bewitched I gazed, And howled and grovelled like a beast as the awful splendors blazed. My eyes were seared, yet thralled I peered through the parka hood nigh blind; But I staggered on to the lights that shone, and never I looked behind.

There is a mountain round and low that lies by the Polar rim, And I climbed its height in a whirl of light, and I peered o'er its jagged brim; And there in a crater deep and vast, ungained, unguessed of men, The mystery of the Arctic world was flashed into my ken. For there these poor dim eyes of mine beheld the sight of sights-- That hollow ring was the source and spring of the mystic Northern Lights.

Then I staked that place from crown to base, and I hit the homeward trail. Ah, God! it was good, though my eyes were blurred, and I crawled like a sickly snail. In that vast white world where the silent sky communes with the silent snow, In hunger and cold and misery I wandered to and fro. But the Lord took pity on my pain, and He led me to the sea, And some ice-bound whalers heard my moan, and they fed and sheltered me. They fed the feeble scarecrow thing that stumbled out of the wild With the ravaged face of a mask of death and the wandering wits of a child-- A craven, cowering bag of bones that once had been a man. They tended me and they brought me back to the world, and here I am.

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