Robert Service

I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,
A-purpose to revisit the old claim.
I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,
And the lads who once were with me in the game.
Poor boys, they’re down-and-outers, and there’s scarcely one to-day
Can show a dozen colors in his poke;
And me, I’m still prospecting, old […]

The man above was a murderer, the man below was a thief;
And I lay there in the bunk between, ailing beyond belief;
A weary armful of skin and bone, wasted with pain and grief.
My feet were froze, and the lifeless toes were purple and green and gray;
The little flesh that clung to my bones,
you could punch […]

He’s the man from Eldorado, and he’s just arrived in town,
In moccasins and oily buckskin shirt.
He’s gaunt as any Indian, and pretty nigh as brown;
He’s greasy, and he smells of sweat and dirt.
He sports a crop of whiskers that would shame a healthy hog;
Hard work has racked his joints and stooped his back;
He slops along […]

Now wouldn’t you expect to find a man an awful crank
That’s staked out nigh three hundred claims, and every one a blank;
That’s followed every fool stampede, and seen the rise and fall
Of camps where men got gold in chunks and he got none at all;
That’s prospected a bit of ground and sold it for a […]

‘Twas up in a land long famed for gold, where women were far and rare,
Tellus, the smith, had taken to wife a maiden amazingly fair;
Tellus, the brawny worker in iron, hairy and heavy of hand,
Saw her and loved her and bore her away from the tribe of a Southern land;
Deeming her worthy to queen his […]

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 […]

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 […]

“The North has got him.” –Yukonism.
I tried to refine that neighbor of mine, honest to God, I did.
I grieved for his fate, and early and late I watched over him like a kid.
I gave him excuse, I bore his abuse in every way that I could;
I swore to prevail; I camped on his trail;
I plotted […]

There was Claw-fingered Kitty and Windy Ike living the life of shame,
When unto them in the Long, Long Night came the man-who-had-no-name;
Bearing his prize of a black fox pelt, out of the Wild he came.
His cheeks were blanched as the flume-head foam
when the brown spring freshets flow;
Deep in their dark, sin-calcined pits were his sombre […]

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, […]