Robert Service-The Shooting of Dan McGrew

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the
Malamute saloon’
The kid that handles the music-box was hitting
a jag-time tune;
Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous
Dan McGrew,
And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the
lady that’s known as Lou.

When out of the night, which was fifty below,
and into the din and the glare,
There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks,
dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.
He looked like a man with a foot in the grave
and scarcely the strength of a louse,
Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he
called for drinks for the house.

There was none could place the stranger’s face,
though we searched ourselves for a clue;
But we drank his health, and the last to drink
was Dangerous Dan McGrew.

There’s men that somehow just grip your eyes,
and hold them hard like a spell;
And such was he, and he looked to me like a
man who had lived in hell;
With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of
a dog whose day is done,
Then I got to figgering who he was, and won-
dering what he’d do,
And I turned my head-and there watching
him was the lady that’s known as Lou.

His eyes went rubbering round the room, and
he seemed in a kind of daze,
Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his
wandering gaze.
The rag-time kid was having a drink; there
was no one else on the stool,
So the stranger stumbles across the room, and
flops down there like a fool.
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt
he sat, and I saw him sway;
Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands
-my God! But that man could play.

Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the
moon was awful clear,
And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a
silence you most could hear;
With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you
camped there in the cold,
A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean
mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green,yellowand red,
the Northern Lights swept in bars?-
Then you’ve a hunch what the music meant
. . . hunger and night and the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that’s ban-
ished with bacon and beans,
But the gnawing huger of lonely men for a
home and all that it means;
For a fireside far from the cares that are, four
walls and a roof above;
But oh! So cramful of cozy joy, and crowned
with a woman’s love-
A woman dearer than all the world, and true
as Heaven is true-
(God! How ghastly she looks through her
rouge,-the lady that’s known as Lou.)

Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft
that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean
of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved;
that her love was a devils lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you
was to crawl away and die.
'Twas the crowning cry of a hearts despair,
and it thrilled you through and through-
“I guess I’ll make it a spread misere” said
Dangerous Dan McGrew.

Shall I continue?