The Shooting Of Dan McGrew - Poem Recited Taylor Holmes from buckskin mare Watch Video

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✓ Published: 01-Apr-2024

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Notice the wild ragtime piano playing at the very start of this poem from the Yukon.<br/><br/>The Shooting of Dan McGrew<br/><br/>Poem by Robert W. Service <br/><br/>A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon;<br/>The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune;<br/>Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew,<br/>And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou.<br/><br/>When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare,<br/>There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear.<br/>He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse,<br/>Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house.<br/>There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue;<br/>But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew.<br/><br/>There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell;<br/>And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell;<br/>With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done,<br/>As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one.<br/>Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do,<br/>And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou.<br/><br/>His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze,<br/>Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze.<br/>The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool,<br/>So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool.<br/>In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway;<br/>Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play.<br/><br/>Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear,<br/>And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear;<br/>With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold,<br/>A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;<br/>While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? —<br/>Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars.<br/><br/>And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans,<br/>But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means;<br/>For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above;<br/>But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love —<br/>A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true —<br/>(God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that's known as Lou.)<br/><br/>Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;<br/>But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;<br/>That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie;<br/>That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die.<br/>