les 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, yellow, and red, the North Lights swept
in bars--
Then you've a haunch what the music meant ... hunger and night and
the stars.

And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans;
But the gnawing hunger 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 cosy 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 some one had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a
devil's lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and
die.
'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you
through and through--
"I guess I'll make it a spread misere," said Dangerous Dan McGrew.

The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood;
And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with
blood.
The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a
frozen lash,
And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with
a crash,

And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar
way;
In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him
sway;
Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice
was calm;
And, "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn;
But