The Shooting of Dan McGrew

Robert W. Service

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a rag-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 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, As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one. Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering 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 helf-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 hunch what the music meant . . . hunger and might 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 crowded 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.)? They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it’s so. I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two —? The woman that kissed him — and pinched his poke — was the lady known as Lou.