Wall, no! I can't tell whar he lives,
Bekase he don't live, you see;
Leastways, he's got out of the habit
Of livin' like you an' me.

Whar have you been for the last three year
That you haven't heard folks tell
How Jimmy Bludso passed in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle?

He weren't no saint--them engineers
Is pretty much all alike--
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, an' he never lied--
I reckon he never knowed how.

And this was all the religion he had--
To treat his engine well;
Never be passed on the river;
To mind the pilot's bell;
And if ever the Prairie Belle took fire,
A thousand times he swore
He'd hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last soul got ashore.

All the boats has their day on the Mississip',
And her day come at last,--
The Movastar was a better boat,
But the Belle she wouldn't be passed.
And so she come tearin' along that night--
The oldest craft on the line--
With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,
And her furnace crammed, rosin' an' pine.

The fire bust out as she cl'ared the bar
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, an' made
For that willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin' an' cursin', but Jim yelled out
Over all the infernal roar,
"I'll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot's ashore!"

Through the hot black breath of the burnin' boat
Jim Bludso's voice was heard,
An' they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.
And, sure's you're born, they all got off
Afore the smokestack fell,--
And Bludso's ghost went up alone
In the smoke of the Prairie Belle.

He weren't no saint --but at Jedgment
I'd run my chance with Jim,
'Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn't shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,--
And went for it, thar an' then:
And Christ ain't a-goin' to be too hard
On a man that died for me.