True stories of old Houston and Houstonians: historical and personal sketches / by S. O. Young. Page: 109
244 p. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this book.
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HOUSTON AND HOUSTONIANS 109
"Why," said he, "I have actually had the jimmies, and you know
that was going some. I got drunk and I could not get sober. I
kept it up day after day and week after week, and finally I gave
up trying to get sober and went in for the limit. One afternoon
I went in the grocery store of one of my friends and insisted
that he should go out and take a drink with me. He refused and
said he had better whiskey in his store than we could get elsewhere
and asked me to try it. Of course I agreed. I took a big
drink and it made me so drunk that the merchant had me taken
to a room on the second floor of his store. where one of his clerks
slept. I don't remember much about getting in bed, but I do remember
about waking up. It was late in the evening when I
awoke, and I was lying there wondering where I was when I
heard a noise behind me, and turning over I saw the biggest
skeleton anybody ever saw sitting on the bureau in front of the
looking glass. He had a great big scythe in his hand and sat
there grinning at me. You know all skeletons grin, but his grin
was a different sort of thing; you could see he was enjoying the
situation. In those days I was a bit profane, so I took a long
look at him and asked him what in hell he wanted and what he
was doing there.
"'Billy,' said he, very slowly and drawling, 'Billy,' said he, 'I
am here after you and I am going to cut your head off.' Saying
that he made one big jump, landed square across my chest, cut
my head off with the scythe, and jumped back on the bureau
again.
/ That made me good mad. I don't know how I did it, but I
could see just as well without my head as I could with it, but all
the same I wanted my head back. 'Look here,' I said to him,
'you bring that head back here or I'll hurt you.' 'You can't hurt
me,' he said. 'You make me laugh,' and with that he began to
chuckle. It was the funniest chuckle you ever heard. It commenced
in his teeth and then dropped down into him and went
rattling along his ribs and sounded like a boy scraping along a
picket fence with a stick. I had my 45 with me and I lugged it
out. 'Are you going to bring that head back?' I asked. The
skeleton said nothing, but just sat there and grinned. I took
good aim at his head and said: 'I am going to count three and
when I finish, if my head's not back, I'm going to destroy you.
I commenced counting right slowly, 'one,' 'two,' 'three,' and I let
him have it. I saw the looking-glass fly to pieces and I saw that
I had missed him, so I pulled down on him again. When the
smoke cleared off the skeleton was gone, but he had taken my
head with him and I was in a worse fix than ever. I heard a
noise back of me and there was the skeleton. He was trying to
hide and I was trying to get a line on him when the crowd from
downstairs broke into the room and grabbed me. They lugged
me off to a hospital and the doctors finally pulled me through.
That is the reason. I don't drink. I have whiskey and that skele-
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Young, Samuel Oliver. True stories of old Houston and Houstonians: historical and personal sketches / by S. O. Young., book, 1913; Galveston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth24646/m1/109/: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Special Collections.