For instance, one night in December little Al Wingate came into Billy Grimm’s where a gang of us were doing our Christmas shopping early and, as usual when he had a load aboard, he was leaking tears and lamentations with every faltering step he took. Talk about your crying jags, when this here Little Al got going he had riparian rights. It made you wonder where he kept his reservoirs hid at, him not weighing more than about ninety pounds and being short-waisted besides. Maybe he had hydraulic legs; I don’t know. Likewise always on such occasions, which they were frequent, he acted low and suicidal in his mind. He was our official melancholihic.
So he drifted in out of the starry night and leaned up against the bar, and between sobs he says to Billy Grimm, “Billy,” he says, “have you got any real deadly poison round here?”
“Only the regular staple brands,” says Billy. “What’ll it be—rye or Bourbon?”
“Billy,” he says, “don’t trifle with a man that’s already the same as dead. Licker has been my curse and downfall. It’s made me what I am tonight. Look at me—no good to myself or anybody else on this earth. Just a poor derelick without a true friend on this earth. But this is the finish with me. I’ve said that before but now I mean it. Before tomorrow morning I’m going to end everything. If one of you boys won’t kindly trust me with a pistol I’d be mighty much obliged to somebody for the loan of a piece of rope about six or seven or eight feet long. Just any little scrap of rope that you happen to have handy will do me,” he says.
I put in my oar. “Why, you poor little worthless sawed-off-and-hammered-down,” I says to him, “don’t try to hang yourself without you slip an anvil into the seat of your pants first.”
One of the other boys—Rawhide Rawlings, I think it was—speaks up also and says, “And don’t try jumping off a high roof, neither; you’d only go up!”
You see we were acquainted with Little Al’s peculiarities and we knew he didn’t mean a word he said, and so we were just aiming to cheer him up. But Good Sam, who’d joined our little group of intense drinkers only a few minutes before, he didn’t enter into the spirit of it at all. He motioned to us to come on down to the other end of the rail and he asks us haven’t we got any sympathy for a fellow being that’s sunk so deep in despondency he’s liable to drown himself in his own water-works plant any minute?
“You don’t want to be prodding him that-away,” he says; “what you want to do is humor him along. You want to lead him so close up to the Pearly Gates that he can hear the hinges creaking; that’ll make him see things different,” he says. “That’ll scare him out of this delusion of his that he wants to be a runt angel.”
“I suppose then you think you could cure him yourself?” asks one of the gang.
“In one easy lesson,” says Good Sam, speaking very confident. “All I ask from you gents is for one of you to let me borrow his six-gun off of him for a little while and then everybody agree to stand back and not interfere. If possible I’d like for it to be a big unhealthy-looking six-gun,” he says.