“Ever been in Seattle, Washington Territory?” he asked.
“Blub-a-lub-blub,” said the Post Man, struggling against the soap, and then he shook his head feebly.
“Neither have I,” said the barber, “but I have a brother named Bill who runs an orange orchard nine miles from St. John, Fla. That’s only a split hair on your neck; it’s growing the wrong way. They are caused by shaving the neck in the wrong direction. Sometimes whiskey will make them do that way. Whisky is a terrible thing. Do you drink it?”
The Post Man only had one eye of all his features uncovered by lather and he tried to throw an appealing expression implying negation into this optic, but the barber was too quick for him and filled the eye with soap by a dextrous flap of his brush.
“My brother Bill used to drink,” continued the barber. “He could drink more whiskey than any man in Houston, but he never got drunk. He had a chair in my shop, but I had to let him go. Bill had a wonderful constitution. When he got all he could hold he would quit drinking. The only way he showed it was in his eyes. They would get kind of glazed and fishy and wouldn’t turn in his head. When Bill wanted to look to one side he used to take his fingers and turn his eyeballs a little the way he wanted to see. His eyes looked exactly like those little round windows you see in the dome of the postoffice. You could hear Bill breathe across the street when he was full. He could shave people when he was drunk as well as he could sober.—Razor hurt you?”
The Post Man tried to wave one of his hands to disclaim any sense of pain, but the barber’s quick eye caught the motion and he leaned his weight against the hand, crushing it against the chair.
“I kept noticing,” went on the barber, “that Bill was getting about four customers to my one, even if he did drink so much. People would come in three or four at a time and sit down and wait their turns with Bill when my chair was vacant. I didn’t know what to make of it. Bill had all he could do, and he was so crowded that he didn’t have time to go out to a saloon, but he kept a big jug in the back room, and every few minutes he would slip in there and take a drink.
“One day I noticed a man that got out of Bill’s chair acting queer and he staggered as he went out. A day or two afterwards the shop was full of customers from morning till night, and one man came back and had a shave three different times in the forenoon. In a couple of days more there was a crowd of men in the shop, and they had a line formed outside two or three doors down the sidewalk. Bill made $9.00 that day. That evening a policeman came in and jerked me up for running a saloon without a license. It seems that Bill’s breath was so full of whiskey that every man he shaved went out feeling pretty hilarious and sent his friends there to be shaved. It cost me $300 to get out of it, and I shipped Bill to Florida pretty soon afterward.”
“I was sent for once,” went on the barber, as he seized his victim by the ear and slammed his head over on the other side, “to go out on Piney Street and shave a dead man. Barbers don’t much like a job of that kind, although they get from $5 to $10 for the work. It was 1908 Piney Street. I started about 11 o’clock at night. I found the street all right and I counted from the corner until I found 1908. I had my razors, soap and mug in a little case I use for such purposes. I went in and knocked at the door. An old man opened it and his eye fell on my case.