“Next day,” said the barber, “I heard some news. It seems that a man had died at 1908 Piney Street and just a little while before a man in the next house had taken poison. The folks in one house sent for a doctor and the ones in the other sent for a barber. The funny part is the doctor and I both made a mistake and got into the wrong house. He went in to see the dead man and found the family doctor just getting ready to leave. The doctor didn’t waste any time asking questions, but got out his stomach pump, stuck it into the dead man and went to work pumping the poison out. All this time I was busy shaving the man who had taken poison. And the funniest part of it all is that after the doctor had pumped all the other doctor’s medicine out of the dead man, he opened his eyes, raised up in bed and asked for a steak and potatoes.
“This made the family doctor mad, and he and the doctor with a stomach pump got into a fight and fell down the stairs and broke the hat rack all to pieces.”
“And how about your man who had taken poison?” asked the Post Man timidly.
“Him?” said the barber, “why he died, of course, but he died with one of the beautifulest shaves that ever a man had.—Brush!”
An African of terrible aspect bore down upon the Post Man, struck him violently with the stub of a whisk broom, seized his coat at the back and ripped it loose from its collar.
“Call again,” growled the barber in a voice of the deepest menace, as the scribe made a rush for the door and escaped.
(Houston Daily Post, Sunday morning, May 31, 1896.)
Barbershop Adventure
When the Post Man entered the shop yesterday the chairs were full of customers, and for a brief moment he felt a thrill of hope that he might escape, but the barber’s eye, deadly and gloomy fixed itself upon him.
“You’re next,” he said, with a look of diabolical malevolence, and the Post Man sank into a hard chair nailed to the wall, with a feeling of hopeless despair.