It’s Halloween tonight, and the children will be running through the streets on a mission to fill bags with candy. But, some believe that spirits walk tonight. It’s a good time to sit in front of a fire and tell spooky ghost stories. Because sophiagurl wants it (and what she wants, she gets!), I’ve posted a story from my repertoire to celebrate the day. Hope you enjoy. Happy Halloween to all.
A man I know travels for a living through dusty back roads of Texas to small towns, where he sells welding supplies to the local hardware stores. He told me a story that I thought was interesting, and he said I could pass it along. He swears that it is true.
One day he was driving on a farm to market road west of Abilene, Texas. The landscape around him didn’t interest him much. It was just endless rolling prairie, broken here and there by barbed wire fences. Occasionally, he passed small herds of cattle grazing. He drove past an old cemetery, the remnant of a time when there had been a community in this desolate land. The tombstones standing bent and broken among the weeds made his thoughts start to wander.
He tried to imagine what life must have been like for those settlers in the early days of Texas. “How hard their life must have been!” he thought. “They must have struggled to make a living on this land.”
In that frame of mind, thinking about days gone by, he glanced ahead and saw the silhouette of a tall thin man standing beside the road. At first glance, he figured the man for a cowboy, because of the hat and the boots. There was no horse around, and no one goes hiking in high-heeled boots, so my friend knew this was a hitchhiker.
Not being in the habit of picking up strangers, my friend prepared to ignore the man on the road. But he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the hitchhiker. The fellow seemed so out of place.
Keep in mind, that these perceptions were taking place in a matter of seconds as he drove toward the hitchhiker. The man stood there in the west Texas wind with his black duster coat blowing about his knees. As he drove closer, my friend saw the hitchhiker’s thin, angular face freckled from the sun. His sandy red hair fell out from under the big black hat and almost touched his shoulders. The hitchhiker was shuffling a deck of cards back and forth between his hands in one of those fancy card shark type of shuffles.
As my friend drew even with the hitchhiker, the man stared at him with angry black eyes and held out those cards with a wordless question on his face, as if to say, “Care for a game?”
My friend didn’t, and he gunned the car and whizzed right past the hitchhiker. But, when he glanced in his rearview mirror…the hitchhiker was gone!
My friend stomped the brakes and the car ground to a halt. He turned around in the seat to look, but there was no one on the road. There was no tree to hide behind, and no ditch to jump into. He didn’t know where the man had gone. He got out of the car and walked back the few hundred yards to where the man had been standing. On the dust beside the road, there were footprints of birds and of small animals, but there were no human footprints in the sand.
Scratching his head, my friend got back in the car and drove on down the road thinking he must have had a daydream. But, when he stopped for gas at a little town a few miles down the road, he discovered that perhaps he had not.
When he paid for his gasoline, he laughingly told the woman behind the counter about his hallucination. Her eyes grew wide and she shook her head. She said, “No, sir. Other folks have seen just what you did. You saw Long Tom March…or the ghost of him anyway.”
Knowing that I would want the story, my friend stopped long enough to hear the whole tale…and this is what he discovered:
Back in the old days, a lot of people came to Texas for the opportunity to get land. Most of the folks were good God-fearing people, but sometimes there were some really bad men who came here. Whenever a few settlers moved to one area, a town sprang up. Now this town might be no more than a general store and a saloon that doubled on Sunday as a church meeting room. Near Abilene was such a town. It’s saloon was frequented by a man who was meaner than the devil himself. They called him “Long Tom March.” The “long” was because he was tall. Back then, most men weren’t six foot tall, but Tom was taller than seven foot! He towered over most men. So skinny he was that his belly button almost touched his backbone, as folks say in west Texas. Everybody backed away from those angry black eyes of his.
What Long Tom March loved was gambling. He would bet on anything, but mostly he liked to play poker. He had a favorite table in the saloon where he sat day after day asking anyone who passed to join him in a game. He was a good player, and he always won…at least one way or another. If someone had a better hand than he did, they were smart to just fold the cards and walk away. Long Tom was quick with a Bowie Knife and even faster with a gun. He had notches on both to show how many men he had killed over a game of cards. You can imagine that the folks who lived in that town began to feel very uncomfortable coming into the saloon. They knew that Long Tom would badger them to play poker. And, they knew that if they played a game with Long Tom they would lose their money or their life!
But, sometimes bullies get their “come uppance.” Someone comes along who doesn’t play by the bully’s rules. That happened to Long Tom March. One day, a stranger to town walked into the saloon. He sidled up to the bar and asked the bartender for a drink. Long Tom called out, “Hey feller, come on over here and join me in a game of draw poker!” That stranger smiled and sat down across the table from Long Tom.
Long Tom dealt the hand. He fanned his five cards in front of his face and held back a grin when he saw the two pretty ladies looking up at him…a pair of queens. That was good. He studied the stranger with those evil eyes of his. The stranger looked at him for a long minute and put fifty dollars on the table. Long Tom called the bet. The stranger put one card on the table, and Long Tom put back two. Tom picked up the deck, dealt off a burn card and put it aside. He dealt a new card to the stranger and two for himself.
When he looked at his cards he almost jumped out of his seat. Three pretty ladies in his hand! The stranger bet fifty dollars more. Long Tom said, “I’ll see your fifty and raise you a hundred more.” The stranger called the bet.
Long Tom grinned as he place his cards face up on the table. “Three queens!” he crowed. “Can you beat that?”
The stranger frowned and said, “Now, that’s a tough hand to beat.” Then a slow smile stretched over his face as he spread his cards on the table. “But, “ he said, “a Royal Flush can do it.” The stranger held the Ace, King, Queen, Jack and Ten of Spades!
Long Tom was furious! “You cheatin’dog!” he yelled. He jumped to his feet and reached for his gun. But, that stranger was quicker. Before Tom’s gun had cleared the leather of his holster, he took a bullet right between the eyes and fell to the floor. Now in the commotion that followed, the stranger slipped out of there and disappeared from town! He didn’t know that the people living there would probably have pinned a medal on his chest and called him a hero.
So nobody knows who killed Long Tom March. But, the folks in town were delighted to be rid of him. They buried him that very afternoon. Nobody bothered to build him a coffin, they just pulled an old gunny sack over his head and another over his legs and called it good. Then they shoved his crudely shrouded body in a hole they dug at the edge of the cemetery. No one bothered to even say words over his grave, because what was there to say about a fellow as evil as Long Tom March?
Long Tom March was dead. But he wasn’t gone! That very night, the men who buried him were walking down the one street in town, when they saw the shadow of a long thin man in a duster coat walking toward them in the darkness! They scattered and the figure disappeared.
The next night, in the saloon, the bartender glanced up at Long Tom’s favorite table, and saw a familiar figure sitting there shuffling the cards waiting for a game! He punched one of the men at the bar and said, “Look over there! What do you see?” The man must have seen the same thing as the bartender. Because he gulped down his whiskey and ran from the room!
After that, folks often saw Long Tom walking the streets, or sitting in the saloon, or standing on a street corner shuffling his cards. So, it’s no surprise that folks started moving away from that town. Soon it became a ghost town…in more ways than one! Over the years, the building fell to dust. Now there isn’t anything there but a cemetery. And, now and then, folks driving on the road see a lonesome figure standing at the side of the road. He’s shuffling his cards and waiting for a game. Nobody knows if anyone has ever actually stopped and taken him up on a game of poker. But, it’s a sure bet that if they did…they lost!
Technorati Tags: Texas, Long Tom March, ghost, poker
