HENRY GOODE RAISES ROUGHHOUSE

Henry Goode had a habit of coming in the saloon and tearing things up. Mr. Williams worked in the basement saloon tending bar in the old Graves building on the corner. (This winter part of the north rock wall collapsed in this structure, the first built rock building on the square). Said, "I started selling whisky about ‘88 [1888] and sold it till about ‘92 [1892]. He once told me that the Democratic Party took him out of a saloon and put him in as postmaster and that he was going to stay with it whether he agreed with its policies or not.

One time he went to Dallas and came back, and Henry Goode had come in an broken things up. That he talked to him about it and he said he wouldn’t do it any more. A little later Mr. Williams and some others he named, whom I can’t now remember were playing billiards down there, and Goode came in wanted a drink. The decanter was sittin on the bar, and Goode raised the class and he could see he was going to crash it on the bar. Mr. Williams was right over his six shooter under the bar, and pulled it and cracked him in the side of the head before he had time to do it, and knocked him, he said, "as far as that horse out there," (referring to a horse tethered about 20 feed away along the sidewalk). And Goode bled at the ears, mouth, and nose, and he thought he had killed him. And he called for Dr. George F. Perry, and they carried him out.

Goode never did do anything about it. Sometime later Henry and Milt Goode and a younger brother and others, were playing leap frog over in front of Bob Matheson’s Saloon on the north side. Mr. Williams said he must have been feeling a little mean, and he thought maybe they were planning on bothering him. Jim Livingston came in (this was before 1898) and he told Livingston he thought they were bantering him. So they each put a six shooter in their pants, walked over there, and walked right through the boys into Matheson’s Saloon, and then walked back through them again, but they didn’t do anything. That they intended to have it out with them if they made a crooked move.

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