"He afterward fell off a Wabash train at Edwardsville and claimed
to have sustained serious injuries, but in this case the
company's attorneys beat him and proved him to be an impostor. In
1879 he stumbled into the telegraph office at the Union Depot
here, when Henry C. Mahoney, the superintendent, catching sight
of him, put him out, with the curt remark that he didn't want him
to stick that crutch into a cuspidor and fall down, as it was too
expensive a performance for the company to stand. He beat the
Missouri Pacific and several other railroads and municipalities
at different times, it is claimed, and manages to get enough at
each successful venture to carry him along for a year or eighteen
months, by which time the memory of his trick fades out of the
public mind, when he again bobs up serenely."
Anomalous Suicides.--The literature on suicide affords many
instances of self-mutilations and ingenious modes of producing
death. In the Dublin Medical Press for 1854 there is an
extraordinary case of suicide, in which the patient thrust a
red-hot poker into his abdomen and subsequently pulled it out,
detaching portions of the omentum and 32 inches of the colon.
Another suicide in Great Britain swallowed a red-hot poker.
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