There was a man over in Cherokee County who had some mighty good luck with ‘taters. He planted them on a steep hillside and when he dug under the row, one of the big ones rolled down the hillside and a great slew of dirt followed after. The dirt dammed up a good-sized stream and made a fifty acre lake, bored a hole through a little mountain, where the railroad company was fixin’ to dig a tunnel, and went on down a half mile further and dammed up a stream where a company was planning to build a power plant.
With the money he for his lake, and what the railroad paid him for the tunnel and with what he got from the power company for saving them the price of a dam, he was sure sitting on top of the world.
He didn’t always have such good luck. There was the time when he couldn’t afford to buy a hen and chickens. He got so down and out he tried to kill himself. He had a old pistol, but he was afraid it would work, so he went down to the store and bought a gallon of kerosene, a piece of strong rope and some rat poison. Then he went down to the river and got in a boat and rowed down to where some trees hung way out over the water.
He tied the rope around his neck and to the limb of a tree, soaked himself in kerosene and ate the rat poison, and set his clothes on fire, figuring that he should shoot himself just as he kicked the boat out from under him.
Well, he kicked the boat away and the pistol went off and shot the rope in two, he fell in the water and that put out the fire in his clothes, and he got to choking and strangling when he went under – and threw up the poison. He figured his luck had changed, so he swum over to the bank and announced himself as a candidate for the legislature. Got elected, too.