Leisure-Sigler fight - Montgomery InGenWeb Project

Curtis Street is down in the southwest end of town and one of the leading factions resident thereon or therein, as the grammarians please, is the Leisure-Sigler faction. Sigler has a wife and four children and with him lives his mother and her brother, Charles Leisure. Both Sigler and his festive old uncle are fond of corn juice, rye extract and hop ale, and last Friday they went down town and indulged their abnormal appetite for these delicacies until the irrigation committees at the several bar rooms refused to accommodate them any further. The merry gentlemen then turned their fairy foot steps toward Court Street and arrived there in the course of time—much time. Once inside the house they fell to quarreling and from words they passed to blows. Sigler, being more husky, was giving his uncle some fancy points in boxing when the old blatherskite discarded all the rules of the ring and drew a pocket knife, known in polite parlance as a “frog-sticker.” Armed with this weapon he made short work of his aggressive nephew. The first cut slashed the end of one ear, laid open a cheek and cut a piece off his lip big enough to bait a cat fish hook. The second blow laid open the other cheek and the third was jabbed straight into his throat an inch from the jugular vein. A half a dozen vicious slashes along the neck and throat were then made and when Sigler threw up his hands to save himself these members were stabbed and slashed most cruelly. Finally the young man’s mother ran in to save her son’s life and her now fiendish brother turned upon her and stabbed her half a dozen times on the hands and arms. A small artery in her arm was cut and she bled like a butchered animal. She undoubtedly saved the life of her miserable son, however, for help arrived before Leisure could put the finishing touches on his beastly work. The police were summoned and the old man was trotted off to jail. He was also bleeding profusely, for in the fight he had been knocked over a chair and had fallen on a basin, which cut him in half a dozen places. Dr. Niven and Dr. Barcus were called in to attend Sigler and his mother and had hard work to keep them from bleeding to death. The cuts, while ugly and painful, are not necessarily fatal, but Leisure will be kept in jail until all doubts as to their recovery are removed. Should either die, he will be tried for murder and at best will not escape a trial on the charge of assault and battery with intent to commit murder.