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Show ONE BRAVE MAN STILL. Modern conditions of life are making: "cowards of U3 all." Personal Per-sonal courage is a rare quality in men today for tie reason that any citizen who exhibits courage in a good cause is usually made a horrible horri-ble example of, while thugs, sluggers and bad men generally are allowed to get off on the Dogberrian principle that no self-respecting guardian of justice should have anything to do with lawbreakers. The newspapers teem with accounts of hold-ups where whole trainloads of people will sit as meek as lambs at the request of a single sin-gle robber to "shell out." But now and then there does appear on the scene a man with some little remnant of the old spirit of the race in him and then the material for a rattling good novel is manufactured In short order right on the spot. Such was the case recently when a party of young men and women wo-men were rfturning by stage to Ouray, Colo., after a day's picnicking picnick-ing in the mountains. Masked men, armed to the teeth, suddenly blocked the road and brought the stage to a standstill. They thought they had only the ordinary take-'em-as-you-find-'em specimens of mankind to deal with, and were congratulating themselves on a good job, when a lady-like little fellow from the East just a despised "tenderfoot" not a terrible border ruffian or cowboy dead-shot, nor yet an old Indian fighter, but merely a mild-mannered bookkeeper named Samuel McCurdy, coolly pulled out an automatic pistol and began answering the highwaymen's requests with a fusillade of bullets. The ruffians were not prepared for such a show of resistance and instantly decamped from tie scene, leaving a trail of blood as a testimony testi-mony that the arguments of the little tenderfoot had gone to the spot. There would be far less of crime, mob rule, and hoodlumism if more people would have the personal courage to defend themselves against unjust attacks. But we are all so careful of our skins that we will stand anything rather than take any bodily risk and so violence and tyranny run riot, in the name of peace and order. |
