A HUMBLE HERO | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 7, 1903

A HUMBLE HERO.

An Illustration.

SUCH an one is J. J. Loeb of Colorado who saved the town of Manitou, in Ute Pass Canyon, Colorado, August 5, 1902. Since the age of two years he has been paralyzed on one side. He makes his living by selling soap. He rode from Denver to Los Angeles recently on a freight train to meet the famous Austrian surgeon, Dr. Lorenz, but had to bear the disappointment of being told there was no help for him. The story of how he saved Manitou is as follows:—

He reached Cascade in the afternoon after a ride for miles through a severe thunder storm, mixing with hail as he neared the town. The hail stones were so large, he tells us, that nine of the frozen masses filled the bicycle cap he was wearing. At Cascade he borrowed a rain coat of a liveryman. The liveryman pointed up the valley where about a mile and a half away, a great wall of water forty feet high—it seemed eighty—was pouring down upon them. No need to be told by man, God's angel told him of Manitou, with its 2,000 people below, and the campers along the valley. He turned his good horse down the valley and started in his mad race with death,—death in the slippery, dangerous mountain road. Death riding the crest of the cloud-burst wave of destruction. The rest of the story we will take from his telling in the Examiner of December 21:—

The hailstones beat against my body, while I held my only good hand over my eyes to prevent being blinded, and for days afterwards there were black and blue marks all over my body where those hailstones struck me. Maybe I didn't long for the use of that paralyzed arm just then. I had to cling to the horse with my one good leg. How I did it I don't know, except that there are such things as miracles. Once, after my horse had slipped, I held the bridle in my teeth. When the hailstones had bruised my hand—the hand I was holding over my eyes—so that every stone cut it like a knife, I drew my hand down, from the pain of it, lowered my head to the horse's mane and rode it blind. Did you ever think a man sentimental when he said he loved his favorite horse? Picture that pony in that frightful storm, and you will not wonder when the next man praises a horse to you. Constancy in human beings furnishes few parallels.

I rode back to Cascade and told the operator at the little railroad station to wire at once, for God's sake, to Manitou that the life of every man, woman and child was in danger. Then I dashed on to the pass. That was the rough-and-tumble part of the ride, through that canyon. My horse stumbled with me and threw me into the creek that flows through the canyon, after I had ridden about a mile and a

half. The faithful animal stood still, trembling and whinnying, as much or more for my safety as for his own, I have no doubt, until I was safely on his back; then, without my having to put the spur to him again, he leaped forward and we were down the canyon like a streak.

I rode about 175 yards when I saw two women coming leisurely along the pass, near the creek. I pulled up quick, shouted to the women to get to the top of the mountain unless they wanted to be drowned. They did not heed me, and, as I learned later, they were both drowned. I saw a horse tied to a tree near a tent about four feet from the creek. Maybe I was beginning to appreciate that noble little beast I was riding then, for I got off and led the other horse to high ground before I continued on to Manitou. I reached Rainbow Falls safely and was turning into the road to Manitou when my horse stumbled again and slipped and down we went, more than 100 feet to the bottom. My leg was cut open—my only good leg—and I was squeezed between rocks, but I got back in the saddle and rode along the creek and into the town, shouting warnings to everybody.

That is all the story. Nobody in the town was drowned. About sixty were hurt by the big trees that were washed through the canyon. Property valued at $120,000 was washed away, and I saw a great wall of water push the ties out from under the rails of the track as easily as I could push a match into a ball of wet mud. It was the most horrible thing I ever saw. I was only four minutes ahead of the flood, and strange as it may seem I was worse scared after I got through it all than I was at any other time.

What did I get for it? Nothing but the title of the "Paul Revere of Colorado." Not even thanks.

How human it all is, the treatment of the man who saved them! How such instances feebly illustrate the offering, the sacrifice, of Jesus Christ; who to save mankind—you and me, reader—from the great on-rushing, overwhelming tide of sin, gave Himself. The town of Manitou ought to pension Mr. Loeb for life; but they forgot him with an empty name. But Jesus Christ met scoffing, abuse, maltreatment, death, from those He came to save! May this little story help us more vividly to recognize Him who yielded all, suffered all in our behalf and to render to Him His due—ourselves.