p. 107 | SHOT HIS COMPANION

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Dec 19, 1892

SHOT HIS COMPANION.

A FEW months ago a boy of ten was mortally wounded, one evening, in a suburb of one of our great cities. He was carried home, and a few minutes later a small lad, aged twelve, pushed his way through the crowd, loudly announcing himself to be "Joe K., the murderer."

He wore a wide-brimmed sombrero, and a belt, in which was a pistol, still hot from its discharge.

"I 'held him up,'" he said, "and told him to give me his money. I knew he had twenty-five cents in his pocket. He wouldn't do it, so I had to fire."

The child died. The other child, for he was no more, was sent to a reformatory. His brain was so filled with stories of border life that it was impossible to convince him that he had done wrong. In his own eyes he was only a hero.

His parents were honest, hard-working people, who stated that they had no time to look after the boy, and that, when they thought he was at school, he was either reading the lives of Western train robbers, in flash papers, or was trying to imitate them.

About the same time a young man in a Western State, who had "held up" several trains alone, robbing the express agents of large sums, was tried and sentenced to a long imprisonment. A private diary was published, which he had kept while committing his crimes. In it he congratulates himself on his bravery, kindness, and high purposes in life, with evident sincerity.

"The papers," he says, "call me a villain. No one who knows me would give me that name. Nine men out of ten would have shot to kill; every time I fired only to frighten and to protect my life. Many a man in my place would have taken the women’s jewelry; I only took money. My friends know how brave and good a fellow I am."

Now were this young man and boy wholly to blame if they had learned to regard theft as a heroic exploit, and murder as an innocent exhibition of courage?

The American boy of the last generation was taught to regard the Indian fighter as the truest type of a hero; many American boys of to-day gloat over a literature in which the train robber and "bad man" of the West are held up as the ideal of manhood.

Is the boy altogether in fault if he imitates the only example which is set before him?

This is a question for parents to answer.—The Household.