Rensselaer Republican, Volume 24, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 October 1891 — SAVING HIS AMMUNITION. [ARTICLE]

SAVING HIS AMMUNITION.

Why a United States Marshal Held His Fire, New York Tribune. In the year of the last yellow fever epidemic in the South one of the first men to catch the disease at a summer resort on the gulf was a tall, rather heavily built man, whose eye was dark and keen and who wore a a line gray imperial. He was a strikingly handsome man, with his military carriage and his strong face But his manner was grave and chilling and he made few aeqainLances. Staying at the big hotel was'a man "wtoriirtriKmariylifohad lived in thw West, but who shortly after tho war had married a Southern widow who owned a sugar plantation on the Mississippi River. He knew Major Wells, the stranger, and on the evening when the Major died told the fol-lowing-story to a group of men who sat on one of the hotel verandas: “When I first saw Wells he was a deputy United States Marshal in Nevada.. Hewas so cool and daring that he seemed absolutely-indifferent as to death. He would calmly walk into a bar-room filled with reckless gamblers and desperate outlaws.pick out his man, scarcely saying a word and march him out tho door without placing his baud on a weapon or holding himself in readiness fur an attack. “Coming down the street one day I heard rapid firing, and look up saw Wells standing behind the stump oi a tree (the stumps still in the streets where the trees had been failed) and three men blazing away at him. Wells was a rigid as a statue, his face a little white, but unmoved. He was a sure shot with a revolver, and I expected to see him draw his sixshooter and drop his men in one, two, three order, but he did not stir. For a inoment" tlio bullets rained around there, and then the sound ol the shooting suddenly ceased. The three men had emptiedrutbeir revolvers. At that instant,Vquick as a flash and with a tiger bound, Wells leaped - before the three men, and, whipping out his revolver, with a swift stroke of his arm covered their. They all stood stock still. The whole, thing took less time than it docs to draw a long breath. Then he grimly walked the three of them off, and saw thqm securely locked up. “I met him a few hours later leaning carelessly over a bar, as easy and unconcerned as if he had never heard the crack of a six-shooter “ ’Good heavens, Wells,’.l,...said to himywhy did you let those fellows blaze away at you without returning a shot? The chances were fifty to one against you.’ “There was a quiet smile on his lips when he answered that words can not describe, and in his* eye was the twinkle of a man who loved a good joke: “‘There jvas just one ball in the chamber of my revolver,’ he said, ‘and I thought I might need it later.’ “And there is a man,” added the speaker, after a slight pause, “who defied the bullets of desperadoes for years, and who went down like a child before the fever.” «