Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 41, Number 88, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 July 1909 — SOME HEROES AND A COWARD. [ARTICLE]

SOME HEROES AND A COWARD.

It was a goodly company Never before had the Three Eagles Inu sheltered so many lion hearts, so many of the bravest of the brave. There was Sheridan, the jungle invader, and Wllby, who rode with Jameson, and the Emerson brothers, with their glamour of early-day scouting. Perkins had scuttled away from cannibals in the hot islands .and Youngblood talked constantly of Tibet and Kabul. Little Bettina, the trim, piquant maid of the Three Eagles, drank In all the heroism and golden-deed stuff. Flitting, from bravo to bravo, she had a word for dashing cavalrymen here and a merry, blue eye for swaggering huntsmen there. And all of the famous company toasted her saucy glance, her dimpled chin, her locks of golden — “It was a close pinch, I tell you!” roared Buller, the railroad builder, finishing a yarn of strife on the frontier; and all the valiants yelled when timid, dapper, little Hans Vogel, the clerk, asked. “But weren’t you afraid, Mr. Buller?” “You’re a brave chap!” jeered BuL ler; and all the others quipped and teased poor Hans. “Hans wouldn’t fight,” confided the pretty Bettina to a colonel of hussars. He was raised at his mother’s apron strings. Bah! I like a man!” And the colonel slapped his thigh and his red face broke into loud laughter. “Hans Is a coward.” scoffed one. “You ought to have seen me In Manchuria,” bragged another. “I fought three men at once,” boasted a third. The petite Bettina joined in the general derision. “Hans.” she said, “you’d better keep quiet. You’re among men now.” and she laid stress on the “men.” Hans grew quite red. “Oh, I would never dare to attempt the feats you gentlemen have performed,” he said, in his prim, modest way. “I am just a little fellow, who writes all the day on the account books and waits upon the travelers, while you are men of the big rough world that I never saw.” And then from outside came the clamor of men shouting, very far away—then nearer, nearer, until the noise was just outside, uproarious, blood-curdling, frightful. “What is it?” asked Buller. the war correspondent, craning from his chair. For answer a panting, foaming, snapping dog plunged throhgh the open doorway, eyes rolling, mouth dripping with the dread craze of the rabies. “Mein Gott! ” shouted a German captain. “Der dog iss mad!” There was a scurrying, a scrambling of world-known valiants into, chairs, through the door, through the windows. Only the trim, petite Bettina stood in the middle of the room, dazed and unable to move. It was then that a slight figure wriggled over the hotel desk; there was a twisting and jumping and whirling about of man and dog, and. with the chivalry of the earth agape, little Hans Vogel, hotel clerk and coward, stood upon the dog' 9 head. “Save der girl!” roared the German captain, when the animal had ceased to writhe. “Dear me!” murmured Hans Vogel. "I’m all a-tremble. I’m such a coward.” “Good, old Hans!” cooed little Bettina. “Brave, brave. Hans,” and the blue eyes flashed light which the strutting valiants had never obtained, —Stuart B. Stone.