The Girl and Her Reading

1902

By W. D. Howells

What, then, is a good rule for a girl in her reading? Pleasure in it, as I have already said; pleasure, first, last and all the time. But as one star differs from another, so the pleasures differ. With the high natures they will be fine, and with the low natures they will be coarse. It is idle to commend a fine pleasure to the low natures, for to these it will be a disgust, as surely as a coarse pleasure to the high. But without pleasure in a thing read it will not nourish, or even fill, the mind; it will be worse provender than the husks which the swine did eat, and which the prodigal found so unpalatable.

Thence follows a conclusion that I am not going to blink. It may be asked, then, if we are to purvey a coarse literary pleasure to the low natures, seeing that they have no relish for a fine one. I should say yes, so long as it is not a vicious one. But here I should distinguish, and say farther that I think there is no special merit in reading as an occupation, or even as a pastime. I should very much doubt whether a low nature would get any good of its pleasure in reading; and without going back to the old question whether women should be taught the alphabet, I should feel sure that some girls could be better employed in cooking, sewing, knitting, rowing, fishing, playing basket ball or ping-pong than in reading the kind of books they like; just as some men could be better employed in the toils and sports that befit their sex.

I am aware that this is not quite continuing to answer the question as to what girls should read; and I will revert to that for a moment without relinquishing my position that the cult of reading is largely a superstition, more or less baleful. The common notion is that books are the right sort of reading for girls, who are allowed also the modified form of books which we know as magazines, but are not expected to read newspapers. This notion is so prevalent and so penetrant that I detected it in my own moral and mental substance, the other day, when I saw a pretty and prettily dressed girl in the elevated train, reading a daily newspaper quite as if she were a man. It gave me a little shock which I was promptly ashamed of for when I considered, I realized that she was possibly employed as usefully and nobly as if she were reading a book, certainly the sort of book she might have chosen. — Harper's Bazar.

Arizona's Stage Robbers — Dan Elkins and Wilbur

1896

Histories of Two Men Who Terrorized the Southwest

One Man "Holds Up" a Stage Load of Eight Passengers — Tracked to Their Hiding Place by Apaches

DAN ELKINS is remembered as the original lone bandit of the Southwest, because, single-handed, he once held up a stage load of eight passengers, besides the driver, all of whom were armed. For weeks the exploit was the talk of the men in and about Tombstone. Judge Bennett, now of San Gabriel, Cal., was one of the passengers, and he tells how the robber worked his desperate game.

"We on the inside of the coach had just been talking," says the Judge, of the robberies that Elkins and his partner, Wilbur, had committed in the Territory, and the shame it was that an organized effort was not made to go and keep after the villains until they were killed, even if it took a year, when we heard a rifle crack, and a man shout to the driver:

" 'Come, now, stop those horses or you'll drop dead.'

"We were traveling through a rocky region along the foothills, and each of us knew instantly that all were in for a hold-up then and there. Every one wondered what his neighbor would do with his pistol.

" 'I'll be hanged,' said a big man from Texas, 'if I'll stand this nonsense,' and he snatched his big shooting iron up from the seat at his side.

"The driver put on the brakes and the stage was stopped at once, when we heard a voice outside saying:

" 'Now you fellers on the inside get out on this side. The first man who gets out on the other side will drop dead as a smelt. Don't be lazy. All of you throw down your shooters as you file out of the coach, for there's a lot of sure rifle shots that's got their eyes on you and are hiding in these here rocks to lay you out cold dead if you don't mind what I'm telling you.'

"When I got out of the stage I noticed that the highwayman wore a wire mask contrivance over his face, and had a big black beard and a whole arsenal of weapons in a belt about his waist. He stood on a commanding boulder, and kept his Winchester repeater moving slowly over us. I took particular pains that he saw I threw down my two pistols on the ground, and I noticed that every one of us, including the Texan, did the same thing.

" 'Throw up your hands, gents, said the masked robber, when we were all on the ground and our pistols lay there in a pile by the side of the coach wheels. 'Now get in line there, quick and face this way. Keep your hands above your heads, don't move; keep your months shut or you'll know how quick a man can go plumb to death."

"We got in line facing our commander in a moment, and none of us could extend his hands quite high enough.

" 'Now, you young fellow with the monkey whiskers,' said the highwayman, 'you just shell out there where you stand. Turn your pockets inside out, so me and my pards can see that you're dealing fair. That's right. Now, while me and my pards keep you in gun range, you search that next man, turn his pockets out. Keep your hands up high, gents, and save trouble. Don't speak.'

"In a few minutes that seemed like ages of an awful silence, each man was searched," and we all stood there in a row with our pockets turned out and flapping in the morning breeze, our hands a full foot above our heads, and a small pile of wallets, watches, little pocket leather and cloth bags of coin lay at the feet of the young man of our party, who had been compelled to search his companions.

" 'Now, you driver, throw that money box off quick, while my pards keep you in range,' said the robber when we had been searched. 'There; that's right. Be lively. It may cost you your carcass. Get that ax under the back seat and chop the box open. Hurry up. Don't speak, and don't get behind that coach, or you'll drop.'

"The ax was got, and the driver chopped open the box near us while we stood there like metal forms in front of clothing stores. When the box had been split apart and the valuables thrown out, the highwayman, all the time keeping his rifle slowly moving up and down our line of silent, hand-uplifted men, said:

" 'Now, driver, get up on your seat. You gents get into your coach. Don't let me hear you peep. Driver, lick your horses up fast and get out of this.

" 'Now, gents,' said he, as the last of us had got back into our seats, weaponless, 'you can brag that you've been held up by a single-handed in the profesh. I don't mind telling you that I'm all alone to-day and that I need your money awful bad. Tell them Tombstone fellers that Dan Elkins has a new trick in his line of business.'

"The horses were whipped up, and the last we saw of Dan Elkins he stood there on that big boulder keeping his head still on us until we turned in the foothill road a mile away. I think the rascal must have got $1000 that day. You see we did not carry much money on our persons in those days when there was danger of highway robbery."

During the winter of 1879 and 1880, the recklessness and bravado of Elkins and his partner, Wilbur, became unbearable, and people began to see that the stage robberies were hurting the name of Arizona, so an unusual effort was made to get the rascals. An extra reward for their capture was offered, and two or three detectives from Los Angeles, Cal., began work. Several half-breed Apache Indian trailers were hired, and after a few weeks the trail to the bandits was found. These Apache trailers are the most wonderful of their kind. They sometimes follow a man's tracks across a desert of sand, even after a windstorm, when the tracks have become obliterated to white men's eyes. They can follow at break-neck speed on a horse the trail of a man who has run in moccasins and taken pains to leave only the faintest traces of his course. They see signs of a trail through cactus and sage brush that no white man would recognize.

After a short period of more trailing and questioning of the few white settlers in the region Elkins and Wilbur were located. Their hiding place was thirty miles south from Benson, among the granite foothills, where no white man but they had probably ever been. Indians were hired to go to the spot, and to act as if they were out hunting and had unwittingly stumbled upon the bandits. Then when the Indians had engaged Elkins and Wilbur in conversation they were to give a signal. A posse of twenty men was to ride at once to the scene. Each man in the band was to take his chances of getting shot by the robbers.

The plan worked well. The bandits were asleep when the Indians came to them one warm afternoon. The Apaches asked for food, and while Wilbur went to get a knife to cut a slice from a deer hanging in the mesquite brush near at hand one of the Indians, pretending to be interested in one of the white stranger's pistols, discharged it. A few minutes later the posse rode up pell mell from behind a low foothill that impeded the view half a mile away.

"We're trapped! we're trapped!" shrieked Elkins as he jumped from his couch of leaves and saw the horsemen encircling about his hiding place.

In a second he and Wilbur were behind two great oaks, and were prepared to fight for their lives. They forgot the Indians at their rear, and no sooner had they turned their faces toward the advancing posse than they were shot dead in the back by the Apache trailers.

There is good reason to believe that if the men had been captured alive they might have been induced to tell where they had hidden the greater part of their stolen money and gold, for no one thinks that, living as they did, they spent more than a small part of their ill-gotten gains. Both the robbers were buried where they were killed, and to this day there are people who go out from the now well-populated town of Benson every little while to the scene of the old camp of Elkins and Wilbur in the hope of finding the secret storehouse of stolen riches among the boulders and foothills that surround the spot. — New York Sun.