Steve P. Holcombe, the Converted Gambler - The Original Classic Edition. Gross Alexander

necessary to say to the reader who has perused the foregoing pages, that Mr. Holcombe was not afraid of any man. His former experience in sin and his former association with sinners of every sort led him to see that it was necessary for him rigidly to protect the work he was now engaged in and he determined to do so. Men would come into the meetings, sometimes, in a state of intoxication; sometimes lewd fellows of

       the baser sort would come in for the purpose of interrupting the service and still others for other purposes; but when Mr. Holcombe had put a few of them out, they saw that this man in getting religion had lost neither common sense nor courage, and that Steve Holcombe, the converted gambler, was not a man to be fooled with any more than Steve Holcombe, the unconverted gambler; so that all such interruptions soon ceased. But nobody should get the impression that Mr. Holcombe was harsh or unsympathetic. On the contrary, he is one of the most tenderhearted of men, and few men living would go farther, do more or make greater sacrifices

       to save a drunkard or a gambler or an outcast of any sort, than Steve Holcombe. For days he has gone without meat for himself and

       his family that he might have something to help a poor drunkard who was trying to reform. Indeed, his pitying love for wretched

       men and women of every class and degree, manifested in his efforts to look them up and to do them good in any possible way, is the chief secret of his wonderful success in dealing with hardened and apparently inaccessible cases. The following account of his last and perhaps most desperate[86] case is taken from one of the Louisville daily papers and will illustrate what has been said:

       JAMES WILLIAMS AS HE WAS.

       DRUNK TWENTY-THREE YEARS.

       REMARKABLE STORY OF "WHISKY JIM'S" WASTED LIFE AND FINAL CONVERSION. HOW THE WORK WAS EFFECTED.

       The work that Steve Holcombe is doing is well known, in a general way, but the public understand but little of the wonderful good that man is doing. The reformations he has brought about may be numbered by the hundred, and the drunkards he has reclaimed would make a regiment.

       But of all the wonderful and truly startling examples of what Mr. Holcombe is doing, the case of James Williams is the climax. Williams has been known for years as "Whisky Jim" and "Old Hoss," and there is not a more familiar character in the city. Until the last two or three weeks no man in Louisville ever remembers to have seen Jim free from the influence of liquor. He was always drunk, and was looked upon as an absolutely hopeless case, that would be able to stand the terrible life he was leading but a year or two longer.

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