The Dance Hall Regular and the Broken Gun

An old offender, known as Morris, was up before Justice of the Peace Humphrey yesterday afternoon on a charge of assaulting Alexander Bridges, a clerk in a Commercial street second-hand store, with a deadly weapon. It is charged that last Saturday he wanted to pawn a revolver at the second-hand store where Bridges is employed, and when Bridges remarked that it was broken and not in working order, so he could advance very little on it, he jerked the weapon and declared: 'The gun may not be worth anything and may be broken, but it's good enough to kill you with!' Bridges, who is a small man and easily intimidated, was almost frightened to death. He uttered a loud cry of fear and threw his hands up in a dead faint. Morris thought he was dead, and hiding his revolver in his pocket, fled. Morris was at one time a waiter in a Pike street restaurant, but the influence of the dance halls in the southern portion of the city was too much for him, and for more than a year past the police have had his name on their list as a suspicious character.