Rube Burrow, king of outlaws, and his band of train robbers

by George W. Agee

“I am Jim Burrow, and the other man is my brother Rube, and if you give us two pistols apiece we are not afraid of any two men living.”

He further stated that while walking up the street from the depot he became satisfied they were in the hands of the police, but as Rube had the only pistol, he having failed to secure his in his sudden flight from his home in Lamar County, he was looking for Rube to make the first break. Rube, however, suspected nothing until he reached the police station. When afterwards chided by friends for his failure to assist Jim, in view of the fact that the latter was unarmed, Rube replied that he thought the whole of Montgomery was after him.

The next day, realizing the faux pas of the previous night, and the notorious character of the fugitive, the entire police force of Montgomery joined in the chase. The city, its suburban districts and the adjacent country all swarmed with anxious pursuers.

No trace of Rube, however, was found until just before dark, when Officers Young and Hill, having searched a negro cabin about five miles south of Montgomery, without result, rode off in the direction of the city. After leaving the house a negro boy came running after them and informed the officers that the man for whom they were searching had just gone into the cabin they had left. Rube, hungry and exhausted, had seen his pursuers leave the cabin, and immediately thereafter went in and asked for something to eat.

Young and Hill rode back at once in company with the boy, and instructed him to go in and tell the man to come out. They were about thirty paces in front of the cabin, when Rube came to the door, and, looking out, saw a solitary horseman in front of the cabin. He deliberately sat down in a chair in the doorway and pulled off his boots, while Officer Young dismounted. Hill had covered the rear of the cabin.

Taking his boots in his left hand, Rube held his trusty revolver in his right. His chief forte was a running fight. With the agility of an Indian he sprang from the cabin and bounded away to the swamps, which were distant only about one hundred yards, and as he passed in front of Officer Young the latter rested his breech-loading shot gun on his saddle and fired the contents of both barrels in quick succession at the fleeing desperado, when only about thirty yards distant.

Rube dropped his boots and hat, and to the chagrin of the officer, when he picked them up, he found them filled with number eight birdshot. He had substituted these for his loads of buckshot early in the day to shoot a bird, and had forgotten the fact. Rube carried to the day of his death the marks of the birdshot, which filled his neck and face, but were powerless to stop his flight.

Fifty yards further on a countryman, who had joined the pursuing party, sprang up from behind an embankment, and was in the act of taking aim at twenty paces distant, his gun being charged with buckshot, when Rube wheeled and covered him with his revolver. His pursuer dropped flat to the earth and Rube escaped. He was wont to revert to this incident frequently, afterward and laughingly state what was the truth, that he had fired his last cartridge, and the intrepid courage with which he turned and covered his pursuer with an empty revolver saved his life.

Hatless and bare-footed, the friendless felon now found himself, at dark of night, in a wilderness of swamp, whose treacherous waters were covered with a tangled growth of brush and vines, and chilled with the winter’s cold. Exhausted with the toils of the day’s flight, his face and neck smarting with the keen pain of the wounds he had just received, hungry and foot-sore, his body quivering with the biting cold—could human flesh and blood be subjected to the frenzy of sharper distress than that which faced Rube as he blindly picked his footing through this terra incognita? Plodding through bog and fen, full knee-deep with water, his progress was beset by indescribable perplexities, and so it was nearly midnight when he emerged from the marsh into a field, distant only about three miles from the point at which he had entered it.

A flickering light in a negro cabin a few hundred yards away, on the slope of a hill, gave friendly token of comfort within, but Rube, fearing that some one of his pursuers might be sheltered there, approached it with cautious step. All was still within, save the snoring of the sleeping inmates, and in his dire extremity the outlaw slowly pulled the latch-string which hung without and entered. With bated breath he looked about him. The cheerful log fire alone beamed for him a silent welcome. Noiselessly taking a chair he sat himself before the coveted warmth of the lowly hearthstone, while the old colored man and his family slept on, in blissful ignorance of the presence of their midnight visitor.