After a hard night’s ride they were at daylight, on June 4th, within a few miles of Ben Brook. Having ascertained that the north-bound train would pass the station about 7 P. M. they secreted themselves in the woods near by until dark, at which time they rode quietly to within a few hundred yards of the station. Rube Burrow and Henderson Bromley had blackened their faces with burnt cork, while Jim Burrow and Brock used their pocket handkerchiefs for masks. Rube and Bromley boarded the engine as it pulled out of the station and, with drawn revolvers, covered the engineer and fireman, and ordered the former to stop at a trestle a few hundred yards beyond the station. Here Jim Burrow and Brock were in waiting, and the two latter held the conductor and passengers at bay, while the two former ordered the engineer to break into the express car with the coal pick taken from the engine, and again the Pacific Express Company was robbed, the highwaymen securing $2,450. The passengers and mail were unmolested.
Regaining their horses within thirty minutes after the train first stopped at the station, the robbers rode hard and fast until noon of the following day. Through woodland and over plain, ere dawn of day they had fled far from the scene of the robbery of the previous night, and a drenching rain, which commenced to fall at midnight, left not a trace of the course of their flight. Here the robbers remained in quiet seclusion, disguising their identity as train robbers by a seeming diligence in agricultural pursuits, until September 20, 1887, when they made a second raid on the Texas Pacific Road, robbing the train at Ben Brook station again.
When Rube and Bromley mounted the engine, wonderful to relate, it was in charge of the same engineer whom the robbers had “held up” in the robbery of June 4th, and the engineer, recognizing Rube and Bromley, said, as he looked down the barrels of their Colt’s revolvers, “Well, Captain, where do you want me to stop this time?” Rube laconically replied “Same place,” and so it was that the train was stopped and robbed, the same crew being in charge, on the identical spot where it had been robbed before. The messenger of the Pacific Express Company made some resistance, but finally the robbers succeeded in entering his car and secured $2,725, or about $680 each.
The highwaymen reached their rendezvous in Erath County, having successfully committed four train robberies.
About the middle of November following, Rube and Jim paid a visit to their parents in Lamar County, Ala., Jim taking his wife there and Rube his two children. They remained in Lamar County some weeks, visiting their relatives and walking the streets of Vernon, the county seat, unmolested, as neither of the two men had at that time ever been suspected of train robbing.
CHAPTER III.
THE GENOA, ARK., ROBBERY, DECEMBER 9, 1887—ARREST OF WILLIAM BROCK—HIS CONFESSION.
Express Train No. 2, on the St. Louis, Arkansas and Texas Railway, left Texarkana, Ark., on the evening of December 9, 1887, at 5:50 P. M., fifty minutes late. Nothing unusual occurred until just as the train began to pull out of Genoa, Ark., a small station thirty miles north of Texarkana. Engineer Rue, on looking about, discovered two men standing just behind him, with drawn revolvers, covering himself and fireman.
“What are you doing here?” asked Rue.
The answer was, “Go on! Don’t stop! If you stop I will kill you!” And further: “I want you to stop about one and a half miles from here, at the north end of the second big cut. I don’t want to hurt you or your fireman, but we are going to rob this train or kill every man on it.”
Arriving at the spot designated, the leader abruptly said, “Stop!” The engineer and fireman were then ordered down from the engine, and the leader said, “Boys, how are you all?”