Audio version: Download MP3 or use controls below:
|
Soon someone was thumping on his main door. “Open up here, or I’ll blow you to hell,” the robber yelled. Cautiously leaning out the other door, Butler cut loose with a charge of buckshot at the shadow beating on the side of the car — but he must have shot high, because the robber whipped around and fired at his muzzle flash. The woodwork behind Butler’s head splintered. Butler pulled the trigger again, but his second barrel didn’t fire. Dodging back into the car, he started feeling around for his box of shotgun shells. “As I was groping around to find it he suddenly threw a big bomb in the car, and I knew it was time to get out,” Butler told the Roseburg Plaindealer afterward. “I was taking a good many chances to get out, but I knew that if I had stayed there I would be blown to pieces the next minute. I jumped out on the river side of the car, a jump of about six feet, and ran, gun in hand, into the coach behind. The next minute the bomb blew up with a terrible explosion, splintering the window glass in the coach I was in and tearing the express car nearly to pieces.” This was the explosion farmer Lindsey had heard, and it soon started the fire he’d seen. The robbers grabbed what they could, forced their way into the mail car and ransacked the registered-mail pouch. But they made no move to bother the passengers — either because they were aware that a posse was probably already on its way, or because they worried about being shot or “made” by one of the passengers. In any case, “the passengers were not subjected to the mortification and indignity, to say nothing of the financial loss, of a ‘stand and deliver’ ordeal,” the Plaindealer writes. “Nevertheless, there was a hasty concealment of valuables and those who were traveling with their wives, knowing the gallantry of the Western bandit, gave their purses into the keeping of the weaker half.” But the robbers merely grabbed what they could from the wreckage and galloped away. Behind them, they left the burning express car in such a shambles that no one was ever able to figure out how much valuable property was stolen and how much simply destroyed or burned up. They never did figure out for sure who the robbers were, either. The next day, Jack Case emphatically denied that he’d had anything to do with the job. And in fact, he may not have been lying. It was not Case’s style to neglect to rob the passengers. But perhaps aware that he’d be the first suspect, he quit the town almost immediately, making his way north to Washington, where he apparently hoped to find fresher pickings. He did — and he found something else, too. About halfway between Tacoma and Steilacoom up in Washington, he threw down on a streetcar full of passengers and started relieving them of their valuables. One of his victims — the superintendent of the streetcar line, a Mr. Dame — pulled a revolver on him. The air for a moment was thick with smoke and lead, and when it all cleared away, Mr. Dame had been shot in the arm and one of the passengers had taken a bullet in his leg. As for Jack Case, he was lying in the gravel beside the car, stone dead.
|
On our Sortable Master Directory you can search by keywords, locations, or historical timeframes. Hover your mouse over the headlines to read the first few paragraphs (or a summary of the story) in a pop-up box.
©2008-2015 by Finn J.D. John. Copyright assertion does not apply to assets that are in the public domain or are used by permission.