SHOOT OUT AT DOW CITY

Continued from: Pat Crowe

From the Autobiography of Pat Crowe:

They caught a passing freight that stopped for water, and ere dawn were near Dow City. They had ditched their useless tools and juice in a pond before taking to the freight, and had about thirty-two hundred dollars in cash to show for their work. But Pat's hunch persisted. He had not yet divided the money with Kane, partly because of this and partly because to have divided it would have been to light up the inside of the car in which they had been concealed and thus to betray their presence to the trainmen, while making the get-away.

DOW CITY DRAMA

Before they arrived at Dow City Pat urged Kane to leave the car, as this was now a way freight, making frequent stops.

"Let's take to a cornfield," said he. "That operator will sure be found and the wires will be hot. They'll be looking for us."

"All right, at the next stop," said Kane. "Let's get out now," said Pat.

"I don't like cornfields," objected Kane.

The train had started and sped on. Only a few miles and then it stopped abruptly and backed into a siding. Pat Crowe opened his side of the door and jumped out. His hunch was too strong to allow him to wait a moment more.

During the identical time these two men had patiently waited for the passing of the flyer before robbing the Denison railway safe, five desperate men in another Iowa town called Ida Grove, about fifty miles from Dow City had also been engaged in an enterprise fully as fraught with peril. They were breaking jail, and when they went they left a wounded jailer and a wounded deputy sheriff behind them. They had fled toward Dow City.

When Pat and Kane came into this place on the way-freight, not knowing of the acts of the other desperadoes, the marshal of the town, with his deputy and a posse of citizens, was at the railway station, scouring all trains for traces of these other fugitives.

This uncanny coincidence put quite a different aspect on things the moment Pat Crowe leaped from the car. He happened, through sheer luck, to be on the side of the car which also happened to be opposite the station platform and with a dry ditch near by covered with thick weeds, into which he slipped and fell.

Dow City Train Station

At the same moment Kane left the other side of the car. Both men were, of course, still armed. Kane, however, stepped into a reception committee of the sort that he had never expected to meet at all. The moment he appeared on the platform, the town marshal spied him. He did not wait to learn if the fugitive was one of the jail breakers. He ran toward him, his big gun cocked, his finger itching on the trigger.

"Put up your hands!" he shouted. Pat Crowe heard the command, just as he fell into the bottom of the weedy ditch. He wormed along it and still within the shelter, quite unseen.

On the other side of the train a half dozen other men, including the deputy marshal, ran toward Kane. Unseen, Pat emerged. The train stood quite still. He crossed from where he lay beneath the train, thence beneath the station platform, above which the excited voices came as audibly as if he were among them.

(Photo illustrative only)

"We've got one of them!" said the marshal triumphantly. Pat slid like a serpent, noiselessly on hands and knees, to the far end of the platform. Kane was caught and disarmed. He protested.

"Shut up!" said the marshal. "You broke jail last night at Ida Grove. I know you by the description. Take his gun."

Pat Crowe wormed out from his hiding place.

"Search every car in that train while I take this feller to jail," pompously commanded the marshal. A chorus of voices replied that they would. Pat crouched low. His pal was caught. He had never turned his back on a pal in all his life, and never would so long as he had a reliable Betsey and plenty of reserve cartridges. He had both. All he had to do was to straighten up from his crouching position the instant the marshal and Kane started to walk down the steps, and with Betsey ready for action, and the marshal off guard, the trick was turned.

"Put 'em up!" commanded Pat Crowe to the astonished officer, whose star of office gleamed brightly as his eyes grew wide with terror. He did not hesitate, the cold blue eyes gleaming frostily. Crowe disarmed him.

"Go on down the track," said he to Kane, tossing him the marshal's weapon, while he possessed himself of the one the marshal also had, which he had taken from Kane. Kane ran. He had not gone a dozen feet when the patter of his feet came clearly to other searchers of the train. They started toward the end of the platform, from which Pat Crowe was just backing away, with two guns instead of one, focused on the marshal.

A mighty shout went up. One of Pat Crowe's guns covered the four men who had rushed to help the marshal to recapture Kane, whom they supposed had merely broken away and was legging it. Their paralysis was instant at sight of the second armed desperado and the disarmed marshal.

"Put 'em up—and keep 'em up," called Pat, softly but clearly, to the deputy marshal and three worthy townsmen who stood with jaws sagging. They complied. Pat Crowe began walking backward, his two guns covering all the other armed men and the marshal.

With the "golden fleece" taken from the Denison railway station still on his person, with Billy Kane released, rearmed and hotfooting it out of the vicinity while Pat Crowe still cowed the marshal and deputy marshal of Dow City with their citizen assistants "under the guns," it looked for a moment or two as if the two trapped desperadoes would make good their escape. Affairs of this impromptu sort, however, always contain elements of the unexpected.

The dilemma of Kane and Crowe had arisen from their ignorance of the escape of five other desperadoes from Ida Grove jail, the presence of the two law officers and citizens searching for them at the railroad station and the error of mistaking Kane for one of them. Kane's unwillingness to leave the box car had also precipitated his sudden capture when the train backed on the siding at Dow City.

So, in spite of Crowe's imperturbable nerve and swift action to retrieve their plight, two other unexpected things immediately complicated their effort to escape. The first of these was that Kane, frantic with his sudden and unexpected arrest on leaving the box car, did not stick by Crowe, and aid their joint get-away. Kane's panic was natural. All of these things were happening much more quickly than the time required for their telling. So Kane continued to put as much space between him and the scene of this dire situation as his numbed brain and laggard legs would allow. The next unknown element which suddenly upset Pat's calculations was the action of another member of the citizen's posse, not in the group under Pat's gun.

This chap had been searching the rest of the train with his gun handy, believing that others of the five Ida Grove jail breakers might be on it. Not finding any, he had gone around the train, walking back on the side opposite the station, the same side on which Pat had luckily leaped from the box car, and he reached the end of the train unseen just as Crowe was continuing to walk backward, still covering the other group. This chap immediately threw himself on the ground, crawled under the first car where he would be sheltered from gun fire by the trucks and took a shot at Pat Crowe with the best intention in the world of laying him low. At which, Pat, in turn, seeing Kane was some distance off and still going strong, dropped a shot in reply to the man in ambuscade [one who ambushed] which tossed a shower of cinders from the railway right of way into his face and then turned and ran for it.

The chagrined but still furious marshal grabbed a pistol from one of the citizens and with his deputy opened fire on Pat, while the other citizens, no longer menaced by the two Betseys, sent a volley after Kane. Pat saw that to try to catch up with Kane was to court death. So with the bullets pattering around and whizzing past him, he leaped over the railroad right of way which ran here along the ground somewhat higher than the rest of the land. As he leaped he turned and sent several swift shots toward the marshal, the deputy, and others of the posse who were shooting at him, scattering them, although he did not hit any one. This gave him a bit of time and he started running under cover of the railway embankment as fast as he could, intending to emerge further down it, cross over it again, and rejoin Kane.

Kane, meanwhile, as the shots began whizzing closer and closer and infuriated yells from the posse rent the air, suddenly stopped, turned with his pistol in his hand and then tossed it to one side, raising his hands above his head in token of surrender, the moment Pat peered over the railway embankment with intention of rejoining him.

While part of the posse closed in on Kane and again placed him under arrest, Pat ran for a little group of willows and brush, bordering a small river or large creek. There had been considerable high water and the footing was both heavy and insecure. But he managed to gain the shelter of the underbrush, unseen, dodging low through it and into some thicker cover just beyond, which led him to the banks of the river.

Meanwhile, the posse behind had crossed the railroad embankment and were spreading out in the fields to cut off his retreat back toward the station. Pat saw that he would have to keep on. So he hastily took the sack of money from his coat, thrust it hurriedly under the roots of a venerable tree, kicked some mud and dead leaves over the spot to conceal its hiding place, and then boldly leaped into the river, the water of which came up only to his hips. The bottom was muddy and sticky.

(Photo illustrative only)

Holding both guns above his head to keep his ammunition dry, Pat made the crossing, as his pursuers were too far distant to make their shots effective. Beyond the river he wallowed into another flat stretch, also covered with half wet gumbo, and some underbrush. His trail was plain but those who had followed him had no stomach for trying his trick of wading the river, lest they be shot down from the brush by the hidden desperado. Far beyond this natural swamp, Pat could see a magnificent field of corn and a barn. He worked his way through the brush toward it. A cornfield in full leaf was good shelter since it was now midsummer, while a barn spelled a horse.

Had it been near nightfall Pat might have reached this field but again two unknown elements intervened. One was a road which ran along the far end of the swamp beyond the river which he had crossed and between it and the cornfield. The other was a member of the posse, mounted on a swift horse, who came galloping up along this road to cut off Pat's escape this way at the very inopportune instant that the fugitive poked his head out from the underbrush to see if the coast was clear.

"Here he is!" shouted the man on horseback to a dozen more men a little further up the road.

"Here's the blankety blank blank."

He raised the rifle he carried and a bullet whizzed past Pat Crowe's head, too close for comfort, and as it did, another volley, fired indiscriminately from the approaching riders into the brush behind him, began clipping twigs from shrubs and mowing down slender reeds in an ominous way. Realizing that the jig was up Pat came boldly out of his concealment, tossing his two Betseys into the road and raising his hands high above his head. He was fagged with the hard run and the laborious crawl through mud up to his knees. And the immersed reserve ammunition might have failed to explode, once the few bullets in his pistols not yet discharged had been exhausted.

With yells of triumph this section of the posse closed in and Pat was driven at the point of a half dozen guns back by way of the road, across, the wagon bridge over the river he had waded, to the railroad station, where by now a large number of the yeomanry of Dow City were assembled. The marshal and his deputy were already having to put forth no small effort to keep Kane from the hands of the mob attracted by the firing and the rumor that "two of the cussed jail breakers who had shot up Ida Grove" were in custody.

(Photo illustrative only)

Pat was promptly manacled and hustled alongside of Kane. Then the wrath of the citizens broke all bounds. A terrible roar went up.

"Get a rope!" cried one of the men in the crowd.

"Yes, that's it - hang 'em! Hang 'em!" screamed the infuriated people.

"They tried to kill the marshal. What's the use of waiting for the law? Hang 'em now!"

"Now, boys!" began the marshal perfunctorily.

"Shut up!" shouted a dozen.

A man appeared with a large rope in which he had already knotted a noose. With another yell, the foremost man seized on it. It was Pat Crowe's second personal experience of the sort, the first being at Chicago, following his shooting of three policemen. But on that occasion there had been police reserves who had protected him. Now, there was no one but the marshal and his deputy and Pat saw in a flash that they would rather hang the prisoners than see them taken to prison owing to the humiliation Pat had put upon both of them by disarming one officer and standing off the others and the posse. He saw no "out," in criminal vernacular.

Nothing can explain what next happened, as Crowe and Kane faced immediate lynching except the circumstances, itself.

To be continued: Saved From the Dow City Lynch Mob