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. The robber tarried only long enough to warm his chilled frame into energy for the task of further flight, and after about one hour’s stay he quietly donned the shoes of the black _pater familias_, and, stealthily drawing an old quilt from a couch in which a brood of pickaninnies slept, all unconscious of their loss, he wrapped it about him, and, stepping silently out into the darkness, resumed his journey. A few miles further on he stole a horse from the stable of a farmer, and, mounting its bare back, rode hard and fast till daylight, when he turned the animal loose in the road, and betaking himself to the protection of the forests that covered the bottom lands of the Alabama River, left no further trace of his course. Here his trail was lost to the detectives, who, after an arduous and vain pursuit of several days, abandoned all further effort in that vicinity.