Rube Smith is a son of James Smith, who lives in Lamar County, near Crews Station, and about eight miles from the home of Allen Burrow. He is a first cousin of the Burrow brothers. Smith was about twenty-eight years old, five feet eight inches high, weighed one hundred and sixty pounds, and bore a very bad reputation in all that section. He had never followed any legitimate occupation, except that, for a short period in 1883, he had been an itinerant photographer, moving about from place to place, and making cheap photographs in country towns of northern Alabama. In the fall of 1888, however, he was indicted, with James McClung and James Barker, an uncle, for robbery from the person of a Mr. Johnson, a respectable old farmer of Lamar County. Smith and party went to farmer Johnson’s home about nightfall, with their faces masked, and at the point of their revolvers demanded his money. The old man hesitating, was cruelly beaten, and at last divulged the hiding-place of his money, some three hundred dollars, which the robbers secured. They left their victim bleeding and maimed, lying upon the floor, where he remained until the next morning, when kindly neighbors came to his assistance. Rube Smith then became a fugitive from justice. Burrow, knowing of the presence of the detectives in the vicinity, suspected that Smith was being used by the officers to entrap him. After considering the matter several days he sent, through his sister, a message to Rube Smith that he would meet him at the hour of midnight, September 4th, in Fellowship church-yard, a point about four miles from Vernon. Thither Burrow and Joe Jackson repaired early after dark, on that night, for the purpose of forestalling any plan which the detectives might have to capture them through Smith. The watch was set, and each, by turn, stood sentinel in this quiet and lonely spot, awaiting the appointed hour. Smith, in due course, appeared as agreed. He was alone, and Burrow was soon assured that his proposal to join him was genuine. There, in the graveyard of Fellowship church, where the body of the famous outlaw now lies buried, at the solemn hour of midnight, the compact which linked Rube Smith’s fortunes with his own was made. There was no subscribing to the black oath, no signing in letters of blood, but with the skillfulness of a master Rube Burrow inducted his young kinsman into the office of train robbing to which he had elected him. He described the preliminary step of boarding the engine and getting the “drop;” the method of “holding up,” and all the subtle artifices of the craft, in such a masterly style that the new recruit smacked his lips in anticipation of the rich dish spread before his mental vision, and, after the manner of little Jack Horner, he mentally “put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and said, what a good boy am I.”