Setting out, therefore, with the two-fold object of avoiding the detectives in Lamar County, and of robbing a train, the three men journeyed southward, but without any particular destination in view. Going down the west bank of the Tombigbee River, they traveled a distance of about one hundred and fifty miles, to Buckatunna, Miss., on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, seventy-three miles north of Mobile. After a careful deliberation of the matter, Rube Burrow selected Ellisville, Miss., a point on the Queen and Crescent Railway, sixty-five miles south of Meridian, and distant fifty-five miles east across the country, as the point for making his seventh train robbery. Leaving the Mobile and Ohio Railway at Buckatunna on the fourteenth day of September, the men walked towards Ellisville, arriving there on the night of the 17th of September. Here Rube Burrow concluded, after finding there were three trains daily each way on that road, that there was no money in robbing a train on the Queen and Crescent Railway. He argued that the shipments would be divided up between the several trains, and no one train would carry much money. He had been so often disappointed in the amounts obtained that he was now planning, with great care, to make a big haul. He concluded, therefore, to reverse his course, return to Buckatunna, and rob the Mobile and Ohio, as the schedule on that line indicated only a single daily express train each way. Accordingly the robbers resumed their journey towards Buckatunna, through the “Free State of Jones.” The county of Jones, Miss., bears to this day the appellation of the “Free State of Jones.” During the late civil war the county seceded from the Confederacy and set up an independent government of its own. Here, in the famous Bogue Homer swamp, which covers one-third of the area of the county, hundreds of Mississippians, and Alabamians from across the border, declared themselves non-combatants, and gathering their families about them, set up a military government of their own. Fortified within this inaccessible wild land, by the aid of their flint locks, they defied Confederate and Federal alike, and in the solitude of a peacefulness disturbed only by an occasional unsuccessful raid upon them, lived on, unmindful of the fate of the Republic. One may ride, at this day, over the public road, so-called, from Ellisville to Buckatunna, sixty miles, and in all that distance he will find no sign of human habitation save at intervals of ten miles or so a rude log hut, and here and there a rosin orchard.