[Illustration: DETECTIVE T. V. JACKSON.] CHAPTER XIII. THE CAPTURE OF RUBE SMITH AND JAMES M’CLUNG AT AMORY, MISS.-- M’CLUNG’S CONFESSION--A PLAN TO ROB THE TRAIN FALLS THROUGH--A SAFE ROBBERY NIPPED IN THE BUD. When the Buckatunna robbery of September 25, 1889, occurred, the fact that three men participated in that deed proved that a third man had joined Rube Burrow since his last robbery at Duck Hill, on December 15, 1888, and the identity of the third man puzzled the detectives of the Express Company for some weeks. An accurate description, however, of all three of the men had been obtained, and Detective Thomas Jackson, after a visit into Lamar County a few weeks after the robbery, became convinced that it was Rube Smith. On the eighth day of October, succeeding the Buckatunna robbery, Rube Smith appeared in Lamar County, exhibited a good deal of money, and was known to be in hiding in the vicinity of his father’s home. Here he remained for some weeks, narrowly escaping capture at the hands of Detective Thomas Jackson several times, while the latter was daily securing additional evidence of his complicity in the Buckatunna affair. Finally, in the latter part of November, 1889, Jim McClung, an old acquaintance of Rube Smith’s, left Itawamba County, Miss., to visit his relatives in Lamar County, and while _en route_ thither fell in with Rube Smith near the house of that worthy’s father. Rube exhibited quite a sum of money to McClung, and invited him to accompany him to the Indian Territory, which McClung agreed to do. This was the hiding place to which Smith had gone soon after the Johnson robbery. The two men left for the Indian Territory. Their destination was Kavanaugh, and Smith unfolded to McClung, while _en route_, the whole story of the Buckatunna train robbery and the part he played in it. He described every detail and circumstance of the robbery, and McClung, having a very retentive memory, was afterwards enabled to testify about it so minutely that the jury in the Federal Court, before which Smith had a mistrial in May, 1890, concluded that Jim McClung had participated in that robbery. Such, however, was not the fact. The section of the Indian Territory to which Smith and McClung went was wild and sparsely settled, but no sooner had Smith appeared there than he learned that the officers were after him for a violation of the Federal law forbidding the importation and sale of intoxicating liquors in the Indian Territory, while he was there in the early spring. Smith therefore left within twenty-four hours after his arrival, and returned to Lamar County, abandoning a project of robbing the disbursing officer of an Indian agency near Kavanaugh, which he had unfolded to McClung.