The Pursuit
Written by Murray Edwards, grandson of John Soules and great-grandson of T.E. Hamilton
Mr. T.E. Hamilton always hated this time of the day. It wasn’t so much the walk through the tall weeds to the privy, or even so much the shiver he always felt when he had to sit down on that cold damp seat. It was having to look at Miss Barr and say, “Please excuse me for a minute” as he stepped out the back door of the bank, knowing that she knew exactly why he was leaving and how long he’d be gone. It was downright humiliating for a grown man—an important man, too—like asking the teacher’s permission in grade school, he thought, blushing at the mere anticipation of this daily embarrassment.
He wished the bank could afford to hire an additional cashier, but it was 1928, and things hadn’t been all that grand for the Star State Bank lately. Besides, Miss Barr was a capable and loyal employee, he supposed, and the two of them managed the bank quite well. So he endured.
“Please excuse me for a minute,” Mr. Hamilton mumbled to her as he always did walking out the door.
Miss Barr always smiled to herself when Mr. Hamilton had to excuse himself like that, knowing how embarrassed it always made him. They both knew he was in charge and could simply walk out with no comment. They both knew he never would. What funny creatures men were. Miss Barr wouldn’t admit it to herself, of course, but she knew the rules; she was essentially a spinster. Never married (and at age…well…“thirty-ish,” she never intended to, for Heaven’s sake!), she was comfortable enough for her station in life, and she was working in a nice enough job at the bank, but working nonetheless, which announced as succinctly as the “Miss” forever appended to her name for all the world to see that she did not have a husband at home to support her as she raised any number of children. She had missed that typical route for women. She deeply admired her boss; in fact, he was the sort of gentleman she might have considered as a husband if she had ever thought about the social condition of matrimony in earnest, which, of course, she never did really. And even though Mr. Hamilton was a rather portly fellow, Miss Barr found no fault in that; she herself was rather “large boned.” That was neither here nor there, she thought every single day at this time as she returned to her work, which varied only slightly from day to day.
But on this day, a few moments later, Miss Barr heard what sounded like a small pebble strike the windowpane just behind her on the other side of the teller’s cage. Instinctively, she looked out the window to catch a glimpse of the young truant she assumed was proudly trying to proclaim his absence from school.
But there was no one outside, and Miss Barr was beginning to think it might only have been the wind, when she turned to see a tall man standing in front of the teller’s cage. Her “cage” was truly only a semblance of safety for its inhabitant, standing mostly as a separation that symbolically demarked those who had the money from those who did not. It was a pretty affair with thin, ornate posts, but realistically the structure wouldn’t have held back a determined cat from entering. But it appeared imposing; that was the important thing.
Her latest client was wearing a bulky overcoat, like our heroic soldiers wore in the Great War, she mused, but his face was turned away toward the bank’s front door, as if he was waiting for a friend to enter.
“And how may we be of service to you, sir?” she purred in her most financial voice.
The man turned his head directly toward her. Miss Barr’s first thought was not one of fear, just confusion. Oddly, he was wearing a cloth over his face, she thought, like the one everyone used when we played Blind Man’s Bluff at Lula Mae Webster’s delightful party last New Year’s Eve.
“This is a robbery, ma’am,” the man rasped through his mask. “Give me the cash. I don’t mean you no harm.”
Miss Barr was not amused, to say the least. This was turning out to be no ordinary Tuesday. Quite likely, she was facing, for all she knew, a whole gang of desperadoes, and Mr. Hamilton was still out back….indisposed. Honestly! This was just too much.
Emptying the cash drawers in the teller’s cage, too many thoughts to calculate raced through Miss Barr’s mind. She noticed the robber’s hands quivering slightly as he placed the money into the pockets of his overcoat. She couldn’t tell for sure whether he had a gun, but certainly didn’t want to press the issue. She did manage a glance out the front window and noticed a black Model T Ford parked in front of the bank. It had a small spare tire attached just above the rear bumper, and the car was pointed south in the direction of Moline, its motor running. Cars weren’t as plentiful then, so a shiny new one stood out.
After Miss Barr handed the last of about $300 of the bank’s precious cash to the by-now very nervous masked man, he motioned for her to go into the bank’s vault. The vault door closed with a solid thud. Miss Barr listened intently in the darkness as the front door of the bank opened and closed.
“MISTER HAMILTON! M-I-S-T-E-R H-A-M-I-L-T-O-N!” she yelled. This was definitely not her financial voice.
“P-L-E-A-S-E, MISTER HAMILTON,” she pleaded, only to hear her voice resonate in the echo chamber of the vault. What on earth could possibly be taking him so long?
Like many women, Nettie Hamilton had told her husband repeatedly that he was losing his hearing, but like most men, he had simply been too vain to admit his loss, particularly to his children and certainly not to an employee. And even more certainly not to Miss Barr of all people. He knew he could hear what he needed to just fine.
As such, and considering the distance from the bank to his present location, Mr. Hamilton was quite oblivious to the muffled shouts coming from within the bank vault. He finished the World Series article in Collier’s he had been intending to read for the past month, neatly stacked the magazine on top of the older issues of the Saturday Evening Post, and started toward the back door of the bank. He began to refocus his thinking from the Yankees’ infield to whether the gin would work as much cotton as last year.
With his first step into the bank, Mr. Hamilton knew something was not exactly right. Miss Barr, normally there to give him a silent nod of acknowledgment, was nowhere in sight, and the vault was closed. He stepped behind the railing to the teller’s cage, and immediately discovered that the cash drawer was open, and to his great disappointment, empty. This was not good.
Mr. Hamilton crossed the room to the vault as quickly as a man of his size possibly could. He turned the dial of the safe faster than he had ever done a thousand times before, all the while hoping to find Miss Barr alive and unharmed.
He swung the door open.
“Mister Hamilton, I’m sorry, but there was nothing I could do,” she gasped at her first sight of him.
Her normally steady voice quivered with emotion. Even though her black ordeal in the vault had lasted only two or three minutes, it seemed like two or three hours. Any notion that she was safe and relatively unharmed in the entire episode took a well-deserved backseat to her emotional retelling of what COULD have happened. Everyone in town soon knew, and always in these words, that “but for the grace of almighty God…” she could be dead or even worse. For the rest of her life, the bravery she exhibited in the “incident” would bring Miss Barr great solace; more, she ultimately surmised, even than having had a husband might have done.
Standing together with her rescuer, and exhibiting a great deal more fortitude than she should be expected to possess at the moment, Miss Barr quickly described the robber and the automobile with the small spare tire. She was convinced the robber had driven towards Moline.
Mr. Hamilton immediately thought of Frank Soules. In addition to being Chairman of the Board of the Star State Bank, he was a trusted friend. Most importantly, he lived on a ranch not far from the Moline road and had an automobile. If he acted quickly, perhaps Frank Soules could intercept the thief or at least follow him to his hideout. But it wasn’t yet noon, and Frank Soules was hardly the sort of man to come in early from his work.
The banker rang the switchboard operator, Lizzie Garret, and without explaining any details to the always inquisitive and all knowing lady, told her that there was an emergency and that he needed to speak with Frank Soules.
Frank Soules and his two grown sons, Henry and John, were branding calves that day up at the main pens near the house. Working livestock brings out the best and worst in men: cooperation, anger, satisfaction, pride, and frustration. There was some of each to be found at the pens on that particular day.
Frank’s wife had passed away some years earlier, but John and his wife Maurine now lived at the ranch with him. Frank thought as much of Maurine as he did his boys.
Henry and John continued to work the calves when Frank went to the house to answer Maurine’s shout that there was a telephone call for him. In those days, people always dropped what they were doing when they were wanted on the telephone.
In just a minute or two, the brothers looked up to see their father running toward the pens, waving his arms for them to stop what they were doing. He told the boys about the bank robbery in town and the thief’s escape towards Moline. And with the look of a ten year old boy about to go on his first rabbit hunt, Frank Soules asked his sons if they wanted to go help track down the robber. It took Henry about half a second to decide to join his father. John was decidedly more philosophical.
“I believe I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero,” he opined in a succinct manner that would have made Socrates proud.
Frank and Henry didn’t have a lot of time or inclination to change John’s mind. Frank ran to the house to get the Winchester while Henry hurried to get the automobile started.
Henry drove around to the front of the house, and his father jumped in the front seat with his rifle to set out on their adventure.
“If we cut through the Bennett Creek crossing, we can catch him before he gets to Moline,” Henry suggested to his father. This was certainly more fun that having to eat dust in the cow lot.
The automobile kicked up so much chalky dirt that John could barely see them drive down the hill. He began to put out the branding fire. There wasn’t much use in trying to brand steers by yourself.
The “posse” followed the rutted road across the Bennett Creek low water crossing and up through the pecan trees on the other side of the creek. Henry looked over to see his father bouncing up and down on the seat trying to hold on to his hat with one hand and the Winchester with the other.
Frank and Henry arrived at the Moline road and decided to park behind a large cedar tree which would hide them from the view of an oncoming automobile. But before they could get their vehicle into position, a black Model T Ford swept by. It all fit. The car was shiny new and appeared to have a small spare tire attached to the rear end. And it was definitely driving toward Moline.
“That’s him!” Frank shouted. And the chase was on.
Henry pulled out onto the road and began to flash his lights on and off at the Model T. Frank stuck his head out of the window and waved his arms for the robber to pull over. The black Model T paid no attention.
The chase continued for several miles around curves and over a couple of low water crossings. It was obvious to the self-declared defenders of justice that the desperado had no intention of stopping. Sometimes difficult situations require daring solutions. If the nefarious criminal wouldn’t stop in spite of such a blatant display of justice prevailing, he’d good and well stop with a little “persuasion,” Frank surmised. And so Frank Soules decided to shoot the tires of the black Model T Ford. It only took two tries. Frank took pride in being an excellent shot even as he had gotten a little older, but this was his finest hour as a marksman.
The Model T lurched to the right side of the road and pulled over to a dead stop. Frank had a look of satisfaction that he hadn’t worn in years. Henry’s palms began to sweat, however, because neither of them had thought about what they would do if the thief actually decided to resist!
Enjoying this adventure less and less, the Soules men were cautiously getting out of their automobile when the robber opened the door of his Model T. Frank was prepared for a third shot, if necessary, and this one wouldn’t be at a tire. The gravity of their position abruptly came to the two men who had been calmly branding rather benign creatures a mere hour before.
As the pair walked toward the black Model T, they could see Lucian Pitcock storming toward them. Lucian had a very angry look in his eyes.
Frank and Henry swallowed hard because they both knew that Lucian Pitcock was a farmer, a neighbor, an upstanding citizen in every regard, and a deacon in the Baptist church just for good measure. And he was certainly no bank robber.
But the one thing the Soules men did not know about Lucian was that he had just purchased a brand spanking new black Model T Ford that now sat glumly off the country road with two tires as flat as Frank Soules’ once soaring ego.
Murray Edwards
1995