Some Union Pacific men came up from the roundhouse they worked in down at a sprawling yard by the river, not far from Riverview Park. It wasn’t hard to raise a search party. Not even a week earlier a UP conductor had been murdered out in North Platte in a robbery gone wrong. He was shot dead with a .32 automatic. This was big news in Omaha. The Union Pacific employed over two thousand men here, settled and itinerant, and a similar number across the state. These men took an interest in the murderer being found. It was Leon Darling who murdered the conductor. Darling was a tramp. A black man. His roommates turned him in for the reward. The gun was in his trunk when the railroad detectives found him, a .32 with the same number of bullets missing that had been fired into the conductor. Railroad detectives got a confession out of him. He’d only meant to rob the conductor but lost his nerve in the heat of the moment and fired. The trigger stuck. Three shots fired instead of one. The detectives had Darling up in a jailhouse in Grand Island. A lynching had been planned, if the yard men there could bust in, but it didn’t go off.
You can bet those railroad men in Omaha thought of this when they looked for whoever robbed and abused Agnes Loebeck. Practically all the shop workers rushed the bluffs when they heard what happened. They carried crowbars and iron pipes and pieces of lumber. Railroad men rushed the Missouri bluffs from their turntable, work abandoned to find the man who’d held a revolver at a cripple and abused a girl. They ran high-kneed through stands of weeds and fell face-first when the yellow loess dirt gave way. They evaded trees and rattled windows they passed. Once word spread of what happened to Agnes Loebeck, the whole Gibson neighborhood was swarmed by railroad men. They knocked down fences and tore up gardens looking for the one who did it. The girl said she could identify her attacker if they got hold of him. He isn’t a large man, he’s short. I think he’s a hunchback. All night they knocked on doors and questioned whoever was inside. Railroad men who kept awls and block tobacco in the sagging bibs of their overalls, who flexed watermelon-sized biceps to carry wrenches, thirty-pound, three-foot wrenches that were their jobs. Some teenage boys from the Southside joined in. The dorming house emptied in a rush, Karel up in front. Once they got over the shock of what the manager was waking them up for, the boys thundered down the stairs and into the streets to Gibson. Once they heard that the baddest men of a Union Pacific rail yard had formed a party, all teenage boys who wanted to be bad were keen to join the search. Boys, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, who’d been too young to fight in the Great War. Some stopped at home to grab Pop’s shotgun.
Lots of these kids knew Agnes Loebeck and her sister. The family was liked in Gibson. That meant a lot to people there. To the boys. To the men of the Union Pacific.
The party wandered and shouted and kept Gibson awake. They sloshed liquor. They dipped cloth in coal oil and lit torches. But they didn’t find any black man that night.
The party reconvened at the Bancroft school late the next morning. Nearly three hundred searchers. It was Friday morning, a workday, a school day, but that didn’t matter. Surely no manager would hold it against one of his men. A bunch from the slaughterhouses showed up, jobbers from the River Ward, concerned parties from all over the county, to find the one who did it—a short black man who looked like a hunchback and wore a white cap. Lots of folks had seen a man sneaking around Gibson who looked like that. One guy said he’d been robbed by a black hunchback two weeks before. They got weapons to shoot the black hunchback if he came around again. They waited on the trampled diamond where baseball was played after school, or ducked under crab apple trees to escape the sun, or below the hanging beans of catalpas. Karel was in the outfield near the Bancroft school. He smoked cigarettes with men, shared their flasks, and shook his head in disgust as they traded stories of how these new police couldn’t do the job. They fluffed their shirts away from their backs because it was hot. They told Uncle Remus jokes. Some kicked up dirt practicing their footwork and punching.
A kid rushed into the crowd in the evening. He shouted the news.
“The cops got him! He’s up at the Loebeck house now! They got him!”
Somebody told the police she knew the one who grabbed that girl Agnes on Scenic Avenue. A neighbor. She pointed out the shack where he lived, at Fifth and Cedar, with another black man in a white woman’s house. She called it “the trouble house on our block.” Two black men, one white woman. If something bad happened, this neighbor figured it must have been done by one of those men.
It was late in the evening. Cicadas were cranking loud. The other two abandoned him once they saw police detectives on their street. They caught sight of the cops and took off. The one the police were looking for was under the bed—that was where they found him. He said he didn’t own a revolver, but they found one in the room. A long-barreled kind, like they were looking for. They grabbed his arms and told him to confess.
“Don’t you know that girl Agnes?”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“We’ll see.” “What if she recognizes you, boy? Then what?” “Something tells me she’s going to remember.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“You think she’ll know you? You think she’ll remember your face?”
He was guilty enough then for most people. But the cops took him over to the Loebeck house, not far from Gibson Road, up on Second Street, to ask Agnes if this was the one who did those things to her. She screamed when she saw him in her mother’s lamplit parlor, the one she said raped her, twisting his cloth cap in his hands. She collapsed to the sofa when she saw him. “Yes! That’s the man,” she shouted. Her sister repeated it. “He’s the one! That’s him!”
Milton Hoffman was there and he confirmed this was the man without a doubt.
One of the neighbors sent his boy over to Bancroft to tell the party the cops got the one who did it. They were told what Agnes said. She knew from his hat and clothes and shoes and from his face and his size. He said, “It wasn’t me that did it,” and she recognized his voice instantly. She remembered that voice telling her to shut up as he pulled her into the weeds. Agnes Loebeck rubbed her face as she said these things, her head aching, bound in a scarf. The little sister stayed close to keep a shawl over her shoulders.
They weren’t inside twenty minutes. The house was surrounded by the time they went to leave—10 p.m. on Friday night.