the manhunt. Planes were flying overhead. The inmates ran into a
farmhouse and seized an eighteen-year-old girl and her younger
brother. White pleaded with the prisoners, saying, “I know you’re
going to kill me. But don’t kill these two—they aren’t in it at all.”
Boxcar and another inmate went to look for a second car, taking
White with them. At one point, White could see that the girl had
broken free and was running. The gang seemed ready to start
killing, and White grabbed the barrel of the gun being held by one
of his captors, who yelled at Boxcar, “Shoot him! He’s got my gun.”
As Boxcar leveled his shotgun at White’s chest, only inches away,
White lifted his left forearm to shield himself. Then he heard the
blast and felt the bullet boring through his arm, through flesh and
blood and bone, the buckshot fragmenting, some pieces going
through his arm and into his chest. Yet White was standing. It was
like a miracle; he had been shot to pieces, and yet he was still
breathing in the cold December air, and then he felt the butt of the
rifle smashing into his face and he crumbled, all 225 pounds of
him, and fell into a ditch, bleeding out and left to die.
Nearly a decade later, in December 1939, the acclaimed
newspaper reporter Ernie Pyle stopped at La Tuna prison, near El
Paso, Texas. He asked to meet the warden and was led in to see
Tom White, who was then nearly sixty years old. “White asked me
to stay for lunch,” Pyle later wrote. “So I did, and we sat and
talked, and finally he told me the story, as I was hoping all the
time he would. The story about his left arm.”
White described how, after being shot by Boxcar, he was found
in the ditch and rushed to the hospital. For several days, it was
uncertain whether he would live, and doctors contemplated
amputating his arm. But he survived, somehow, and he even kept
his arm, though it still had bullet fragments lodged inside and