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 onfusion gripped the Texas A&M
campus in the first few minutes following the escape of the Rice
raiders. It appeared the cadets had been bested in this game
of mascot stealing. When all seemed darkest, a golden opportunity
quite literally rolled into College Station in the form of the
Houston a& Texas Central Limited making its brief late night
stop at College before continuing on to Houston. The Rice
plan had failed to take into account the arrival of the H.&T.C.,
which, as fate would have it, was running just a little behind
schedule. Within minutes the cadets raced to the depot,
piled aboard, and with the cooperation of the conductor and engineer,
commandeered the train. Quickly the train, with over 400
cheering cadets aboard, pulled out of the station and was soon at
top speed in hot pursuit of the fleeing vandals. In 1917, the
tracks and the road paralleled each other only yards apart nearly
all the way to Houston.
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Cadets frolic over the Owls' wrecked Ford.
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In the meantime, the 17 members of the Owl
Protective Association (O.P.A.) jolted merrily down
"old" Highway 6 toward Houston, confident that they had
beaten the Aggies at their own game. But, suddenly things
began to go very wrong. The lighting systems on both Fords
failed. The lead Ford then shook itself apart and died in
the middle of the road where it was rear ended in the dark and all
but destroyed by the trailing Ford.
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The O.P.A. abandoned the
wrecked Ford in a ditch and again set off for Houston with the
remaining Ford limping along and the Hudson Super-six badly
overloaded with 14 of the Rice students.
At this point the speeding Limited caught the
ill-fated crew in the glare of this searchlight. As the
powerful train roared by with whistle blowing, smoke streaming and
cheering Aggies hanging out of every window, the Rice crew
realized that their avenue of escape would soon be blocked.
Indeed, the Limited made an unscheduled stop at
Navasota for the Aggies to detrain. Here they began a
textbook military operation. The cadets set up roadblocks,
took over the telephone and telegraph lines, and wired the campus
for reinforcements. Within the next few hours over eight
hundred cadets were in the field between College and
Navasota. Scouts, mechanized patrols and skirmish lines
began closing in on the fugitives. It did not take long to
run them to ground as the O.P.A. was now on foot owing to the
breakdown of their remaining motorized transport. The cadets
quickly began to round up the tired, bedraggled and hungry raiders
including Snowball the spy.
Knowing that the game would soon be up, the few
Rice students remaining at large, skinned the owl and burned the
stuffing. Carrying a 200-pound bird through the brush had
been more than they had bargained for. They divided the skin
into pieces and apportioned it among the fastest runners in the
party. Relentless Aggie pursuit quickly reduced the original
party to two and would have captured them except for two prominent
Navasota citizens who ran into the pair while hunting. The
sportsmen smuggled the two through the Aggies' roadblock, enabling
them to return safely to Houston with the only surviving portion
of the Owl—a four-foot square portion including the face.
The rest of the Rice raiding party was treated
to good hospitality and released. Snowball was not so
fortunate. He as paraded around campus, given a regulation
army haircut, and turned over to the freshmen for a few
days. He was eventually taken to the station late at night,
minus his clothes, and told to catch the train. It was said he
wasted no time getting aboard. Thus ended the Great Owl
Campaign with both sides claiming victory.
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Detective "Snowball" at the mercy of the
cadets.
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