III
The crash was part of Nathan’s nightmare,—part of it until he felt himself rocking, bumping, knocking, billowing, hurled at a strange tangent he could not comprehend.
Then came another crash, more horrible than before. He was falling,—down, down, down. BUMP!
Roach uttered one long-drawn, grisly cry. A car beam had crushed his legs. When some ominous ripping sound followed, a portion of the iron underwork broke through the timbers where he lay impaled, crushing his skull in the inky dark.
For an instant all was quiet,—the ghastly quiet before pandemonium. Then from up front started a gigantic hissing of steam. The engine boiler blew an instant later. When the roar had echoed away across the distance, hoarse voices were calling, a staccato tatting began,—a machine-gun spitting death.
Nathan came to his senses and tore frantically at nail-jagged sheathing that pinned his lower limbs. His hat was lost. One of his legs was shot with sudden agony where a nail had spiked it to the bone.
But he crawled out. Somehow he crawled out. The leg was not broken. He looked around.
Through black fog loomed a horrible glare. Sharp tongues of ruddy, ominous flame shot up, forked, ravenous. The glare grew brighter. It disclosed grotesque, hysterical figures silhouetted against roaring yellow. In the wrecked cars, imprisoned men were bellowing in agony. From surrounding banks of murky dark, fiends were shooting down others as they crawled from wreckage or forced twisted doors open and leaped down the embankment.
The wreckage fired terribly. It might have been sprayed with oil, so swiftly did those tongues of liquid flame leap from timber to timber. And through the hissing, crackling, snapping, roaring tumult which obliterated the next few minutes came sharp rifle fire and singing death.
It was massacre!
Nathan could not grasp where he was, where to flee, what to do. Fear-grazed, he stood irresolute. The fire-painted fog blanketed everything.
Then from the mist-wall a short distance away he heard more frenzied shrieking than the rest.
“Americanski! Americanski!” The attackers had recognized his uniform.
Nat tried to run forward. He slipped and fell. The entire Bolshevik army piled immediately on his back.
Nathan waited for the impact of bullet or bayonet stab to finish him. His terror was so great he was physically paralyzed. The fortunes of war! The end had come! He was interested to see what Death would be like. Let it come—quickly.
But the entire Bolshevik army lifted itself from his back. He was yanked to his feet. In front of him, lighted by the wild, barbaric flames was a huge, bearded man in a high, outlandish, lambskin hat pushed over one ear. He jabbered at Nathan crazily.
“N’panam’ayu!” (I don’t understand!) cried Nathan frantically.
But his contention had small effect on the Russian. Nathan protested hysterically that he did not understand.
The big Bolshevik grew angrier and angrier. Then a tall, lithe figure, girt with a huge cavalry sword, jammed his way forward. He looked like a Cossack, though the Cossacks were considered pro-Ally.
This man took note of Nathan’s uniform. To the boy’s stunned astonishment he spoke in broken Germanic English.
“You are American?”
“Yes,” cried Nathan. He could scarcely make himself heard amid the increasing tumult all around.
“You are American soldat—yist?”
“I’m a Y. M. C. A. man!”
“Where are you going? You help Czecho-slovak—yist?”
“I was only traveling on the train—Petrograd to America!”
The panther-like young fellow jabbered to the man in the lambskin hat. A dozen others tried to harangue each other at once. Nathan looked death in the face. A dozen bayonets were ready to finish him without further ado, for Nathan heard that sickening word “shteek!” Finally the Cossack prevailed.
“You go with us. Do not run away. We ask you question afterward!”
A dozen maniacal hands gripped him. Down the incline on the south side of the horrible furnace he was hustled, out of range of the bullets.
The bullet fire was subsiding, however. The flames were roaring in triumph over the long line of splintered cars where a few luckless human beings were roasting horribly.
Nathan was half-dragged, half-carried to the bottom of an embankment. There were hordes of stampeding horses there. One had a bullet through its nose and was shrieking in agony. There is no earthly cry like the shriek of a wounded horse. It was dispatched with a shot in the head and broke a man’s leg in its writhing.
The attacking crowd which had engineered this holocaust was a tattered, unruly, blood-crazed mob.
“You climb up!” ordered the tall Cossack grimly. He indicated a scrubby pony that three men were holding by the head.
Nathan had no choice. He was living by minutes now. The Cossack threw his pipe-stem leg over another pony. His act was followed by a dozen. There was a howling argument over something. Then southward from the roaring, roasting horror, serpentine along the trackage, a cavalcade started abruptly down into deeper southern fog. Nathan had to grip the high Siberian saddle tightly to preserve his balance. It was like riding atop a moving fence post. The Cossack had the reins of the pony’s bridle.
Nathan was conscious of traveling down a far, far slope. He marveled how the men knew their way in that fog. The slope seemed miles long before they reached the valley bottom. Then he realized the cavalcade was taking its course from the depression in the hills. But the horses walked. The hysteria of the crime which had been consummated burned itself out.
Several horsemen trotted alongside and howled questions at Nat in their native tongue. Over and over the young man had to protest he did not understand. Finally when they stopped once in that labyrinth of mist, Nathan demanded of the Cossack:
“Where are you taking me?”
“Beeg commandant! You see! Stop talk!”
“What for?”
“You have come from Petrograd! To answer question! I say stop talk!”
“And what then?”
“Ah! We see how good you answer question!”