"They look like a swarm of hornets after some one has chucked a stone through their nest," laughed MacWilliams. "What shall we do now? Go back, or wait here, or run the blockade?"
"Oh, ride them out," said Langham; "the family's anxious, and I want to tell them what's happened. Go ahead."
Clay turned to the sailors in the car behind them. "Lie down, men," he said. "And don't any of you fire unless I tell you to. Let them do all the shooting. This isn't our fight yet, and, besides, they can't hit a locomotive standing still, certainly not when it's going at full speed."
"Suppose they've torn the track up?" said MacWilliams, grinning. "We'd look sort of silly flying through the air."
"Oh, they've not sense enough to think of that," said Clay. "Besides, they don't know it was we who took their arms away, yet."
MacWilliams opened the throttle gently, and the train moved slowly forward, gaining speed at each revolution of the wheels.
As the noise of its approach beat louder and louder on the air, a yell of disappointed rage and execration rose into the night from the fort, and a mass of soldiers swarmed upon the track, leaping up and down and shaking the rifles in their hands.
"That sounds a little as though they thought we had something to do with it," said MacWilliams, grimly. "If they don't look out some one will get hurt."
There was a flash of fire from where the mass of men stood, followed by a dozen more flashes, and the bullets rattled on the smokestack and upon the boiler of the engine.
"Low bridge," cried MacWilliams, with a fierce chuckle. "Now, watch her!"