The engineer of McNally's special had received no orders to sacrifice his engine, and had no desire to sacrifice himself. He wavered, stopped, then tried to back. But Jawn let out another notch, and rammed his bull nose into and through the other's pilot with such force that both locomotives left the track.
CHAPTER XVIII. — THE COMING OF DAWN
The collision occurred at the southern end of the cut. It had for the men in the C. & S.C. train the additional force of unexpectedness. It was not violent, as railway collisions go, but the shock of it was enough to jerk the huddled, dozing men out of their seats, and to awaken them to a full consciousness that something had happened. In the stupefied hush which followed the crash they heard outside the train a chorus of shoutings,—derisive, blasphemous, triumphant. That completed their momentary demoralization; a panic swept them away, and the frenzied men fought each other in the effort to reach the car doors.
But the rush was checked as suddenly as it had begun. The first men to get through the doors had hardly leaped to the ground when they saw from the shadow of the cut the vicious spit of revolvers and heard the bullets singing unpleasantly over their heads. Where they stood the gray dawn made them perfectly visible, but the blackness of the cut screened their assailants and made it impossible to guess their numbers. About twenty men had got out of the C. & S.C. train when the volley was fired, and the celerity with which they scattered brought another cheer from Mallory's men intrenched in the cut.
Some of the fugitives scurried to the woods, while others struggled back into the cars. The shots had been heard inside the cars, and the rush to get out of them was succeeded by the impulse to lie down. The men were without leaders, without means of measuring the peril they were in or the force of their opponents, without knowledge of what was expected of them; and they lay cowering but angry in the barricaded cars, awaiting further developments.
There was no one to tell them what to do. Where were their leaders? The murmur ran through the line of cars that McNally and Wilkins had deserted them. For neither of them was on the train when the collision occurred.
McNally, standing on the Sawyerville platform near the rear end of his train, had already given the signal to go ahead when a man came out of the woods, hurried across the muddy road, ran down the platform, and clutching his arm said eagerly:—
“Mr. McNally, Wilkins wants you to come over here. We've caught one of them and he says he thinks it's the one you told him about.”