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.