"Get off that track," the words came clearer now, from one of the men just below the headlight. "Or we shoot."
It happened so quickly that they hardly had time to get out of the car. A voice came from one of the two upon the track, the pleasant, velvety richness of a negro voice. "Ah reckon Ah kin walk on dis track ef Ah wants to."
He did not finish. From the deeper shadow below the tender, two rifles popped together, with a thin hollow noise, like playthings. There was a shrieking medley from all sides. For one instant, etched black against the light thrown by the unwinking eye of the engine, the two figures stood. One of the negroes plunged wildly to the side, clattering and tumbling down the seventy foot fill to the bottom of the sharp declivity. The other stood alone, a black break on the lighted area. He screamed once like a kicked dog. He slid to the ground. His body huddled across a rail.
"God!" Dawson exploded. Tumbling out of the car, they started pelting toward the track.
They stopped, still thirty feet from the lighted area, as half a dozen men plunged toward them, scattering to the safety of the woods. One came at them--Ben Wilson, who should have been with the committee.
"For God's sake, don't go there--they're shooting to kill----"
Dawson caught him by the collar, shook him bitterly. "What hell of a mess is this! We've got to stop it----"
Wilson made a gesture of hopeless exultation, touched with something sublime. "You can't stop it now!"
The cries became louder, from all around the motionless train; they looked back. Protected by the guns under the headlights, a line of hesitating men were cursed forward to where the obstacle lay crudely across the tracks. The leader of the guards, rifle cached on his left forearm, pointed this way and that.
The reluctant line of workers burrowed into the mound. Boulders of ore, a broken wagon, old cross-ties were pulled out and sent bounding into the seventyfoot gulley, each starting a rocketing train of pebbles and rocks after it. The front row of gunmen had moved silently forward, and menaced the threatening darkness.
Suddenly there was a shock of breaking glass, and a herd scream from the front car just behind the tender. A cloudburst of stones rained against the length of the train from the gap's crests on both sides. Windows were caved in, rocks bounced noisily off the roof, there were gulped outcries from the penned men inside the cars. At a command, the rifles flared wildly toward the tops of the cut.