'Find me a rifle, somebody, ' he shouted above the uproar.
'Here. ' Saul's voice, and the rifle was thrust into his hands.
He ran the barrel into the opening and using it as a lever flung his
weight on to it. He felt wood tearing, moved the barrel and pulled
again. It gave and he cleared the plank and started on the next.
'all right. One at a time. Saul, you first.' With his panic just
below the surface. Sean shoved each man unceremoniously through the
jagged opening. A fat one stuck and Sean put a boot behind him and
pushed. The man squeaked and went out like a champagne cork.
'Is there anyone else?' he shouted in the darkness.
'Sean,' Saul's voice from outside. 'Get out of there.'
'You get under cover,' Sean roared back at him.
The Boer fire still flailed the wrecked train. Then he asked again.
'Is there anyone else?' and a man groaned at Sean's feet.
Quickly Sean found him. Hurt badly, his head twisted. Sean cleared
the tangle of baggage from above his body and straightened him out.
Can't move him, he decided, safer here until the Medicos come.
He left him and stumbled over another.
'Damn them,' he sobbed in his dreadful anxiety to get out.
This one was dead. He could feel the reptilian clamminess of death on
his skin, and he left him and scrabbled his way out into the open
night.
After the utter blackness of the compartment, the stars lit the land
with a pearly light and he saw the fog of steam hanging above the
locomotive in a high, hissing bank, and the leading coaches telescoped
into each other, and the others jack-knifed and twisted into a weird
sculpture of destruction. At intervals along the chain a few rifles
winked a feeble reply to the Boer fire that poured down upon them,
'Sean, ' Saul called from where he was crouched beside the overturned
coach. Sean ran to him and lifted his voice above the clamour.
'Stay here. I'm going back to look for Mbejane.
'You'll never find him in this lot. He was with the horses listen to
them.'
From the horse-boxes at the rear of the train came such a sound that
Sean hoped never to hear again. TWo hundred trapped and frenzied
animals-it was far worse than the sound of those men still in the
wreckage.
'My God! ' whispered Sean. Then his anger rose higher than his fear.
'The bastards,' he grated and looked up at the high ground above
them.
The Boers had chosen a place where the line curved along the bank of a
river. The watercourse cut off escape on that side, and on the other
the ground rose steeply in a double fold that commanded the full length
of the railway line.
Along the first fold lay their riflemen, two hundred of them at least,
judging by the intensity of their fire, while from above them on the
summit ridge the muzzle flashes of the Maxim gun faded and flared as it
traversed relentlessly back and forth along the train. Sean watched it
hungrily for a moment, then he lifted the rifle that he still carried
