Wilson pulled out a pistol, dropped to his knees, aimed carefully at the leader of the gunmen, standing awkwardly in the exposing glare.
Dawson jerked the pistol from his hand, and sent the man tottering sideways. "Not that way."
The track was cleared now. Even the first negro's body was laid hurriedly on the south-bound rail. But the wild bombardment of the train had had its effect. The bewildered engineer started backing into the gap, in whose deeper shadows the reinforced strikers had further advantage.
One boulder, two-thirds the height of a man, was sent lumbering down, gathering momentum. It leapt against the side of a car; for a moment the car tottered. The head gunman, seeing his men deserted by the train, stumbled down the cross-ties toward it.
It was a rout for the company forces, a clear victory for the strikers.
Then with a whirr like giant mechanical wings the belated guard automobiles, four of them, swung around the curving crest of the road fifty feet behind and above the cut. The trees and underbrush had been cleared for just this purpose. The huge searchlights, one to each car, wavered, then poured their blinding flood on the dark gap summits.
The light itself seemed to stagger those who had been triumphant in the dark. They diverged sharply from the point of advantage. Those on the far side cleared back toward the east. Those on the near side halted uncertainly for a fatal second, before they ran toward the two ends of the cut.
An intermittent sheet of flame broke from the guard automobiles. The defenseless workers stopped and tumbled grotesquely. To Dawson's horrified imagination it seemed that more than a dozen lay flat and twitching in the hellish flare of the searchlights.
With savage yells the new attackers, firing whenever they saw a moving target, covered the slope, and halted above the train.
"Hey, there," bellowed the man in the lead, addressing the train crew below. "Whatcher stop for?"
"Why 'n' cher go on, then?" he parroted in irritation.
The whistle wailed, the engine and cars shuddered forward toward Hewintown. The first attack was over.
"Well," Dawson led the way back to the low gray car hidden in the shadows. "Hell's loose this time!"
The youth who lay dead on the track was Babe Cole, the youngest of Tom Cole's four sons.