David Healey - Rebel Train

“Captain?” one of the gunners asked.

“I see them,” he snapped. The gun crew also had sensed something wasn’t right.

He hesitated a moment before issuing orders. The captain wasn’t about to have his battery open fire on any B&O Railroad locomotives, even if they did look suspicious. But there was something less drastic he could do.

“Throw the switch!” he shouted to a group of soldiers standing near the track. One of the men cupped a hand to his ear to show they hadn’t heard the command. It was more likely, he thought, that they didn’t understand it.

The captain mimicked a man throwing the big switch located just behind the soldiers. They stared back, obviously puzzled by his strange movements. “The switch!” he yelled.

“Lazy bastards are always playing dumb,” the gunner muttered. He spat. Since Gettysburg, the ranks had been swelled with draftees and hired substitutes who were less than exemplary soldiers.

“Go tell them to throw the goddamn switch,” the captain said to the gunner. He took a quick look toward the locomotives racing closer and closer. “You’d best hurry.”

“No!” Greer shouted into the wind.

Disaster lay ahead. He saw at once what was going to happen. He had been expecting at any moment to hear the battery open fire on the raiders’ train. But no guns fired. Roaring closer to the river, he could see the gunners standing around. To his horror, the only activity he saw was at the switch that sent trains off the main track and onto a siding.

The soldiers weren’t railroad men. What they were about to do was just as deadly as unleashing the battery’s guns. They didn’t realize that a train traveling at full throttle would derail if it struck a turned switch. Even if it didn’t jump the track, there was no way a speeding train could stop in time on the short siding before it ran out of rails. Either way, it meant disaster.

“No!” Greer shouted again, vainly trying to be heard over the engine’s roar. He waved his arms wildly. The soldiers, bent at their work, didn’t see him.

Up ahead, the speeding Chesapeake flashed past the soldiers. They had intended to stop the first engine as well, but hadn’t been able to operate the switch in time. The locomotive raced toward the bridge. Even if they had wanted to, there was no way the soldiers could slew the guns around and fire in time to keep the train from reaching the bridge. Nothing in the world could stop the Rebel train now.

Greer’s train wouldn’t be so lucky. Heart racing, he saw the switch being pulled down. Rails twisted out of place. He shouted at Schmidt, “Reverse! Reverse!”

Both men grabbed the Johnson bar and wrestled it backwards. But the locomotive was traveling too fast. Iron wheels slid down polished iron rails with an unearthly shriek. The engine was unstoppable as doom itself.

“Mein Gott!” Schmidt swore, seeing what was about to happen.

The engine reached the switch. It went neither straight ahead nor down the siding, but instead launched itself clear out into the long autumn grass. Frost wailed in terror.

“Hang on!” Greer shouted.

The engine plowed across the ground, sending up clods of earth. Soldiers jumped out of the way. The tender jerked, twisted, and overturned, scattering its load of wood like a burst of shrapnel. Frost went flying.

The engine continued its sleigh ride, with Schmidt and Greer hanging on for dear life. It bounced over the rails at the end of the siding and headed for the muddy river.

“Jump!” Greer shouted. “Oscar, jump!”

Schmidt was already leaping. Greer jumped, too, and in one awful moment before he hit the ground and tumbled, he saw the engine rush on.

The locomotive careened toward the river, knocking aside telegraph poles as if they were toothpicks. Men scrambled out of the way like so many blue-coated ants. The train reached the banks of the Monocacy and plunged into the brown current, landing sideways with a tremendous splash that sent up a geyser of river water. Steam hissed and spat from the flooded engine as the river quenched the firebox. The wheels spun on, trying to grip rails that were no longer there, like a deer’s legs might twitch even after the hunter’s fatal shot.

Cutting through all the noise was the distant sound of the Chesapeake’s whistle. Most times a train whistle stirred something in Greer’s soul. Now, he only tasted the dirt in his mouth and thought the whistle sounded triumphant, like a war cry — or even scornful. The raiders were laughing at him.

Damn them . He tried to shout, but the fall had knocked the breath from his lungs. Damn those bastards .

He swore he was going to see them hanged, every last one of them.

“You all right, mister?” a voice asked, and Greer looked up into the face of a young soldier who stood nearby, poking a musket at him.

He coughed. Tried to speak and couldn’t. The wind was still knocked out of him. He rolled over, gasping for air. He recognized the conductor from his frequent stops at the junction.

“Hell, it’s Greer,” the Union captain said, hurrying over. “Point that musket somewhere else, Private, before you hurt somebody.”

Hands reached for Greer and helped him up. Captain Lowell shoved a silver flask into his hands. The whiskey restored his voice. Schmidt and Frost received similar medicinal doses and were soon back on their feet. Greer thought it was a miracle that no one had been injured or killed by the runaway locomotive.

Schmidt stared at the steaming hulk of iron in the river. “ Gott -damn thieves,” the German said. “Thieving schweinen .”

“What thieves?” the captain asked, turning to Greer, who was soon answering a flurry of questions.

When the captain had heard enough, he shouted his orders. They would form a detail of twenty men and march west along the tracks. It would have been better to wire a warning ahead, but the train wreck had reduced the telegraph to a jumble of broken poles and snapped wires.

On foot, of course, the captain knew they would never catch the train, but there was always the chance the raiders would abandon it somewhere along the tracks. Besides, the captain welcomed anything that broke the dull routine of guarding the junction.

A downy faced lieutenant spoke up. “Sir, we’re going to chase a train — on foot?”

“Lieutenant, the property of a United States business has been seized by lawless thieves,” the captain said, his tone indicating he did not like to be questioned by lieutenants. He nodded at Greer. “That train was under the command of Mr. Greer here. He’s a veteran wounded in the service of his country. Besides, we’re going to commandeer the first train we come across and chase those raiders to hell and back if we have to. Now, let’s move out!”

Ten miles beyond the Monocacy River, Colonel Percy ordered a halt. They had been racing across the countryside, but there was no evidence that anyone was still giving chase. The sky behind them was clear and blue, unstained by the smoke from a pursuing locomotive.

“Keep up a full head of steam, boys, and be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice,” he said to the engineer and fireman. “The next bunch to come after us might have more guns.”

“We’re low on water, sir,” Cephas Wilson reminded him.

“We’ll stop the first chance we get,” Percy said.

The colonel jumped down from the locomotive. He wasn’t happy about stopping, but he really had no other choice. It was a gambler’s call: race on toward the Potomac River crossing at Harpers Ferry, hoping everything held together, or stop and reassess. He chose the latter, mainly because they had been too lucky so far and there was no reason to stretch that luck to the breaking point. There were still many miles between them and the safety of the Shenandoah Valley.