The locomotive clanked forward, its funnel giving off small and urgent puffs of gray-white smoke. A black soot smut, hot and sudden, landed on Starbuck’s cheek. Hinton was grinning, shouting at the engineer who must have suddenly opened his throttle because the train jerked forward off the rail ends and shoved its cowcatcher deep into the bed. Stones and timber shattered apart. The four drive wheels, each one nearly six feet in diameter, began spinning and shrieking, but they found just enough traction so that, inch by agonizing inch, the monstrous machine shuddered forward as its small front wheels tore up the broken ties. The cowcatcher crumpled in a screech of tearing metal.

Hinton gestured with his revolver and the engineer opened the throttle full and the thirty-ton locomotive lurched forward like a great wounded beast as it toppled a few degrees sideways. Starbuck feared it was about to plunge down the river’s bank, dragging its full cars behind, but then, mercifully, the huge machine stuck fast. Steam began to jet from its farther side. One of its small front wheels spun free above the churned dirt while the drive wheels on the farther side of the engine churned a foot-deep trench into the railbed before the engineer disconnected the pistons and more steam slashed out into the rain.

“Set the tender ablaze!” Truslow yelled and Hinton ordered one of the engineers to take a shovel load of red hot timbers from the firebox and thrust it deep into the tender’s cordwood. “More!” Truslow urged, “more!” Truslow had found the venting faucet for the tender’s water storage tank and turned it on. Water poured out of one end of the tender while the other began to blaze as fiercely as the burning boxcar.

“Go!” Truslow shouted. “Go!”

The raiders pushed past the barricade and ran toward the bridge. Truslow stayed with two men to guard against any pursuit as Captain Hinton led the others across the narrow planks laid beside the rails on the trestles. Colonel Faulconer was waiting on the farther bank and shouting at Hinton’s men to hurry. “Light the fires! Medlicott!” Faulconer called down into the gorge. “Hurry!” Faulconer shouted at Hinton. “For God’s sake! What held you up?”

“Had to make sure the train didn’t go back for help,” Captain Hinton said.

“No one obeys orders here!” The Colonel had given the order to withdraw at least a quarter hour before and every second of the delay had been an insult to his already fragile authority. “Starbuck!” he shouted. “Didn’t I order you to bring the men back?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“My fault! Faulconer,” Hinton intervened.

“I gave you an order, Nate!” the Colonel shouted. His other men were already mounted, all but for Medlicott, who had struck a light to the mass of combustibles about the trestle leg. “Now the fuse!” the Colonel shouted.