A whistle sounded in the dark. "Another train!" The staff officer watching from the hillock to the south of the station shouted the warning.
"Get back! Back!" Officers and sergeants pushed the disappointed plunderers away from the wrecked train, while other men stamped out the fires that had been sparked when the locomotive spilt down the embankment. Cavalry helped clear the scene so that the crew of the oncoming train would suspect nothing.
"Hold your fire this time!" A bearded officer rode along the line of grinning soldiers. "Hold your fire!"
"Son of a bitch won't keep coming with those lights burning." Truslow appeared beside Starbuck and nodded toward the stalled boxcars, where the twin red lamps still glowed to reflect on the steel rails. Truslow waited for someone to realize the fact, but no one seemed to have noticed the lamps, so he took matters into his own hands by running across the strip of waste ground that separated the rail line from the nearest houses. A cavalryman saw the running figure and wheeled his horse to intercept. "Let him be!" Starbuck shouted.
Truslow reached the train, unhitched his rifle, and swung its brass-hiked butt into the two lanterns. There was a tinkle of glass, and the twin lights vanished just seconds before the new train rocked around the western bend. A hush fell over the watching men as the train steamed past the hillock, clattered over some switchgear that led to an unused siding, vented smoke around the water tower, and then hurtled into the dim yellow light cast from the lanterns hanging in the depot. No one fired a rifle. The engineer leaned from his cab to wave a greeting to anyone who might be in the depot but saw no one and so sounded his whistle instead. The engineer was anticipating the comforts of Manassas, where he and his fireman would cook their supper by grilling two steaks on a greased shovel held in the locomotive's firebox. Afterwards they would play cards and drink some liquor in the engineer's shed before hauling a heavy train of ammunition south in the early morning. Both men were professional Pennsylvanian trainmen who had volunteered to serve in the U.S. Military Railroad, where the money was good, the liquor plentiful, the whores cheap, and the danger, they told each other constantly, pretty much minimal.
The engineer was still thinking of shovel-grilled steaks as his locomotive struck the remnants of the first train. The cowcatcher lifted up the rearmost boxcar, catapulting the vehicle high enough to scrape along the top of the boiler and shear the lamp, smokestack, steam dome, and bell clean off the locomotive. The impact of the third train collapsed the remaining cars of the second; then the deadweight of the moving boxcars piled into the crash and drove the locomotive deeper into the wreckage. The wheels finally jumped the rails, and the locomotive slid sideways to a halt. There was a passenger car behind the tender, and screams sounded from the chaos as the boxcars crashed in behind. The last boxcars stopped upright in the depot itself, while deep among the wreckage at the front of the train a fierce fire started to burn. On either side of the track, well out of danger's range, men were whooping with joy.
"Another train!" the staff officer called from the hillock, and once again a whistle sounded from the darkness.
"We'll do this all night!" Truslow was unusually animated. There was a brute joy in such freedom from all the customary and careful regulations of normal life.
A squad ran to the depot to extinguish the rear lamps of the stalled train. Other men doused the depot's own lights so that the oncoming train would not glimpse the boxcars standing among the buildings. Deep among the burning wreckage smoke hissed from the locomotive. Men were trying to extricate the crew and passengers as well as extinguish the fires as the fourth train of the night rocked into sight with its lantern flaring yellow-white in the ever-blackening darkness.
"Come on, you son of a bitch!" Truslow growled.
But instead of a third crash there was a scream of brakes as the engineer scented trouble ahead. Maybe it was the darkened depot, or perhaps it was the unextinguished fires that still flickered in the wreckage, but something made the engineer apply his brakes. The wheels locked to skid down the rails through a fountain of flowing sparks. The locomotive stopped just short of the hillock, and the engineer rammed it into reverse gear and released the steam. Smoke poured from the stack as the machinery labored to push the great train backward. The staff officer on the hillock dragged his revolver free and spurred toward the locomotive that was now spinning its wheels. The officer's horse reared away from a jet of steam; then the wheels began to bite and the tons of steel and iron and wood began to crawl away southward. The staff officer fired at the cab and shouted at the engineer to halt, but the engineer kept the regulator fully open, and the protesting cars gathered speed and the rhythm of the locomotive became faster and faster as the train backed safely away. The staff officer fired again, but the train was now moving quicker than his horse could gallop, and so he abandoned the chase and just watched as the train disappeared into the dark with its whistle screaming shrilly. It was clear no more trains would come this night, and so Jackson ordered his men back into the depot. There was work to do. The survivors had to be brought out of the two wrecked trains, the bridge north of the village had to be destroyed, and the prisoners had to be interrogated. The lanterns in the depot were lit once more, and the General paced up and down beneath their feeble light as he gave his orders.
The survivors of the train wrecks were brought to the depot. Confederate surgeons worked on the wounded while food and water were fetched from the houses. One Northerner, a burly and white-haired civilian dressed in an expensive suit and with a seal-hung gold watch chain stretched across his ample vest, heaved himself onto an elbow to stare across the track at the rebel officers in the depot. The civilian had a new bandage around his head and a splint on his left leg. He stared for a long time, seemingly unable to take his eyes from the skinny, bearded, unkempt, and plain-uniformed man who snapped his orders in a high-pitched voice. The Northerner finally beckoned one of the rebel soldiers to his side. "Son, who is that?"
"That's Stonewall, sir," the soldier said, and then, seeing that the civilian was weak and in pain, he knelt and supported the man's head. "That's Old Jack, sir, large as life."
The wounded man stared at the ragged figure who carried no insignia of rank and whose headgear was nothing but a cadet's shabby cap. The Northerner was a bureaucrat from Washington who was returning from a visit to discuss General Pope's supply problems. He was a man accustomed to the high, imperious style of officers like John Pope or George McClellan, which was why he found it so hard to believe that this unprepossessing figure with its tangled beard and threadbare coat and torn boots was the bogeyman who gave waking nightmares to the whole United States Army. "Are you sure that's Jackson, son?" the bureaucrat asked.
"I'm sure, sir, dead sure. That's him."
The civilian shook his head sadly. "Oh, my God," he said, "just lay me down." A gust of laughter echoed from the nearby soldiers.
Jackson, across the tracks, frowned at the laughter. The General was listening to a brigadier who was assuring him that the Yankees had tons of ammunition, a treasure-house of equipment, and a cornucopia of food stuffed into the warehouses at Manassas Junction. "But they ain't got nothing more than a corporal's guard to watch over it all," the brigadier asserted, "and by morning, General, they'll have a ton of boys out of Washington to keep us at bay. And the sons of bitches, excuse my language, General, are only four miles away. Let me take my two regiments, General, and I'll give you Manassas by dawn."