between
them the engine, with three cars coupled to the cow-catcher and two to
the tender.

On the outward trip the Boers did not show themselves, but as soon as
the English passed Frere station they rolled a rock on the track at a
point where it was hidden by a curve. On the return trip, as the English
approached this curve the Boers opened fire with artillery and pompoms.
The engineer, in his eagerness to escape, rounded the curve at full
speed, and, as the Boers had expected, hit the rock. The three forward
cars were derailed, and one of them was thrown across the track, thus
preventing the escape of the engine and the two rear cars. From these
Captain Haldane, who was in command, with a detachment of the Dublins,
kept up a steady fire on the enemy, while Churchill worked to clear the
track. To assist him he had a company of Natal volunteers, and those who
had not run away of the train hands and break-down crew.

"We were not long left in the comparative safety of a railroad
accident," Churchill writes to his paper. "The Boers' guns, swiftly
changing their position, reopened fire from a distance of thirteen
hundred yards before any one had got out of the stage of exclamations.
The tapping rifle-fire spread along the hills, until it encircled the
wreckage on three sides, and from some high ground on the opposite side
of the line a third field-gun came into action."

For Boer marksmen with Mausers and pompoms, a wrecked railroad train
at thirteen hundred yards was as easy a bull's-eye as the hands of the
first baseman to the pitcher, and while the engine butted and snorted
and the men with their bare bands tore at the massive beams of the
freight-car, the bullets and shells beat about them.

"I have had in the last four years many strange and varied experiences,"
continues young Churchill, "but nothing was so thrilling as this; to
wait and struggle among these clanging, rending iron boxes, with the
repeated explosions of the shells, the noise of the projectiles striking
the cars, the hiss as they passed in the air, the grunting and puffing
of the engine--poor, tortured thing, hammered by at least a dozen
shells, any one of which, by penetrating the boiler, might have made an
end of all--the expectation of destruction as a matter of course, the
realization of powerlessness--all this for seventy minutes by the clock,
with only four inches of twisted iron between danger, captivity, and
shame on one side--and freedom