Under Fire: A Tale of the Shenandoah Valley — page 45: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

38 TRAFTON ELUDES HIS NEMESIS. A wild, chaotic scene of confusion. A grinding, crunching sense of dissolution. Car crashing into and over car. Clouds of blinding, scalding steam. Then screams of terror and agony, relapsing into the moans of the dying and the less fatally injured. A pandemonium of horror! CHAPTER VII. TRAFTON ELUDES HIS NEMESIS. The transition from a scene of hilarity and life to one of shocking confusion and death was as brief as it was unexpected. A misplaced switch had been the cause of the ter- rible accident. The north-bound passenger train, running on schedule time, had left the main track, and ran into a heavy freight train waiting on the siding for this very train to pass. | In a moment, without the slightest warning, more than two-score souls were hurried into eternity, while pethaps a hundred more lay about in the dedrzs in all conditions of bodily laceration. Royal Chetwood and his companion were among the few fortunate ones who in some miraculous man- ner escaped without a scratch. When they crawled out of the ruins of their car, and recovered their startled senses, their eyes took in a scene of frightful confusion. Both engines lay, fractured masses of iron, across the track, and enveloped in clouds of escaping steam. The forward cars were piled on their sides on top of one another, shapeless wrecks. Indeed, some of them were little better than heaps of splintered wood comicbooks (Ele)