He downed an ale and ordered another.

First of all , I should inform you that a lot of Vilmanians have already defected.

Yet had the whole train and all its bombs gone, had the engine crew merely jumped from the train and run as simple self-preservation would have suggested, or unhitched just the engine to make their escape faster, the whole town would have gone and most of the people with it, leaving just a smoking wasteland. Hundreds would have died.

1994, Michael S. Harper, Anthony Walton, Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry →ISBN