Going back into the coach, Lionel abruptly stopped and peered around the doorway. When he started walking again, I followed, and I think I was as relieved as he was to see the two men who'd been sitting in front of us were gone. In fact, almost everyone was gone; the coach was deserted, aside from a few other men in overalls who were moving toward the door.

Coming to the other end of the coach, we turned into the stairwell and hopped down into the dust and gravel - no platform at this station. I gave the train one last, longing look before turning the station directly ahead of us. It was a one-story structure, dried out and preserved by the desert, and less than half the size of the station back home. All around was a small collection of what I took to be houses, not much more than shacks - if they weren't shacks to begin with. There wasn't a sign of any green, lush farmland anywhere, only miles of scrubland stretching to barren hills.

Next to me, I heard the chain on Lionel's watch jangle as he put it back in his pocket. "It's almost time, come on." For a second I had an urge to say, do I have to? Well, I did have to, so I trotted alongside Lionel as he slipped into his jacket, looking dapper regardless of the rising desert heat, and we crossed another set of tracks (those tracks . . . they were so small they didn't even look like rails, they looked more like two silver ribbons half-sunk in the dirt) before walking through the open door of the depot.

The second we entered I smelled something familiar. There were other smells mixed in with it such as steam oil, cigar smoke and flaking plaster, but there was something else, something that reminded me of the schoolhouse - it smelled like the desert. It smelled the way the desert would smell if it had been locked up indoors for decades and turned old but not musty. Sunlight stared in through the windows like it was frowning heavily, and as we looked around we saw there were men in here. There were four or five of them, and not one could've been a day under fifty. Most of them were wearing overalls and heavy denim shirts, but one was dressed up like a clerk in his shirt-sleeves, his vest open, tie loose, jacket draped over the back of a chair. He looked up at us from a counter full of papers, and surveyed us with deep-sunk, humorless eyes. "Well, look out boys, here comes the Rookie Brigade."

The other men burst into a cacophony of deep, gravelly laughs, laughter that seemed to well up from cracks in the earth. Lionel reached up and pulled his cap off as if by instinct; I did the same. Our eyes darted around a few times before resting on the man in the suit. He wasn't laughing. "Which one of you is Reed?" Lionel took a step forward, but the man spoke to both of us. "My name's Ross, I manage the Owenyo yard and the depot. The rest of this august company is the weekly meeting of the Owens Valley Dirty Old Men." He gestured to the other men as he said this, provoking more of that gravelly laughter, while Lionel and I stayed silent and glanced around like rabbits. Mr. Ross went on. "Ignore them at any cost, they'll teach you enough bad habits that your mothers will wash your brains out with soap." More laughter. Mr. Ross turned to me, tapping his pen on the counter like a telegraph key. "You the new brakeman or the new fireman?"

I somehow squeaked out the word "Fireman." Then to my surprise one of the men pointed to something on my outfit and declared "Mud steamer fireman." Mud steamer?

"Yeah, he's a mud steamer, I know," Mr. Ross added. "Had to take what I could get, what with Carl getting snatched up by the draft yesterday."

The man went on. "Shoot, Ronny, you know this kid isn't in it for the long haul."

"Depends on whether or not he can get number nine to Keeler and back." Mr. Ross scribbled something with his pen before continuing, "Let him fire it like a weed burner if it'll keep the wheels rolling."

Laughter again, and again Mr. Ross didn't join it. I hoped I'd get out of here quick. Lionel was fiddling with the buttons on his jacket and he shot me a glance with a hint of a smile in it, as if he were glad the attention was away from him for once. His head snapped back in Mr. Ross' direction when he spoke again. "Reed, do you know how to make out car orders?" Lionel nodded. "Good, typewriter's over there, you're on the clock, get to it." Lionel quickly skimmed over behind the counter to a desk right under a window. The typewriter was placed there and Lionel sat down in the stiff wooden chair in front of it. He didn't take off his coat, but he did put his cap on the desk as if it were a fedora or something, and began looking intently through a stack of flimsy paper sheets. Those sheets weren't just in stacks on the desk, they were pinned to the walls and lined up in open desk drawers.

"Rusk, number nine's at the south end of the yard, engineer Alexander, conductor Blackstone. You're on the clock, get to it." I managed to answer "Yes, sir," before backing out a few steps and looking over at Lionel, who was rolling one of the flimsy sheets into the ornate, almost antique typewriter. He raised his finger near his eyebrow and gave me a split-second gesture that looked like a salute just before I vanished out the door.

Walking away down the track, I caught Mr. Ross' next sentence on the wind: "Get number eight hot, just in case we have to tow 'em in," and a final whiff of laughter. I took a few more steps, then gave the dirt under my feet a kick, sending up a cloud of dry, bitter dust that settled on my overalls. Looking south, I saw a pall of black smoke drift overhead, its shadow oozing over the yard on the torpid desert air.

The train of coaches I'd come on was still there, although for some reason the engine had been uncoupled and they were running it around some tracks on the east - no, wait, it was the west - side of the yard. I lingered a bit as I walked past them, and remembered my father referring to a passenger train as the 'varnish;' now I saw where it got that nickname. The line of boxcars sat on the other track as if they'd been abandoned sometime after the Civil War and left as a resting place for brown desert dust.

I ended up walking the whole length of the yard, following the black smoke like a mirage. The sun was just hinting at the ferociousness it would build to during the day, and the one time I felt a breeze it blew the smoke right into my face. It smelled like automobile exhaust, not like coal, and I hoped there wasn't anything wrong with number nine.

Number nine sat by itself at the end of the yard. That engine reminded me of a fat man with very small feet, just barely balancing its bulk on those two undersized rails. The whole rig was covered in a musty grey color, and I don't think most of it was paint. The only bright spots were the lettering painted on the side, which told the world that this engine was with the Southern Pacific and was known as number nine. Coming closer, I saw the sprinkling of soot over everything. They'd never have stood for the Daylight looking like that.

A face leaned out of the gangway between the cab and the tender, and looked down at me with heavy-lidded eyes that had seen it all and then some. He had a solid white, gentlemanly sort of mustache, and well-trimmed white hair flowed out from underneath his shop cap. His whole outfit was more or less the same as mine, but his had been torn, patched, stained, cleaned and scuffed a thousand times over.

"You the new fireman?" He spoke in a voice that was deep-throated and powerful; it could've been the voice of the iron horse. I nodded a response, and he jerked his head in a way that said "Get up here." I took hold of the grab irons and scrambled into the cab.

All I could smell was oil. Oil burning in the firebox rather than coal, oil shining around every bearing and moving part, steam oil oozing down the side of the bronze lubrication reservoir. Another man stood in the gangway opposite me, wearing a shirt, slacks and black sleeve protectors - conductor Blackstone, probably. I looked the controls over, trying to remember everything I'd read in the rulebook. The only thing I recognized was the giant brass steam pressure gauge when the engineer said "Here we go," and hitched the reversing lever all the way back.

We're going? I looked up and down the lever and valves on my side of the cab, trying to identify which ones to pull first. A hissing sound rent the air and I saw steam rise up around the front end of the engine. The conductor stepped into the cab just as the engine and tender banged together and began to rumble backwards. My eyes went back up to the steam pressure gauge, and I could see the needle inch its way down the numbers.

I clutched two valves almost at random as I tried to decide what to do next. Add water to the boiler? No, that would only cool it down. Add more fuel to the firebox? No, the tractor had taught me doing that would have the same effect.

The engineer put the throttle back in and we rumbled and swayed down the tracks, pitching from side to side. He wasn't using any steam now, just coasting - now I could come up on the oil . . .

"One carlength," the conductor called, leaning out my side of the cab. I peered out the window and saw we were coming up fast on a string of gondola cars set out behind us -

We coupled up to the cars with an almighty bang, one that sent me reeling into the back wall of the cab. I heard the shock of the collision traveling down the cars as I struggled to get back to my controls.

The next half-hour was spent shuffling the cars around the yard like a two-hundred-ton pack of cards, while I wrestled with the firing controls and watched the gauge waver between just above operating pressure and coming up close on popping off the safety valves. By the time we stopped for a few minutes - I could hear them testing the air brakes - I was in a sweat but my hands felt clammy within their gloves. The conductor was climbing down from the cab when he stopped a second, looked at me, then shouted to the engineer above the noise of the fire "Mud steamer?"

The engineer shouted back, "Yep." I heard the conductor mutter something that would've gotten my mouth washed out with soap if I'd said it just before he stepped onto the ground and walked back toward the rear of the train. I pulled at my collar, starting to feel sick.

Two blasts of the whistle rang in my ears and the engine lurched forward. The throttle was open farther than it had been before and the tremendous draft from the exhaust threatened to suck my fire right out the stack. I desperately worked the atomizer draft valves, trying to get a thicker firebed that would hopefully stay put.

At some point I looked out the cab window and realized Owenyo was a quarter-mile back; we were out on a lone track sprawled along the desert floor, heading to who-knows-where. What the gauges did out there was sickening for me watch as the steam pressure built, plunged, wavered, and plunged again. The engineer sat docilely on the other side of the cab, jerking the throttle and the brakes around, wreaking havoc on my fire. I found myself wondering why the in world I ever agreed to this. The Daylight wasn't like this, surely. This was madness.

I heard the exhaust pick up with a heavy bark, shooting brown smoke a mile high. We were going up a grade. I looked down at the gauge glass, a small glass column that was supposed to tell me how much water was in the boiler. I got sicker as I tried to watch what it did as the water sloshed around; there wasn't much left in there.

The crest of the grade wasn't far ahead. I remembered what my father had told me. Always, always keep the water level up. That water's the only thing keeping that boiler cool. If the water ever gets too low, the fire's hot enough to burn right through the boiler shell and the whole rig will go to Kingdom Come. If you can keep up either steam pressure or water but not both, always pick water. I remembered how we had to stop regularly in the middle of the fields so I could get the water back up again.

But I couldn't ask them to stop the train on the line - first thing in the rulebook, keep on time or accidents happen. If I tried to put water in now, the pressure would just disappear, we'd stall on the grade and I'd be out of a job.

While I was trying to think of something, I heard the exhaust taper off. The cab stopped pitching and rolling, the racket of rumbling wheels and clanking rods died down. We stopped just short of where the grade crested, and I heard the engineer set the brakes to keep us from rolling back. He turned to me. "I think we can wait for you to get some water in there before we go over the top."

I swallowed and breathed hard a few a times before nodding and going to work on the valves to start bringing the water up. The engineer calmly folded his hands over his chest and leaned back, his shoulders in the sun coming through the open cab window. He watched me as I watched the water rise the column (the pressure gauge fell like a rock, but at least I didn't have to worry about that), and he stayed absolutely still, only his eyes moving. It was unnerving, especially the one or two times I looked at him and met his eyes.

We had been stopped there a few minutes before I took a guess at what he was staring at me for. Swallowing whatever was left of my pride, I asked for help.

Engineer Alexander leaned forward, unclasping his hands. "Learned on a coal burner, didn't you?" I nodded. "Well, an oil burner's different. Come up on the firing valve and you get instant heat."

That was for starters. By the time I had both water and steam back up, I was mentally repeating to myself all the tips and tricks he's given me; what to do with the dampers (I hadn't even touched those), when to draw water, how to watch what he did and follow up accordingly with the fire. As he went back to the engineer's side of the cab, he turned back one more time. "Remember what I've said. You may or may not be firing for me the next time you're called, you'll probably have one of the other fellows. Shoot, they gave Carl a hard time, and he was young - not a kid like you, but younger than the rest of us."

Grabbing the whistle lever, he gave two blasts and reached for the throttle. He looked at me with something in his aged eyes that might have been sympathy, but his voice was as firm as before: "Run it right, kid. The rest of the crew eats rookies for lunch."