Number nine was sitting on the siding, quiet and utterly still, when we pulled into Owenyo. Lionel's watch showed a quarter to seven, which looked about right by the way the sun was. It was behind the Sierras, and even though the sky shone blue, the air felt very cold when I stepped out of the coach.

Mr. Ross was inside the depot, his jacket buttoned and tie cinched up perfectly. "Morning, boys."

"Morning, sir." We answered almost in unison. Mr. Ross narrowed his eyes on Lionel. "Reed, you're not due in for another two hours."

Lionel tilted his head my way. "Came in on the same train as him, sir."

That we had. We'd caught the 4:18 out of town, the train run, as the ticket agent put it, "for lowlifes, dogsbodies and the risen dead." I wished I'd been in Lionel's shoes, as then I would've had time for some breakfast either at home or at the diner on the main street. But instead, he climbed aboard right behind me. There was a different conductor by the steps that morning, younger than the last one but his collar was dirty, his posture slumped and his face looked unshaven. Life flashed into his tired eyes for only a second, when I showed him my pass.

The coach we went into seemed shorter and older; it was certainly noisier and more determined to throw me off my feet when the train got under way. The sun shone harshly against the clinical white and pale green paint along the walls while men dozed in their seats, some like they'd just got off work, others like they were just about to start. At first I thought we wouldn't find anyplace to sit, but then we came across two aisle seats facing each other almost at the other end of the coach. Seeing a few other men in the aisle, I turned to one of the people in the window seat and asked "Are these seats taken?"

The man, who was middle-aged, was settled comfortably into a brown jacket and a cobbler's apron, and looked up at me while bemusedly playing a finger along his jaw. "No, not at all, go ahead and rest your feet, son."

"Thank you, sir!" I was leaning back in my seat by the time Lionel was moving to his when the same man's voice slashed the air like an axe-blow: "Hold it!"

I kept leaning back, but my head jerked up. Lionel sprang from the seat like he'd sat on a hot coal. "That one's taken," the man intoned. His fingers had stopped moving.

"I'm sorry sir, my mistake," Lionel blurted, moving behind the chair, nervously fingering his watch-chain. I leaned forward, about to get up. "Sorry, sir, we thought you said these seats weren't taken?"

That finger began its bemused play around the man's jaw again, and he looked at me as though all was right with the world. "Oh, that one isn't, lad. You're more than welcome to stay where you are, more than welcome."

He said it so warmly, and looked at me so agreeably that I began to lean back again. But Lionel was still standing next to the seat, one hand on the back, the other clutching the watch-chain, his brown, almond-shaped eyes focused on me like he was saying "Come on, Charlie, come on, please . . ."

"Thank you sir, thanks all the same." I got up and stepped into the aisle.

Now two hours later in the station I was watching Mr. Ross standing up, unfastening his coat as he went. "All right, ride in with the graveyard trick if it pleases you. Sign the register and see about the extra car orders in the four-oh-one. Blackstone won't mind having that job taken off his hands."

As Lionel's pen was scratching in the register, Mr. Ross turned to me. "You know what the usual for number nine is in the morning?" My face must've told him I didn't. Folding his arms on the counter, he leaned toward me. "Light her off, oil round, wipe her down and have steam up by the time our gentleman of principle arrives."

Taking the pen Lionel handed me, I hastily made out the register: name, position, train number, hours of rest . . . hours of rest? I stopped on that one. Lionel whispered to me "Eleven." Eleven it was, then, whatever it meant.

We walked out of the depot side by side. "Mr. Ross isn't making many jokes today," I commented. "Wait for midday," Lionel replied after a beat. Maybe his 'gentleman of principle' bit had been a joke on Mr. Alexander; I remembered the engineer's white hair and mustache, he reminded me of a sea captain who'd go down with his ship.

"Four-oh-one . . ." After glancing at the stack of flimsy paper in his hands, Lionel was looking up and down the railyard, his eyes flickering over at me once. "Four-oh-one . . ." I was drawing a blank about what Mr. Ross meant, all the boxcars were in the two or three-hundred range . . . Blackstone, conductor's car . . . "He means the caboose," I piped up.

The 'caboose' was where we'd left it the day before, coupled between number nine and the ore train. It didn't look like a proper caboose, it looked more like a passenger car with a sliding door in the side and didn't even have a cupola. But it did have a couple of lanterns hanging on the end, and it was red. A rusty, desert-baked, sickly red, but red, and a smart white Southern Pacific symbol on the side. Tucking the papers under one arm, Lionel hopped up the steps and opened the door with a small grating sound, like sand had worked its way into the latch and hinges.

I went forward to the locomotive, a monolith in the mountain's shadow, the cab windows leering down at me like the half-open eyes of a sleeping giant. It wasn't as big as the train I'd come on, wasn't like the gargantuan machines that carried their engineers eight feet above the ground, but it was still plenty big. Clambering into the cab, I was confronted by the network of thunderingly silent pipes and valves and gauges, all of them leading to different places all over the giant's body. Not a soul was around in the yard or anywhere in Owenyo - no old men on the depot bench, no engineer looming over my shoulder, nobody save Lionel in the car behind.

I hoped to high heaven I knew what I was doing.

The water was three-quarters of the way up on the gauge glass - good, no chance of blowing myself up, at least for the next few hours. Thirty pounds on the steam pressure gauge. Enough to start the stack draft, which would help the fire draft properly from the firebox and out the stack.

Opening the firedoor, I knelt next to it and cracked the firing valve open a bit. Liquid trickled out the nozzle at the front of the firebox, and I hastily rummaged under the fireman's seat - should be some matches and fuses under there someplace - here we are - I took a match from the box, struck it, lit the end of a white, cordlike fuse and tossed it as close to the nozzle as I could aim.

Instantly, it fizzled and went out.

Puzzled, I fiddled with the firing valve a little more before leaning closer to the firedoor. That stuff coming out the nozzle wasn't fuel oil, it was too thin and clean . . . water? Water in the fuel line? Must be getting in the way of the oil. I opened the valve further, hoping to get the water out of there.

These oil burners, I wondered who came up with them, why these engines had to burn that unfamiliar slime. True, there wasn't much wood this side of the Sierras, but there had to be coal someplace. Striking another match, I touched it to another fuse. The tractor back home was a dream, all it took to get started was some kindling wood, some kerosene, some small lumps of coal. The stuff coming into the firebox was thicker now and left a dark trail where it oozed onto the firebrick. Yep, that was definitely oil. I flung the fuse in and came up on the firing valve. Kindling wood was much easier, you could arrange it into a little structure to let the air flow through it and didn't have to worry about -

Fire shot right at me - blistering, searing, dirty fire. I shut my eyes, threw up my arms and went crashing down onto the footplate, knocking over oil cans and banging into the front of the tender.

Feeling more heat, I rolled over onto my chest, my arms underneath me - I was afraid my shirt-sleeves were on fire. I opened my eyes, shut them, opened them again and choked on the thick black smoke the firebox vomited in my direction.

Lit! It was lit! I could see flames licking out. I shoved the firedoor shut with my foot, but smoke kept retching out the rear damper. Caught between coughing and holding my breath, I twirled the stack-draft valve open further, pulling that muck out where it was supposed to go.

The cab was clearing already, smoke drifting out the still-open roof hatch and windows. I was leaning out the gangway between the engine and tender, trying to cough the smoke out of my lungs, when Lionel came dashing up from the 401. "What happened?"

Hunching down, I brought my face out of the smoke and more or less level with Lionel's. "Nothing (urk), just got the fire lit (cough!). That's all."

"Some fire! You must've rattled windows across town."

"Did I?"

"I looked out and saw a fireball come out the back of the cab, then all that smoke."

"Well . . ." I glanced back over at the firebox, "it's definitely lit."

I was surprised when he laughed at that; I couldn't for the life of me see what was so funny about it, and I turned back to the cab as Lionel turned back toward the 401. The fire looked good, a nice, healthy yellowish-white color, not too much orange. There probably shouldn't be that much smoke coming out the stack, but Mr. Alexander had said the fuel was so cheap no fireman could help it. It didn't matter, it all shot high up and wasn't settling on the yard.

"Oiling round" meant starting out by filling the lubricator, a bulbous bronze vessel perched atop the back of the boiler. It had three glass ports in the side and had to be filled with a special liquid, a clear, brownish-red substance called 'steam oil." The steam-driven machinery needed it because regular oil would just go right out the stack without oiling anything, but my father had never been able to explain to me why steam oil didn't do the same thing. He once said something about it being "the only oil that'll mix with water," which I knew couldn't be right, even if it was a neat idea.

Filling the lubricator was more of a task than I thought it would be, as I poured in maybe a few tablespoons of the molasses-thick oil before it all came bubbling out the fill port. I almost dropped the tallow pot trying to set it aside in such a hurry, and rushed to find some rags to quench the flow before the stuff slopped all over the footplate. The lubricator must be full of water from yesterday and needed to be drained. Finding an old paint can on the tender deck, I drained off almost a gallon of worthless, watery sludge. All right, maybe water and this oil would mix, but what a mess.

Knowing how long it would take the steam oil to ooze into the lubricating reservoir, I left the tallow pot standing on its nose, its spout wedged into the fill port, and picked up a large but mostly ordinary oilcan. The driving wheels needed their bearings topped up, and the rod motion needed a drop here and there around the cylinders. The Daylight, I remembered, had four colossal drivers on either side, each easily taller than me. Number nine didn't even compare, with only three driver per side and those only a little more than half my height. Truth be told, the stout, long boiler really did look like something, looming over me from atop those wheels - not the Daylight, but big enough to look like a real train.

The sun had finally cleared the crest of the Sierras by a twinge, enough to dispel the early morning chilliness while the shadows remained cool. I'd just finished topping up the front driver bearing when I looked back and saw Lionel sitting on the front steps of the 401. He'd left his coat and cap in the caboose, and cut a dapper figure in his tie, vest and immaculate white shirt-sleeves. I figured I'd better check the bearings on the tender wheels, and in walking back I saw he had a pile of papers on his lap and a smaller one on the car platform behind him, held in place by a small red rock. He looked up, his mouth midway between a smile and a smirk. "So, is she still firing like a napalm cannon?"

"Funny," I answered, leaning over to flip a bearing cover open. "If the army wants to pave its way to Tokyo, they can just donate that thing to the Japanese war effort. Let them blow themselves up with it."

I heard his pencil scratching on paper, mingled with the low-key roar of the firebox. "There's probably something in the Articles of War about that."

I couldn't be sure, I had no idea what was in the Articles of War, except in school it seemed like Japan or Hitler would violate them at least once a month. The first bearing was full, so I shut it and moved on to the second. Come to think of it, why was I checking these anyway, these were covered and should keep their oil better. Pulling the next one open, I looked around at the shacks and wooden buildings of Owenyo, outlined with terrific clarity by the sunlight and brutally clear desert air. "Is it always a ghost town around here?"

Lionel shook his head, not looking away from his paperwork or even stopping his pencil. "Most everyone living here works for the railroad, and we're right in the middle of the morning shift, so everybody's either out working or off work."

"What, everyone?"

"Shoot, Charlie, only 75 people live here." His pencil stopped. "73, after we get off work." We chuckled at that one, but I slammed the journal cover shut harder than I should have. 75 people! Good grief. Something came to me. "If they have a townful of workers right here, why did they bring us in?" I asked.

"The draft, mostly. Took all the younger men, so they had to take a bunch of people from this branch and send them out onto the mainline. Normally when they needed extra men they'd bring them in from Sparks, but that's 300 miles away. We were closer."

Now that got my goat. I could've worked the mainline and instead they shuffled everything and sent me here. Lionel went on: "Word is they hire Indians off the reservations around here. For stuff like baggage handling."

My eye caught something moving around the station. "Like them?" I pointed with the neck of the oilcan.

Lionel instantly went stiff, his jaw clamped shut - I swear I could even see his nape hairs standing on end. There were two men walking under the depot eaves, both of them tall and burly and dressed in worn denim shirts and leather jackets. At first I'd thought they were cowboys, they even wore the massive Stetson-style hats, but then I noticed their darker skin, the way their cheekbones and eyes were set, one of them even wore some kind of tribal strings or beads on his coat. They disappeared into the depot.

Papers rustled as Lionel gathered them up. I stumbled over some words: "I - I wouldn't worry, they're probably just here for part of the shift, maybe just one job. Besides, they might let them in the main waiting room, sure, but not in the offices. They wouldn't trust them in the offices."

By now Lionel had all his papers together in his unsteady hands and was starting to stand up. "Yeah," he replied, his voice almost strangled, "I'm sure you're right. I'm sure." With that, he slipped back inside the 401 and out of sight.

I slammed that journal cover shut so hard drops of oil splattered in the dirt. Of all the times to keep my mouth shut, that was one of them, and I should've known that after what happened on the train.

We'd given up finding seats after the man in the apron turned us out, so we reverted back to the end platforms, leaning out the Dutch doors to watch the summer fields fly by. We would've stayed there the whole trip, but the tired-faced conductor suddenly tapped me on the shoulder. "'Scuse me sir, no passengers allowed to ride in the end platforms." I started to stammer out an apology, but he interrupted: "You've got the run of the coaches, sir, I'm sure you can find a seat even with the War Department thinking we've got unlimited capacity. Just the rules sir, I'm sure you understand."

The conductor was warm and chatty, and I felt like thanking him for being so welcoming despite obviously being so tired. Lionel had been watching from the door between the cars, and I cocked my head to him as if to say, "Come on, we'll find someplace different."

Our friendly conductor turned to Lionel and chewed out the words "You - baggage car's that way, don't let me find you in the coaches again." With that, he turned back to me - "Pardon me, sir . . . thank you, sir" - and slipped by me into the next car.

I stood there like he'd pitched a bucket of water in my face right after shaking my hand. Lionel's eyes met mine briefly, then he took his cap out of his coat pocket and resignedly placed it on his head as he turned the way the conductor had indicated. Numbly, I followed.

Coming into the baggage car, I had to cling to the grab irons to stay on my feet. The car was more or less just a boxcar, and rode much rougher than the coaches and rattled louder. Breezes from the open side doors blew my hair from side to side, and crates were scattered all around.

And scattered around the crates were men, men like Lionel but more so, dark-skinned with oily black hair and beards. Most were sitting, slumped on the floor or on crates, their worn, faded and ill-fitting clothing falling around their limbs in loose folds. I was peering out at them from behind Lionel's shoulder, and while they ignored me, they looked at the depot clerk searchingly - searingly, even - and then their faces turned hard and implacable as those of anyone who'd stared at us in the coaches. A younger man sitting next to the open side door spoke up: "Look who's all duded up, boys. Ain't seen a Jap dressed up like that since the war started and they carted 'em all off."

"That's no Jap." An older man spoke now, one with lines embedded deeply in his wary, wily face. "He's got Pawnee blood in him, if I'm a judge."

"Well, you ain't," the younger one drawled. He got up and moseyed a step or two in our direction, then pointed to something on Lionel's outfit. "Look at that. That ain't no two-dollar watch." I saw Lionel's hand grab something, and I knew he was covering the silver crest that hung from the other end of his watch-chain.

The man was closer and could get a better look at him. At first I thought he was Mexican, but his skin was too red and his eyes shaped a lot like Lionel's. His feet were pointed inward and he limped, like he had a really bad crowsfoot or something. "He's got that fancy jacket with the brass buttons and all, and look at that shirt - his momma knows how to iron." Some of the men in the car chuckled, the same way the other men in the Owenyo depot had chuckled yesterday.

Now the old man leaned forward, smiling. "Where'd you get that watch, boy? Be just the thing for my boy's thirteenth birthday."

"Ask him if he'd like to make a gift of it," the younger one cracked as if what he said was funny. Lionel kept his grip on the crest as he shouted back "It was my father's!"

"His father's!" the young one howled. "And who's you daddy, boy? Superintendent? Vice president?"

Lionel's mouth fluttered open and shut, flailing for a response before he blurted "He's white."

I sincerely believe even the train itself fell silent. Dead silent, until the young man mouthed the words "half-breed." Then all the young men got onto their feet. Some weren't even men, more like boys, closer to my age. They drew closer, making plans among themselves in glances and whispers. I felt ill, sick to my stomach.

Then Lionel did something frightening: he desperately ducked behind me. All the men just stopped, frozen in their tracks. The one in front said "Come out from there, boy." Neither of us moved an inch.

"I said come out!" We flinched, but still didn't move. Something plucked at the sleeve around my elbow.

"Sit down and shut up, all of you!" The older man's hard-edged voice made us all jump. "You hear me? Quit acting like a hothead! You lay a hand on a white boy, you'll make trouble for all of us!"

There were mutters of yeah, get off, don't get us all in trouble you idiot, and the crowd began backing away, easing off. The young man's eyes, deep and brown and glowing, met mine and I felt like I was fused to the swaying car floor, like there were nails driven through the soles of my boots.

He went back to the side door and sat down there. I kept standing, caught right dead center in the middle, no longer a scrawny teenager but as immovable and abused as an old brick wall.