Trumpelman continued the inspection alone. It was obvious he did not care about the sanitation arrangements, or whether the Baluters would have enough coffee to drink. He did not break stride as he moved past the opened doors. But then, in front of a deep, open coal car, he came to a stop. With both hands he gripped the sides of his spectacle frames. He was trembling. Stretching his neck, he peered.

Up came the limousine, playing its light on the side of this tender—an old one, battered, with steep, slanting walls. Only the faces of the oldest children—Rose Atlas, Gutta Blit, Usher Flicker—showed over the rim. And the gardener boy, the pinhead: he was there, too. Then someone inside the coal car began to pound on its walls. It made a booming, hollow sound. “Chaim! Chaim!” Citron’s voice. “Chaim!”

In four strides Trumpelman was next to the dark tender. He leaped to the ladder that hung down its side. From there he could look in. All the children from the Hatters’ Asylum were standing at the bottom. Their faces were black from coal dust. The same dust matted their hair.

“I’m a fast runner!” It was little Gumbiner, now aged almost four. He raced across the bottom of the car and up the slanted wall toward the Elder. But partway up his legs—fat ones, inside short pants—stopped churning, and he sprawled onto the metal floor.

Then Citron tried, holding his arms out, and so did Leibel Shifter. They fell back, too.

Hobnover shouted, “It’s too high!” He began to cry.

“What will they do to us?” Tushnet said.

At that instant the whistle blew, a long, screeching blast. Another whistle came from the far end of the train.

Trumpelman remained on the rim of the coal car. He hung there, uncertain, half in, half out.

Then Wohltat came running along the railway bed, his elbows working like the rods of the train. He stopped beneath the tender. He was bloody. His chest was heaving. He clasped his fat hands together and looked straight down.

“Oh, sir!” said Rose Atlas. She was staring at him over the edge of the car. “What has happened to you?”

The Volksdeutscher heard her. His lower lip went farther and farther out, like a pouting child’s. Then he stamped. He kicked the ground and uttered a pitiful wail.

“I could do whatever I wanted!”

Both whistles sounded again, from either end of the transport. The cars began to rattle, to shake. Trumpelman swung his legs over the rim of the tender and dropped within.

It would be pleasant to say that for the whole of that dreadful journey, while the children clasped his neck, his knees, the Elder entertained them with more of his adventure tales. But it only started that way. Somehow, from somewhere, Trumpelman produced a cigarette. He lit the end of it with a match. Then, like in the old days, in the old singsong voice, he started speaking.

“Dear children, do not be afraid. Take heart! You know how many dangers I have safely passed. How many times I have been on the brink of death. The same fate that protected me as a youth in America will preserve me throughout my last days. Again and again my enemies, continually plotting, have attempted to complete with their bullets, their bombs, what weakness and age have already begun. I do not speak of this to gain your pity, but to give you courage in your own moment of danger. Look up, my doves! For I would not have been saved from death except to fulfill a great destiny. Nothing, no one can kill me until we complete our journey together. And now we have started! We are moving! To Madagascar!”