The banging continued, and Charlie peeked at the window. The tall soldier was running alongside the train. He locked eyes with Charlie. “Stop the train!”

Charlie nodded and glanced to the front of the car, where the conductor was collecting tickets. He started to stand and call out to the conductor, but his legs tingled with numbness and his voice seized in his throat. Sweat blossomed on his upper lip and forehead. He sank down into the seat, swallowing hard before looking back to the window. The soldier was gone.

The train found its rhythm as the engine cleared the station platform, leaving an expanding plume of white smoke in its wake. One by one, the cargo and passenger cars followed the engine from the shadows of the covered platform into the early-evening light. Charlie slid back over to his seat and peered out the window. Both boys were still screaming and chasing the train, but only the taller one kept pace with the last car. As the back platform of the car slid within the boy’s reach, he jumped up, grabbed the side handle, and swung himself onto the shallow metal grate, where he waved frantically for his friend to join him. Gripping the side handle with one hand, he leaned out over the back of the train, extending his other hand to his friend. The bobby, still pursuing the pair, kicked up his pace.

Charlie pressed his face against the window, desperate to see if the second boy would make it before the last train car cleared the platform.

Hanging off the back of the car, George screamed, “Jump!”

The command died beneath the grinding screech of the locomotive’s wheels on the steel tracks, but Thomas obeyed. Clutching his kit bag, Thomas reached out for George’s hand and leaped from the edge of the platform. The bobby’s fingers grazed the cuffs of his trousers but couldn’t grab hold. Thomas’s body hung suspended in the air for two frantic heartbeats before gravity pulled him toward the steel tracks below.

“Tommy!” George screamed as he thrust his chest out over the railing and grabbed Thomas’s arm. Jamming his feet against the base of the grate, he heaved Thomas over the railing and onto the back of the car. Thomas collapsed in a trembling heap while George smiled and waved to the bobby shaking his truncheon and screaming threats at the boys from the end of the platform.

“Told you we’d make it,” George said, slapping a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “And you were worried.”

Struggling to catch his breath, Thomas shot George an exasperated glare before pressing his lips to his brother’s Saint Joseph medal and whispering a prayer of thanks for his protection.

Inside the train car, Charlie breathed a sigh of relief that the short boy hadn’t plummeted to his death. When he heard the creak of the back door opening, he shoved his notebook and pencil in his kit bag and sank lower in his seat. As the footsteps drew closer, he shut his eyes, hoping the tardy soldiers would walk past like the others, but they stopped in the aisle beside him.