Also that morning, on iron tracks through which sifted the East Texas dust, a sturdy 4-6-2 steam locomotive chugged eastward at forty miles per hour, towing its coal tender, four passenger cars, and caboose on the main route of the Beaumont, Sour Lake and Western Railway line. This was nicknamed among those who knew it best the Belch, Slow Leak and Wheeze. Constructed during a flurry of interest in connecting the Midwest to the Gulf (the morning the line opened, its Missouri station was proclaimed “The Port of Kansas City”), it had been bought and sold and gone into receivership so often that the workers now demanded to be paid in cash. Still, service was mostly friendly, a “what the hey” camaraderie which accepted as a noble truth that, should you have business aboard the Belch, Slow Leak and Wheeze, you deserved commiseration.

On the train today were a handful of passengers, an engineer, his assistant, a conductor, two soused brakemen, an indolent fireman, and a seething porter who continually flipped a coin to determine if his sweetheart had been faithless.

In the very rear, facing the receding horizon, alone, feet dangling through the iron rails of the caboose, eyes disconsolate and ill-focused, moped one Hugo Black. He was twenty-three years old. He wore the brown-and-elephant-gray overalls of the Beaumont, Sour Lake and Western Railway junior engineering staff as if they were prisoner’s stripes.

Below a pencil-thin mustache, his mouth was moving; one schooled in the art of lip-reading would find that Hugo was silently pronouncing villainous curses upon the world. In café French. His mastery of the idiom was astonishing, especially in that he had never been to France. He was mourning how moments ago the ill-glued spine of his Flaubert had caught in the wind. As the train rattled past Batson, pages of Madame Bovary scattered behind, fluttering into brambles as if brilliant French literature were simply a by-product of steam locomotion.

Hugo no longer had business on this train. He was the son of a professor at the University of Michigan. Hugo Black père was a scholar of mechanics, specializing in the design of railway trains. “I am an engineer of engineers,” he had said, often, with the eternal hope that he might be found witty, and his son, after cringing through many summers of local railway work, had upon his graduation from college spread his wings as far from home as adventure allowed, seeking at first distant colleagues of his father’s on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, then the Lehigh Valley, and even two weeks on the Sinnemahoning tending to the needs of a splendid Mikado locomotive. But he consistently found his services were no longer required.