On the platform, the Marine Band rehearsed “When the Saints Go Marching In” and its tricky segue to the “Spindletop Fight Song” near a table covered with checked cotton cloth, and on it chicken salad, baked beans, and, finally, their surfaces domed and ready to burst like volcanoes, perhaps a quarter acre of freshly baked pies. The finest people in town, those who had built their homes in The Oaks, lingered by their chauffeur-driven automobiles, for they had their own plans to spirit the guest toward private luncheons with blue-etched china plates shipped from Dresden and on them the amazing fact of tiny, round sandwiches that had no crusts.

Beaumont was home to the Spindletop gusher, whose eruption in 1901 had spilled a million barrels of oil even before it was capped. This was exciting to everyone, from the local boys who had found that dancing in the geyser was a fantastic method of causing their mothers to faint, to the petroleum companies—Humble, Gulf, Texas—who had generated wealth beyond reason.

“Thus,” Mayor Knight whispered, rehearsing, finger in the air as if slicing through prevailing winds, bringing insight and prosperity, “were Texas a giant, you could lay her upon the bosom of Europe. And, with her head in repose upon the mountains of Norway, with London resting in one palm and Warsaw in the other, she could easily bathe her ponderous feet in the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. So, on behalf of the people of Beaumont, proud home of the Spindletop gusher”—he considered the delightful morning he’d had at the Pine Tree Café—“and home to the tastiest flapjacks in Jefferson County, we invite you, Charlie Chaplin, to take light refreshment and a morning drink with us.”

“TRAIN’S COMING!” The yell came up from a fleet of boys running down the track. Rebecca frowned. With the naked eye, she could clearly see the steam from the smokebox chimney that floated over a locomotive shimmering in the distance, and yet she hadn’t been able to see it through the spyglass. And then she saw that the lens was host to a wicked, spidery crack. She was tempted to shout down that the family heirloom was a piece of junk. Instead, she capped the lens, wondering with increasing anger how long her grandfather had kept its obsolescence from them; how betrayed she felt, what a farbrekher he was; then, lowering the spyglass into its protective leather satchel, she was chilled. Wasn’t there a moment, climbing up, when she’d felt it strike the lodgepole-pine stand? Hard?

Since she was always so careful, she decided that this hadn’t actually happened.