The band assembled into neat rows flanking the strongest boy in the twelfth grade, who wore a bass drum strapped to his belly, and who beat on it with a joyous rhythm from the heart of East Texas. There were last-minute panicked repinnings of bunting that had diabolically chosen this moment to sag, and all the town spilled onto the platform in a mass, from the patients at the Ralston Confederate Retirement Home in their wicker-strap wheelchairs to the girls who had turned out in their best dresses, dresses so fine that when the newspaper accounts described the catastrophe to come, they still spent inches serenading local color (“Miss Kate Ogden, pink albatross and white velvet; Miss Fannie Stewart, pink velvet; Miss Hattie Chapman, pale-lavender teatime dress”), and all the girls, no matter how much they hated the others’ high-handed ways, stood linking arms so that—hang your light refreshment and a morning drink—they would be the most inviting sight for Chaplin’s eye.

The 8:16 eased into the station with a belch and slow leak of steam, and then, as promised, a wheeze of ancient brakes. The conductor stood at the exit door, watch heavy in his hand, as if his weighing the correct time might explain this massive crowd.

Rebecca threaded her way between adults until she was in sight of the caboose, where there stood a young man with a razor’s-edge mustache and a baroque nose. He put his hands on his hips and fixed the crowd with an angry, disappointed look. Rebecca almost gasped. She thought he had the condemning weight of storybook nobility, a landowner ashamed of his serfs. She wondered if Charlie Chaplin traveled with, among his many friends, royalty.

The band launched into “Over There,” which annoyed Mayor Knight: there had been discussion of why exactly Chaplin hadn’t enlisted, and he wanted to extend the feeling of welcome rather than guilt. “Play something else! Anything!” he yelled.

“There he is!” The cry came from the throat of a sensible man, Dr. Franklin, and the crowd pressed forward, and a figure appeared at the head of a passenger car. That it was Eugenia Burkhardt in her daisy pokebonnet, returning from her trip to Houston, in no way diminished Beaumont’s enthusiasm. Eugenia, who had never thought much of Beaumont, ignored the hands pulling at her, and the questions of where Chaplin was, until she finally rapped her umbrella against Bethyl Taylor, who was trying to hug her.

By the caboose, Rebecca tentatively waved at her elegant stranger, who was of course Hugo Black, in the hope he might wave back. She had a hunch, which had crept up on her as hunches did for children in folktales who listened to the advice given by magic mirrors or voices whispering from wells: the multitudes around her were missing an actual prince in their midst.