She was aware, without turning, of the shadow behind her, the way any animal could sense the presence of kin. It was the shadow of someone huge. Hugo was so transfixed by the squalling girl that he went dimwitted. He caught a blur: a left hand that had, on the bitter spring mornings on the steppes of Drohitchen, during troubled whelpings, pulled calves from their mothers’ wombs with a single tug, found Hugo’s shirt collar. It yanked him forward and off the train.

This was excellent news, briefly, in that the first brick hurtling through the air missed Hugo. It thudded against the train cab stairs just as Hugo’s entire field of vision filled with a permafrost of impenetrable white beard surrounding a pit of angry teeth that had known only Russian frontier dentists. This was Abraham Golod, Rebecca’s grandfather, owner of the spyglass, and as his left fist continued to reel in Hugo by the collar, his right fist, black as an ironmonger’s mallet, punched him in the face. Hugo’s head snapped back, his legs buckled under his weight as if they were blades of grass, he heard warbling birds and gamboling children, and he wanted to tell them hello, but he was already unconscious.

Rebecca stood wide-eyed, nostrils flaring and mouth open as if every sense were eager to take in all available wisdom from this moment. Had she actually blamed her tarnished prince for the spyglass? How awful of her! Had that resulted in her slithering out of trouble? How not-quite-awful. Her grandfather grabbed her by the arm. When she resisted, he threw her over his shoulder and strode through the crowd toward their Ford flatbed truck, his shattered spyglass now in one fist.

“Today you ride in the back!”

“But, Grandpa—”

“With the vegetables. In the back!”

Their discussion went unnoticed, the air already gone dusty red, a convocation of bricks soaring in parabolas, colliding with the train, bouncing off sheet metal, cracking windows.

“Char-lie! Char-lie! Char-lie!”

While ranchers clambered in through the window frames, wildcat workers fanned into a passenger car, coughing the name like bloodhounds treeing a fugitive. Luggage compartments were thrown open, and each successive valise, portmanteau, and Dutch satchel that was discovered not to be Charlie Chaplin was heaved out the window, until the skies over the platform were heavy with the rain of neckties, trousers, crêpe de chine smocks. Travelers and train workers were marched down the aisles and to the platform, where the crowds demanded, “Where is he?” and did not listen to the answers.

The portmanteaux and satchels were thrown back first, and, in a savage response to the man who had so terribly dismissed their hospitality, came the light refreshments and pitchers of beer. And then a single pie. It half disintegrated on the way, crust and filling slapping against the train like an upsplash of mud.