If people can make trains, people can do anything they want.

Jonathan didn’t sleep that night. The next morning he stole candle leavings from Wify’s cupboard and a piece of seasoned wood from Alvah’s store. The method came to him whole, as God-given as the great train itself. He searched out a clump of clayey earth, bit into it to make a mold of his gums and filled the mold with wax to make a template. He whittled jaws and teeth to size and joined the jaws together with leather thongs. He had to hold the upper plate with his index finger when he spoke, but he could make himself understood again.

Teeth and claws were back in business.

During the first winter George was away at college, Alvah forbade Jonathan to go down to the edge of the homestead where the railway tracks ran. Jonathan went anyway, watched the trains go by and stared after them, heart pounding. Back at the homestead, he looked straight into Alvah’s eyes without a blink and even – or so it seemed to Alvah – without awareness that Alvah’s eyes were eyes, too. As before, Alvah forbade him this, forbade him that, but now hesitated to beat him, was afraid somehow to beat him. Jonathan went to the train station every Saturday after he’d bargained for flour and bacon at Wikin’s store. Mr Finster, late of the Pennsylvania Railroad and builder of the house that had served as model for Alvah’s house, was stationmaster, a talkative man and a warm one, with the strong feelings most of Sweetbrier’s inhabitants shared about the treatment of this boughten boy. He told Jonathan about Wooten fireboxes, equalizing beams and link-and-pin couplers. He explained the signals. He talked about bridges that spanned valleys hundreds of feet deep and trains that crossed the Mississippi in winter on cross-ties laid right over the ice.

Trains weren’t scheduled for Saturdays, but one day at the end of winter, a train came through while Jonathan was at the station. His diaries say it was an American Standard, a great, brass-bound beast by the sound of it with a balloon stack and box-shaped lights two feet square. People scurried this way and that, dogs barked, children screamed, Mr Finster carried bags and checked tickets. Trainmen bawled out orders. The engine built up a second head of steam, the whistle blew, the massive wheels began to turn.

Despite their beauty, these trains were crude pieces of machinery: they didn’t even have real brakes: men stood astride the tops of the cars and leapt from moving car to moving car to set brakes that worked only from the outside: astonishing acrobatics of courage, foolishness and grace that made bystanders gasp. Jonathan kept his eyes on one man in particular; when this one leapt, in his heart Jonathan leapt, too – and was still leaping when the man staggered and fell between the cars. Mr Finster broke into a run. The brakeman’s body bounced beneath the wheels. A flash of arm shot out from the tracks. The body bounced again, and the head flew out to rest some twenty yards beyond the arm. For a moment Jonathan stopped breathing altogether. Then he scrambled back to Alvah’s wagon, jerked the reins, and whipped the mare into a gallop.