In Illinois a man up to his ankles in rich, black loam chased a roistering band of hogs that had broken loose from their pens to raid his new corn. He paused to wave at the train draping a black streamer of smoke on the blue sky. Owney barked gaily at the man from an open door in the railway mail car. And the man waved long and lonesome after the train was long gone.

The sunset turned the yellow Mississippi torchlight-orange at the Iowa line, and a shabby, old paddle wheel freight boat re-churned it butter-yellow in the gloaming as the train clicked and snuffled over a long trestle bridge. There were lamps in the station at Omaha and Owney suffered much petting, as the mascot of the entire postal system should.

The men were careful with the sacks for in the morning a hundred farmers worn out from tearing the thick prairie grass into cornfields would look for hope in the mail, and a word from a place that once was home.

From Omaha all the way across Nebraska, Gib had the idea that the world had spun off all its people and was empty. But then the train stopped at tiny stations and unloaded farm machinery and stout boxes, and it took on coal from rickety bins and water from wooden tanks along the right of way. And suddenly from dirt roads and long grass there would be people again. They climbed aboard the train with bags, boxes and sacks to ride westward, leaving others with bags, boxes and sacks to wait for a train going East, anywhere away from grass, Nebraska and a homestead no longer wanted. Westbound and eastbound, all of them watched the mail unloaded with a look in their eyes like Christmas morning.

In Cheyenne, Wyoming, the station lay at the foot of a hill with Main Street running up it into the raggedy town. And two cowboys rode down the hill firing their guns into the air as they pulled their horses to the station hitch-rail, and their grins were white in their dusty faces.

"Expecting mail?" asked on of the cowboys.

"Just an invitation to a dance in Boston," answered the other.

Owney barked at the horses.

The land lifted and climbed all the way across Wyoming. The bare, red soil turned rocky and the mountains tilted Gib's vision into the highest, cleanest sky he had ever known. The train dropped a few cars and added another engine for the climb over the Medicine Bow. Owney got off the baggage car to stretch his stubby legs. A sheepherder with a brown face and huge eyes dropped off a mule and handed a letter to one of the trainmen, and took, in return, a package that looked like a book. He banged the mule in its side with his heels and vanished down a green draw. A book by mail.

The nights were thin and cold. In the caboose at the end of the train a pot stove glowed red and chuckled up its own tin chimney through the roof of the car. It was a far way across Wyoming into Ogden, Utah, with Owney flagging tail talk to clerks and handlers. Many of them read his tags and added others.

At Ogden, Gib saw a huge colored soldier in a dusty uniform with a yellow cavalry stripe down the outside of his trousers. He was talking to a man in the station. "This is the end of it," he said. "It was last year when Diablito broke out of Mexico and came back to Arizona to raid. We chased him and his Apaches back to the border. General Miles reorganized the command. I'm through and going West. Nothing in that East I need. But I thought I'd drop a letter back there, just for luck. Mail gives a man a handhold somewhere."

The train ran the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake into Salt Lake City where the Mormon Tabernacle and the Temple hung from the sky as if anchored from a cloud. A huge, wooden steeple statue of the Angel Moroni all painted gold pointed a trumpet at the cloud ready to blow it back into place in case it moved. There was new statue of Brigham Young, a Mormon Saint, in the town square. And Owney measured its base with his nose while the train sat in the station for several hours getting ready for the haul West.

It was a seemingly endless journey.

But the storytelling little dog fed Gib's wonder that any land could be so vast, so different and, at the eve of this century, so vacant.

Nevada was a series of desert shapes and saw-tooth mountains. Laughing, dirty men showed up at the whistle stops too late to take gold and silver from the mines at Virginia City and too early to make a living any other way in that state. At Reno a woman in a torn dress watched the unloading of the sacks as if there were never in the world anything as beautiful as mail. Owney licked her hand.

Over the backbone of the Sierras and into California the train went, spanning rivers on bridges that looked like skeletons. Gib saw feathery trees on gray-green slopes. He saw the glades and canyons that drew men from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific for gold. The train moved into Sacramento and beyond into forests of trees tall enough to match the giant dreams of the men who came to find them. There was a shack town called Oakland.

And, across a shining bay and strutting over seven hills was a shout of a city, the pride of the Golden West, San Francisco, waiting for its mail.

"What a trip," marveled Gib.

"It wasn't over," said Owney. "But you know now how the railroads and the United States mail held the country together when I was with the Department.

"I took the Central Pacific's North Coast route into Portland, Oregon and then on into Washington State to Tacoma-I was headed around the world!

"But wouldn't that interfere with your duties as a postal inspector?" asked Gib.

"Enlarge the scope," yawned Owney, "international view, learn how mail binds the world together."

"I'm sleepy," said Gib, "and I guess I'm worried too."

"Would it help if I barked?"

"Not really, but thank you."

"I don't suppose you knew that country around Puget Sound in the state of Washington in the early 1890's? Of course not," said Owney putting his head into Gib's lap.

"It was growing. There were lumbermen coming in who had cut down all the trees in the East and the Great Lakes country and were ready to leave more stumps in the West. There were farmers. Some of them were people whose parents had come over the country on the Oregon Trail, and the older ones were the same people who had ridden the Trail as children. There were fishermen and seal hunters and tired miners from California. There were Chinese people retired from railroad work. There were hunters and part-time gold seekers. There were sons whose Eastern fathers had sent them out to the West to be storekeepers and bankers and to start shipping lines for the China trade. And there were government people, surveyors, mapmakers and land agents from Washington. Some Army folks too who spent most of their time staking out fort sites and fishing for salmon with the Klamath Indians.

"Naturally, there was the United States Post Office Department tucked away in general stores and courthouses and private houses, but with pretty sizable offices in Tacoma and Seattle. The United States government itself sent a lot of mail to China and Japan. I visited around a lot helping out where I could. Waiting my chance you might say.

"I was living at the Tacoma Post Office at the time. When I was off duty I took most of my meals at a Chinese restaurant to learn the language of the Orient."

"Hey, now," said Gib in surprise. "Can you speak Chinese? Say something in Chinese."

"Chop suey," said Owney somewhat embarrassed. "No, I never did well with the actual language, but I was completely understood in China when I got there. More important, I made my intentions of getting there very clear to my postal superiors."

The boy gently stroked the dog's whiskered chin. There was a solemn quiet in the Smithsonian.

Rain was falling in Tacoma.

Rain fell for months in the Puget Sound area. There was nothing unusual about it. It mixed a sweet, soft freshness into the salt-smelling fogs. It dropped dimples into the motherly, gray Sound itself.

Two men were talking in the postmaster's room of the Tacoma Post Office.

They were big men with broad smiles that shone brighter than the soft light of the oil lamps over their heads. As men once did in this land they brought laughter and song to hard work. One of them wore a white shirt and a high, stiff collar with a gold stud in the middle, but no necktie. The other wore a blue shirt, open at the throat, and a most cheerful pair of suspenders, violet with white flowers. The man with the white shirt had a silky, red mustache divided by a big cigar. And the man in the blue shirt shook a finger at it.

"I'm telling you," he said, "we've kicked him off the docks for weeks. He haunts those seagoing sacks. He's on the ships for every loading and you have to pick him up from the docks to get him back to the wagons. He wants to go to the Far East with the ships. After all, he's been on practically every route in this country by now. I've checked it out by telegraph with every other postmaster I know. They can't see anything wrong with the idea. It's great for the Department."

"Does the Department know it?" asked the lips behind the cigar.

"Washington knows everything there is to know about Owney."

The men grinned at each other.

"We'll set it up then," said the man in the white shirt. "He deserves the trip. He's pretty great, and I don't know anybody working with Uncle Sam's mail that doesn't consider him his own personal, four-footed luck piece. You heard about the Wanamaker clocks, didn't you?"

"Tickety-tick, tickety-tick for General John Wanamaker," murmured the man in the blue shirt.

The two men held their sides and roared with laughter.

It was a long time ago and in a world as strange as the Smithsonian at night, thought Gib, but never had he felt such a magic warmth and loving.

It was as if his mother were with him and not asleep in Lindenwold, New Jersey. And he knew for certain-sure that it was a feeling for Owney shared by the entire Post Office Department of the United States. He knew deep down that he was part of a country that could feel such a feeling for everything in it.

"Call that dog in here," said the man with the cigar.

"I can't," replied the other. "He's down at Hop Hop Hop's Restaurant eating Chinese pork and talking with Old Hop again. And he's not due back here until it's time to chase the skunks out of the back loading area. He's fine with them. Shows them his tags, lets them sniff and leads them away until the work's done."

"Well, we have some arrangements to make first." Owney paused for a moment thoughtfully, and then resumed his story.

"I was down on the docks when the word came," the dog continued. "When I walked into the postmaster's office I knew I was going around the world. They put a new harness on me, fixed my medals and hung my tags just so. The postmaster took his cigar out of his mouth and read me a letter. It was signed by John Wanamaker in S. A. Whitfield's handwriting. It said 'Send Owney.'

He showed me another certificate. It made me the United States representative to the Universal Postal Union."

"Is that the United Nations?" asked Gib.

"Nine times better," said Owney, "a skillion times older and a jillion times better managed.

"The Universal Postal Union is what happens when all the countries in the world agree to send each other's mail to any other country no matter what. Even if the countries are at war, all the mail is delivered. All the kings, presidents and heads of nations belong to it. No country in the world is worth a rat steak if it doesn't belong to the Universal Postal Union. And I was the United States representative."

Gib thought about it. He thought about Owney. He thought about how the United States could take a shaggy, little, whiskered runt of a dog and say, "This is our representative. Respect him." Why the dog could have been a boy just as easy, tall, skinny and freckled too. But behind the dog or boy were men who laughed when they worked. Men who built an Army, an Air Force, a Navy. Men who select an Owney and think, "This is the friendliest person we could send you to let you know that we like you too, sort of the hairy part of our hearts." It was a mighty big thought. It gave him courage.

"So," said Owney, "right away in came this sea captain and the postmaster introduced me. As a postal inspector, I whiffed him well. He took snuff. That's a tobacco powder that men put in their noses. He had toured the back of the Post Office. I smelled fresh sawdust from the logs being cut for the new outhouse. But most of all he smelled reliable, clean, salty and solid. He was a big man from where I sat, but he only came up to the postmaster's chest when they stood up. He wore a blue uniform jacket with brass buttons, and a cap that looked like one a conductor on the Erie Railroad might wear.

" 'Come here,' he said to me, and I did. 'So you're very important to a shipmaster who's carrying the United States mails,' he said, 'and Scotch-Irish too,' he said. 'To me you're a dog' he said, ' and I'm Scotch-Irish enough myself to mean it. You'll have sack space with the cargo, two meals a day and a chance to walk the deck.'

"I stood up and put my paws on his knees. I whined a little.

" 'So that's it,' he said. 'And, if that's it,' he said, 'you'll have the run of the ship, and we'll talk a bit now and then. Owney's the name, is it? Well, Mr. Owney, I may need some help to steer the ship to Japan.' "