cinders rattled on the roof, and a whirl of dust sucked after the
whirling wheels. The crew of the combination sat on their bunks,
panting in their shirtsleeves, and Cheyne found himself among them
shouting old, old stories of the railroad that every trainman knows,
above the roar of the car. He told them about his son, and how the sea
had given up its dead, and they nodded and spat and rejoiced with him;
asked after "her, back there," and whether she could stand it if the
engineer "let her out a piece," and Cheyne thought she could.
Accordingly, the great fire-horse was "let 'ut" from Flagstaff to
Winslow, till a division superintendent protested.

But Mrs. Cheyne, in the boudoir stateroom, where the French maid,
sallow-white with fear, clung to the silver door-handle, only moaned a
little and begged her husband to bid them "hurry." And so they dropped
the dry sands and moon-struck rocks of Arizona behind them, and grilled
on till the crash of the couplings and the wheeze of the brake-hose
told them they were at Coolidge by the Continental Divide.

Three bold and experienced men--cool, confident, and dry when they
began; white, quivering, and wet when they finished their trick at
those terrible wheels--swung her over the great lift from Albuquerque
to Glorietta and beyond Springer, up and up to the Raton Tunnel on the
State line, whence they dropped rocking into La Junta, had sight of the
Arkansaw, and tore down the long slope to Dodge City, where Cheyne took
comfort once again from setting his watch an hour ahead.

There was very little talk in the car. The secretary and typewriter sat
together on the stamped Spanish-leather cushions by the plate-glass
observation-window at the rear end, watching the surge and ripple of
the ties crowded back behind them, and, it is believed, making notes of
the scenery. Cheyne moved nervously between his own extravagant
gorgeousness and the naked necessity of the combination, an unlit cigar
in his teeth, till the pitying crews forgot that he was their tribal
enemy, and did their best to entertain him.

At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all
the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the
emptiness of abject desolation.

Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a
Chinaman, the click-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp steel
wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear-platform; now the
solid crash