if she might have been a load of
dynamite, and when the crew rebuked him, they did it in whispers and
dumb show.

"Pshaw!" said the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life
later, "we weren't runnin' for a record. Harvey Cheyne's wife, she were
sick back, an' we didn't want to jounce her. 'Come to think of it, our
runnin' time from San Diego to Chicago was 57.54. You can tell that to
them Eastern way-trains. When we're tryin' for a record, we'll let you
know."

To the Western man (though this would not please either city) Chicago
and Boston are cheek by jowl, and some railroads encourage the
delusion. The Limited whirled the "Constance" into Buffalo and the arms
of the New York Central and Hudson River (illustrious magnates with
white whiskers and gold charms on their watch-chains boarded her here
to talk a little business to Cheyne), who slid her gracefully into
Albany, where the Boston and Albany completed the run from tide-water
to tide-water--total time, eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes,
or three days, fifteen hours and one half. Harvey was waiting for them.

After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food. They
feasted the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their
great happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them. Harvey
ate, drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when
he had a hand free his mother fondled it. His voice was thickened with
living in the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists
dotted with marks of gurrysores; and a fine full flavour of codfish
hung round rubber boots and blue jersey.

The father, well used to judging men, looked at him keenly. He did not
know what enduring harm the boy might have taken. Indeed, he caught
himself thinking that he knew very little whatever of his son; but he
distinctly remembered an unsatisfied, dough-faced youth who took
delight in "calling down the old man," and reducing his mother to
tears--such a person as adds to the gaiety of public rooms and hotel
piazzas, where the ingenuous young of the wealthy play with or revile
the bell-boys. But this well set-up fisher-youth did not wriggle,
looked at him with eyes steady, clear, and unflinching, and spoke in a
tone distinctly, even startlingly, respectful. There was that in his
voice, too, which seemed to promise that the change might be permanent,
and that the new Harvey had come to stay.

"Some one's been coercin