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 out" 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 clink-clink of
hammers that tested the Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp
chased off the rear-platform; now the solid crash of coal shot into
the tender; and now a beating back of noises as they flew past a
waiting train. Now they looked out into great abysses, a trestle
purring beneath their tread, or up to rocks that barred out half the
stars. Now scaur and ravine changed and rolled back to jagged
mountains on the horizon's edge, and now broke into hills lower and
lower, till at last came the true plains.