At Dodge City an unknown hand threw in a copy of a Kansas paper
containing some sort of an interview with Harvey, who had evidently
fallen in with an enterprising reporter, telegraphed on from Boston.
The joyful journalese revealed that it was beyond question their boy,
and it soothed Mrs. Cheyne for a while. Her one word "hurry" was
conveyed by the crews to the engineers at Nickerson, Topeka, and
Marceline, where the grades are easy, and they brushed the Continent
behind them. Towns and villages were close together now, and a man
could feel here that he moved among people.

"I can't see the dial, and my eyes ache so. What are we doing?"

"The very best we can, mamma. There's no sense in getting in before
the Limited. We'd only have to wait."

"I don't care. I want to feel we're moving. Sit down and tell me the
miles."

Cheyne sat down and read the dial for her (there were some miles which
stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed
its long steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a
giant bee. Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs. Cheyne; and the heat,
the remorseless August heat, was making her giddy; the clock-hands
would not move, and when, oh, when would they be in Chicago?

It is not true that, as they changed engines at Fort Madison, Cheyne
passed over to the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers an
endowment sufficient to enable them to fight him and his fellows on
equal terms for evermore. He paid his obligations to engineers and
firemen as he believed they deserved, and only his bank knows what he
gave the crews who had sympathized with him. It is on record that the
last crew took entire charge of switching operations at Sixteenth
Street, because "she" was in a doze at last, and Heaven was to help
any one who bumped her.

Now the highly paid specialist who conveys the Lake Shore and
Michigan Southern Limited from Chicago to Elkhart is something of an
autocrat, and he does not approve of being told how to back up to a
car. None the less he handled the "Constance" as 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 Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life
later, "we were n't runnin' for a record. Harvey Cheyne's wife, she
was sick back, an' we did n't want to jounce her. Come to think of it,
our runnin' time from San Diego to Chicago was 57.54. You can tell