off my bonnet makes me feel as if we’d never get there.”
“Try to sleep a little, Mama, and we’ll be in Chicago before you know.”
“But it’s Boston, Father. Tell them to hurry.”
The six-foot drivers were hammering their way to San Bernardino and the Mohave wastes, but this was no grade for speed. That would come later.
The heat of the desert followed the heat of the hills as they turned east to the Needles and the Colorado River. The car cracked in the utter drouth and glare, and they put crushed ice to Mrs. Cheyne’s neck, and toiled up the long, long grades, past Ash Fork, towards Flagstaff, where the forests and quarries are, under the dry, remote skies.
The needle of the speed-indicator flicked and wagged to and fro; the 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