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 scour 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.
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, Mama. 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