Harvey N. Cheyne, a spoiled darling, "perhaps fifteen years
old," "an American--first, last, and all the time," had
"staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail," after
trying to smoke a "Wheeling stogie." "He was fainting from
seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the
rail," where a "gray mother-wave tucked him under one arm."
He was picked up by the fishing schooner We're Here, and
after many marvellous experiences among the sailors arrived
in port, a happier and wiser fellow. His telegram to his
father brings the following result.


Cheyne was flying to meet the only son, so miraculously restored to
him. The bear was seeking his cub, not the bulls. Hard men who had
their knives drawn to fight for their financial lives put away the
weapons and wished him God-speed, while half a dozen panic-smitten
tin-pot roads perked up their heads and spoke of the wonderful things
they would have done had not Cheyne buried the hatchet.

It was a busy week-end among the wires; for, now that their anxiety
was removed, men and cities hastened to accommodate. Los Angeles
called to San Diego and Barstow that the Southern California engineers
might know and be ready in their lonely roundhouses; Barstow passed
the word to the Atlantic and Pacific; and Albuquerque flung it the
whole length of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé management, even
into Chicago. An engine, combination-car with crew, and the great and
gilded "Constance" private car were to be "expedited" over those two
thousand three hundred and fifty miles. The train would take
precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and
passing; despatchers and crews of every one of those said trains must
be notified. Sixteen locomotives; sixteen engineers, and sixteen
firemen would be needed--each and every one the best available. Two
and one-half minutes would be allowed for changing engines, three for
watering, and two for coaling. "Warn the men, and arrange tanks and
chutes accordingly; for Harvey Cheyne is in a hurry, a hurry--hurry,"
sang the wires. "Forty miles an hour will be expected, and division
superintendents will accompany this special over their respective
divisions. From San Diego to Sixteenth Street, Chicago, let the magic
carpet be laid down. Hurry! oh, hurry!"

"It will be hot," said Cheyne, as they rolled out of San Diego in the
dawn of Sunday. "We're going to hurry, mamma, just as fast as ever we
can; but I really don't think there's any good of your putting on your
bonnet and gloves yet. You'd much better lie down and take your
medicine. I'd play you a game o' dominoes, but it's Sunday."

"I'll be good. Oh, I will be good. Only--taking off my bonnet makes
me feel as if we'd never get there."

"Try to sleep a little, mamma, 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 drought and glare, and they put crushed ice to Mrs. Cheyne's
neck, and toiled up the long, long grades, past Ash Fork, toward
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 shirt-sleeves, 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 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.

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 Fé 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
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.