“It will be hot,” said Cheyne, as they rolled out of San Diego in the dawn of Sunday.  “We’re going to hurry, Mama, 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 of 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, 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 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.