“Pshaw!” said the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life later, “we weren’t runnin’ for a record.  Harvey Cheyne’s wife, she were sick back, an’ we didn’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.

After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food.  They feasted the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their great happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them.  Harvey ate, drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when he had a hand free his mother fondled it.  His voice was thickened with living in the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists dotted with marks of gurrysores; and a fine full flavour of codfish hung round rubber boots and blue jersey.

The father, well used to judging men, looked at him keenly.  He did not know what enduring harm the boy might have taken.  Indeed, he caught himself thinking that he knew very little whatever of his son; but he distinctly remembered an unsatisfied, dough-faced youth who took delight in “calling down the old man,” and reducing his mother to tears—­such a person as adds to the gaiety of public rooms and hotel piazzas, where the ingenuous young of the wealthy play with or revile the bell-boys.  But this well set-up fisher-youth did not wriggle, looked at him with eyes steady, clear, and unflinching, and spoke in a tone distinctly, even startlingly, respectful.  There was that in his voice, too, which seemed to promise that the change might be permanent, and that the new Harvey had come to stay.

“Some one’s been coercing him,” thought Cheyne.  “Now Constance would never have allowed that.  Don’t see as Europe could have done it any better.”

“But why didn’t you tell this man, Troop, who you were?” the mother repeated, when Harvey had expanded his story at least twice.

“Disko Troop, dear.  The best man that ever walked a deck.  I don’t care who the next is.”

“Why didn’t you tell him to put you ashore?  You know Papa would have made it up to him ten times over.”

“I know it; but he thought I was crazy.  I’m afraid I called him a thief because I couldn’t find the bills in my pocket.”