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Page 62
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 Atchinson,
Topeka, and Santa Fe 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, a
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, 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.
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