“There’s a big lot of tropical air moving in some time tomorrow,” said the Chief Service Officer of Air-Lines. “That means heavy rains, but pretty quiet conditions generally. We ought to have a fairly good day.”

14

Before midnight the Transcontinental Streamliner began to pull out of the station at Chicago. Its departure, like the sailing of an ocean-liner, mingled festivity and solemnity. On the platform a woman dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, and near her an after-theater party muffled in evening wraps waved gayly at a corsaged debutante who waved back through the window of her drawing-room. Even inside the shelter of the train-shed the cold was bitter.

The streamliner clicked along over the switches of the yard at a leisurely pace. Two young men were sitting in the lounge-car. One of them was reading a pamphlet which described the train, and was commenting upon it.

“The mildest thing the publicity-men can say about this train is ‘a miracle of modern engineering and art.’ From there they work up. ‘And truly the train may stand for a symbol of what is best in modern civilization—tough steel, aluminum alloys, resplendent chromium, satiny copper, crimson leather, shining glass—all shaped into a creation for safety and speed, power and comfort—a thing of beauty!’ Whoever wrote that passage didn’t think restraint a virtue.”

Across half a continent the tracks stretched out ahead. Through the cold sheen of the winter moonlight the streamliner would cross the snow-covered plains of Illinois and Iowa. It would speed through the long reaches of Nebraska during the forenoon, and give afternoon and early evening to Wyoming. Less than twenty-four hours upon the way it would click down Echo Canyon, fifteen hundred miles from Chicago. Before the second night was ended it would cross Utah and Nevada. Daybreak would find it climbing the Sierra wall into California; at noon it was scheduled to end its run, and halt at the shore of San Francisco Bay—twenty-two hundred miles in forty hours.

Over all those miles of track the streamliner had privilege and right of way. Freights, locals, and working-equipment took the sidings. The green lights glowed; the semaphores signaled open track. Dispatchers sent the streamliner through; trackwalkers patroled ahead of it; snow-plows cleared the way. The premier train of the run must not be halted.

Already the city was behind. The train had gathered speed. Now it whistled for a crossing.

The deep note sounded far through the moonlight—like the sudden mysterious bay of some great hound, unearthly and night-running. Here and there some villager lying awake in bed heard it and turned to look at his clock. “The streamliner,” he thought. “On time!” The train rushed onward through the night.

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