Dick thought the idea a good one, especially when he returned, to find his mother comfortably tucked up, reading by a shaded electric light. He slipped into bed quickly, and enjoyed a magazine, while the train roared on its way, stopping occasionally with a great grinding of brakes, and then gathering way again slowly as it left a wayside station behind, and went swinging on through the night. The swinging motion made him sleepy; he put down the magazine and lay drowsily listening to the roar of the train. Once his mother glanced across and smiled at him; later, he had a drowsy fancy, half a dream, that she was bending over him, tucking him in. But he did not see the tired face of the American actress later on. She tapped gently at the door, looking apologetic when Mrs. Lester, in a hastily-donned dressing gown, opened it.
"Were you in bed?" she asked contritely. "Well, now, I'm real sorry--it's early, and I thought you'd be up still." She hesitated, and a dull flush came into her cheeks. "Is the boy asleep?"
"Yes." Something in Mrs. Lester responded to the hunger in the other mother's eyes. "Would you care to look at him?"
"I came to ask if I could. You see--it's two years since I had the chance of tucking up Jimmy."
She came in noiselessly, and looked down at the sleeping Dick. He lay with one arm flung up above his head; a very ordinary, healthy boy, sunburnt and clear skinned, with just a hint in his close cropped hair of the curls of his boyhood, and only a baby still to the two women who watched him. The American stooped suddenly, and brushed his forehead with her lips. Dick stirred, and said, sleepily, "Mother."
"I sort of had to," said the actress, turning in the corridor to say good night. "You--you get kinder desperate for them after two years. Thanks, ma'am, ever so." She glided away, leaving Mrs. Lester with tears in her eyes.
All night long the train, with its sleeping freight, rushed and roared through the desert country, passing over dreary leagues of sand and sparse scrub. Sometimes the unfamiliarity of his surroundings woke Dick, to lie drowsily for a moment in the dim light that filtered through the fanlight from the corridor; then to float back lazily through the gates of sleep. He woke in earnest about six o'clock and, slipping out of bed, peeped through the window. The train was standing in a wayside station.