The trip was interminable. Chiefly, it consisted of long, stiflingly hot days in a cramped car that lurched and groaned and pounded and halted, getting nowhere in a scorch of wheat-fields. Nights, Quincy was perched far up under the chandelier, with no window through which to reaffirm, by looking out, his hold on the realities. This was insufferable. To be shuffled along through endless flatlands was bad enough if one could see. But to be thrust through the black with no sense of direction or of space, while one’s limbs ached with the unceasing murmurs of the train, bordered on nightmare. The cities, moreover, were an unmeaning jangle of lights and muddy, topless houses and clamoring traffic. The gem of their journey--Yellowstone Park--proved to be the height of his torture. It lasted, by count, four days. But by this period, Quincy’s sense of time had gone the way of his other senses. He was packed stiffly, hotly, into a high, swaying stagecoach. Before being swung to his position he always saw the horses that drew the wagon. He loved horses. And the fiery sinew of these Western beasts gave his heart a turn. He wished to pet them and feed them sugar and talk with them. But always, he was swung up between Josiah and Jonas where the horses were invisible. Their rhythmic patter he still heard, and it was bitter music to him, since he could not fix this one suggested joy by seeing. And now, as they swayed on, Quincy observed that the Park’s chief quality was not geysers at all, but dust. True, it was a peculiar sort of dust. Never had he tasted dust so thick, so bitter, so plentiful, so blinding. It rolled and plunged over the coach, over the crouched, packed creatures that hung upon its scruff, over the very skies. It came in great clouds. It cut into his eyes and ears and mouth. It made him itch and ache. And yet, so carefully had he been wedged against his father and his brother that he could not scratch where the dust itched, nor stretch where the ride stiffened him. At noontime, the coach creaked to a stand-still and there was a hotel, instead of dust, upon the map of living. He was fed at a long table where waitresses hurled thick crockery and men smelled of sweat. Before or after coach-time, he saw geysers.