faced the door through which sounded slow, heavy tread of boots. An
Irishman entered. Then a tall man. Allie’s troubled soul suddenly
calmed. She saw Neale.
Slowly he advanced a few steps. Another man entered, and Allie knew
him by his buckskin garb. Neale turned, his face in the light. And a
poignant cry leaped up from Allie’s heart to be checked on her lips. Was
this her young and hopeful and splendid lover? She recognized him, yet
now did not know him. He stood bareheaded, and her swift, all-embracing
glance saw the gray over his temples, and the eyes that looked out from
across the border of a dark hell, and face white as death and twitching
with spent passion.
“Mr.--Lee,” he panted, very low, and the bloody patch on his shirt
heaved with his breath, “my only--regret--is--I didn’t--think to
make--Durade--tell the truth.... He lied.... He wanted to--revenge
himself--on Allie’s mother--through Allie.... What he said--about
Allie--was a lie--as black as his heart. He meant evil--for her.
But--somehow she was saved. He was a tiger--playing--and he waited--too
long. You must realize--her innocence--and understand. God has watched
over Allie Lee! It was not luck--nor accident. But innocence!... Hough
died to save her! Then Ancliffe! Then my old friend--Larry King!
These men--broken--gone to hell--out here--felt an innocence that made
them--mad--as I have just been.... That is proof--if you need it....
Men of ruined lives--could not rise--and die--as they did--victims of a
false impression--of innocence.... They knew!”
Neale’s voice sank to a whisper, his eyes intent to read belief in the
cold face of Allison Lee.
“I thank you, Neale, for your service to me and your defense of her,” he
said. “What can I do for you?”
“Sir--I--I--”
“Can I reward you in any way?”
The gray burned out of Neale’s face. “I ask--nothing--except that you
believe me.”
Lee did not grant this, nor was there any softening of his cold face.
“I would like to ask you a few questions,” he said. “General Lodge here
informed me that you saved my--my daughter’s life long ago.... Can you
tell me what became of her mother?”
“She was in the caravan--massacred by Sioux,” replied Neale. “I saw her
buried. Her grave is not so many miles from here.”
Then a tremor changed Allison Lee’s expression. He turned away an
instant: his hand closed tight; he bit his lips. This evidence of
feeling in him relaxed the stony scrutiny of the watchers, and they
shifted uneasily on their feet.
Allie stood watching--waiting, with her heart at her lips.
“Where did you take my daughter?” queried Lee, presently.
“To the home of a trapper. My friend--Slingerland,” replied Neale,
indicating the buckskin-clad figure. “She lived there--slowly
recovering. You don’t know that she lost her mind--for a while. But
she recovered.... And during an absence of Slingerland’s--she was taken
away.”
“Were you and she--sweethearts?”
“Yes.”
“And engaged to marry?”
“Of course,” replied Neale, dreamily.
“That cannot be now.”
“I understand. I didn’t expect--I didn’t think....”
Allie Lee had believed many times that her heart was breaking, but now
she knew it had never broken till then. Why did he not turn to see her
waiting there--stricken motionless and voiceless, wild to give the lie
to those cold, strange words?
“Then, Neale--if you will not accept anything from me, let us terminate
this painful interview,” said Allison Lee.
“I’m sorry. I only wanted to tell you--and ask to see--Allie--a moment,”
replied Neale.
“No. It might cause a breakdown. I don’t want to risk anything that
might prevent my taking the next train with her.”
“Going to take her--back East?” asked Neale, as if talking to himself.
“Certainly.”
“Then--I--won’t see her!” Neale murmured, dazedly.
At this juncture General Lodge stepped out. His face was dark, his mouth
stern.
His action caused a breaking of the strange, vise-like clutch--the mute
and motionless spell--that had fallen upon Allie. She felt the gathering
of tremendous forces in her; in an instant she would show these stupid
men the tumult of a woman’s heart.
“Lee, be generous,” spoke up General Lodge, feelingly. “Let Neale see
the girl.”
“I said no!” snapped Lee.
“But why not, in Heaven’s name?”
“Why? I told you why,” declared Lee, passionately.
“But, Lee--that implication may not be true. We didn’t read all that
letter,” protested General Lodge.
“Ask him.”
Then the general turned to Neale. “Boy--tell me--did this Stanton woman
love you--did you strike her? Did you--” The general’s voice failed.
Neale faced about with a tragic darkening of his face. “To my shame--it
is true,” he said, clearly.
Then Allie Lee swept forward. “Oh, Neale!”
He seemed to rise and leap at once. And she ran straight into his arms.
No man, no trouble, no mystery, no dishonor, no barrier--nothing could
have held her back the instant she saw how the sight of her, how the
sound of her voice, had transformed Neale. For one tumultuous, glorious,
terrible moment she clung to his neck, blind, her heart bursting. Then
she fell back with hands seeking her breast.
“I heard!” she cried. “I know nothing of Beauty Stanton’s letter.... But
you didn’t shoot her. It was Larry. I saw him do it.”
“Allie!” he whispered.
At last he had realized her actual presence, the safety of her body
and soul; and all that had made him strange and old and grim and sad
vanished in a beautiful transfiguration.
“You know Larry did it!” implored Allie. “Tell them so.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied. “But I did worse. I--”
She saw him shaken by an agony of remorse; and that agony was
communicated to her.
“Neale! she loved you?”
He bowed his head.
“Oh!” Her cry was almost mute, full of an unutterable realization of
tragic fatality for her. “And you--you--”
Allison Lee strode between them facing Neale. “See! She knows... and if
you would spare her--go!” he exclaimed.
“She knows--what?” gasped Neale, in a frenzy between doubt and
certainty.
Allie felt a horrible, nameless, insidious sense of falsity--a nightmare
unreality--an intangible Neale, fated, drifting away from her.
“Good-bye--Allie!... Bless you! I’ll be--happy--knowing--you’re--” He
choked, and the tears streamed down his face. It was a face convulsed by
renunciation, not by guilt. Whatever he had done, it was not base.
“DON’T LET ME--GO!... _I_--FORGIVE YOU!” she burst out. She held out her
arms. “THERE’S NO ONE IN THE WORLD BUT YOU!”
But Neale plunged away, upheld by Slingerland, and Allie’s world grew
suddenly empty and black.
The train swayed and creaked along through the Night with that strain
and effort which told of upgrade. The oil-lamps burned dimly in corners
of the coach. There were soldiers at open windows looking out. There
were passengers asleep sitting up and lying down and huddled over their
baggage.
But Allie Lee was not asleep. She lay propped up with pillows and
blankets, covered by a heavy coat. Her window was open, and a cool
desert wind softly blew her hair. She stared out into the night, and the
wheels seemed to be grinding over her crushed heart.
It was late. An old moon, misshapen and pale, shone low down over a
dark, rugged horizon. Clouds hid the stars. The desert void seemed
weirdly magnified by the wan light, and all that shadowy waste, silent,
lonely, bleak, called out to Allie Lee the desolation of her soul. For
what had she been saved? The train creaked on, and every foot added to
her woe. Her unquenchable spirit, pure as a white flame that had burned
so wonderfully through the months of her peril, flickered now that her
peril ceased to be. She had no fount of emotion left to draw upon, else
she would have hated this creaking train.
It moved on. And there loomed bold outlines of rock and ridge familiar
to her. They had been stamped upon her memory by the strain of her
lonely wanderings along that very road. She knew every rod of the way,
dark, lonely, wild as it was. In the midst of that stark space lay the
spot where Benton had been. A spot lost in the immensity of the desert.
If she had been asleep she would have awakened while passing there.
There was not a light. Flat patches and pale gleams, a long, wan length
of bare street, shadows everywhere--these marked Benton’s grave.
Allie stared with strained eyes. They were there--in the
blackness--those noble men who had died for her in vain. No--not in
vain! She breathed a prayer for them--a word of love for Larry. Larry,
the waster of life, yet the faithful, the symbol of brotherhood. As long
as she lived she would see him stalk before her with his red, blazing
fire, his magnificent effrontery, his supreme will. He, who had been the
soul of chivalry, the meekest of men before a woman, the inheritor of
a reverence for womanhood, had ruthlessly shot out of his way that
wonderful white-armed Beauty Stanton.
She, too, must lie there in the shadow. Allie shivered with the cool
desert wind that blew in her face from the shadowy spaces. She shut her
eyes to hide the dim passing traces of terrible Benton and the darkness
that hid the lonely graves.
The train moved on and on, leaving what had been Benton far behind; and
once more Allie opened her weary eyes to the dim, obscure reaches of the
desert. Her heart beat very slowly under its leaden weight, its
endless pang. Her blood flowed at low ebb. She felt the long-forgotten
recurrence of an old morbid horror, like a poison lichen fastening upon
the very spring of life. It passed and came again, and left her
once more. Her thoughts wandered back along the night track she had
traversed, until again her ears were haunted by that strange sound which
had given Roaring City its name. She had been torn away from hope, love,
almost life itself. Where was Neale? He had turned from her, obedient
to Allison Lee and the fatal complexity and perversenes’s of life. The
vindication of her spiritual faith and the answer to her prayers lay
in the fact that she had been saved; but rather than to be here in this
car, daughter of a rich father, but separated from Neale, she would have
preferred to fill one of the nameless graves in Benton.
33
The sun set pale-gold and austere as Neale watched the train bear Allie
Lee away. No thought of himself entered into that solemn moment of
happiness. Allie Lee--alive--safe--her troubles ended--on her way home
with her father! The long train wound round the bold bluff and at last
was gone. For Neale the moment held something big, final. A phase--a
part of his life ended there.
“Son, it’s over,” said Slingerland, who watched with him. “Allie’s gone
home--back to whar she belongs--to come into her own. Thank God! An’
you--why this day turns you back to whar you was once.... Allie owes her
life to you an’ her father’s life. Think, son, of these hyar times--how
much wuss it might hev been.”
Neale’s sense of thankfulness was unutterable. Passively he went with
Slingerland, silent and gentle. The trapper dressed his wounds, tended
him, kept men away from him, and watched by him as if he were a sick
child.
Neale suffered only the weakness following the action and stress
of great passion. His mind seemed full of beautiful solemn bells of
blessing, resonant, ringing the wonder of an everlasting unchangeable
truth. Night fell--the darkness thickened--the old trapper kept his
vigil--and Neale sank to sleep, and the sweet, low-toned bells claimed
him in his dreams.
How strange for Neale to greet a dawn without hatred! He and Slingerland
had breakfast together.
“Son, will you go into the hills with me?” asked the old trapper.
“Yes, some day, when the railroad’s built,” replied Neale, thoughtfully.
Slingerland’s keen eyes quickened. “But the railroad’s about done--an’
you need a vacation,” he insisted.
“Yes,” Neale answered, dreamily.
“Son, mebbe you ought to wait awhile. You’re packin’ a bullet somewhar
in your carcass.”
“It’s here,” said Neale, putting his hand to his breast, high up toward
the shoulder. “I feel it--a dull, steady, weighty pain.... But that’s
nothing. I hope I always have it.”
“Wal, I don’t.... An’, son, you ain’t never goin’ back to drink an’
cards-an’ all thet hell?... Not now!”
Neale’s smile was a promise, and the light of it was instantly reflected
on the rugged face of the trapper.
“Reckon I needn’t asked thet. Wal, I’ll be sayin’ good-bye.... You kin
expect me back some day.... To see the meetin’ of the rails from east
an’ west--an’ to pack you off to my hills.”
Neale rode out of Roaring City on the work-train, sitting on a flat-car
with a crowd of hairy-breasted, red-shirted laborers.
That train carried hundreds of men, tons of steel rails, thousands of
ties; and also it was equipped to feed the workers and to fight Indians.
It ran to the end of the rails, about forty miles out of Roaring City.
Neale sought out Reilly, the boss. This big Irishman was in the thick
of the start of the day--which was like a battle. Neale waited in the
crowd, standing there in his shirt-sleeves, with the familiar bustle and
color strong as wine to his senses. At last Reilly saw him and shoved
out a huge paw.
“Hullo, Neale! I’m glad to see ye.... They tell me ye did a dom’ foine
job.”
“Reilly, I need work,” said Neale.
“But, mon--ye was shot!” ejaculated the boss.
“I’m all right.”
“Ye look thot an’ no mistake.... Shure, now, ye ain’t serious about
work? You--that’s chafe of all thim engineer jobs?”
“I want to work with my hands. Let me heave ties or carry rails or swing
a sledge--for just a few days. I’ve explained to General Lodge. It’s a
kind of vacation for me.”
Reilly gazed with keen, twinkling eyes at Neale. “Ye can’t be drunk an’
look sober.”
“Reilly, I’m sober--and in dead earnest,” appealed Neale. “I want to go
back--be in the finish--to lay some rails--drive some spikes.”
The boss lost his humorous, quizzing expression. “Shure--shure,” replied
Reilly, as if he saw, but failed to comprehend. “Ye’re on.... An’ more
power to ye!”
He sent Neale out with the gang detailed to heave railroad ties.
A string of flat-cars, loaded with rails and ties, stood on the track
where the work of yesterday had ended. Beyond stretched the road-bed,
yellow, level, winding as far as eye could see. The sun beat down hot;
the dry, scorching desert breeze swept down from the bare hills, across
the waste; dust flew up in puffs; uprooted clumps of sage, like balls,
went rolling along; and everywhere the veils of heat rose from the
sun-baked earth.
“Drill, ye terriers, drill!” rang out a cheery voice. And Neale
remembered Casey.
Neale’s gang was put to carrying ties. Neale got hold of the first tie
thrown off the car.
“Phwat the hell’s ye’re hurry!” protested his partner. This fellow was
gnarled and knotted, brick-red in color, with face a network of seams,
and narrow, sun-burnt slits for eyes. He answered to the name of Pat.
They carried the tie out to the end of the rails and dropped it on the
level road-bed. Men there set it straight and tamped the gravel around
it. Neale and his partner went back for another, passing a dozen couples
carrying ties forward. Behind these staggered the rows of men burdened
with the heavy iron rails.
So the day’s toil began.
Pat had glanced askance at Neale, and then had made dumb signs to his
fellow-laborers, indicating his hard lot in being yoked to this new wild
man on the job. But his ridicule soon changed to respect. Presently he
offered his gloves to Neale. They were refused.
“But, fri’nd, ye ain’t tough loike me,” he protested.
“Pat, they’ll put you to bed to-night--if you stay with me,” replied
Neale.
“The hell ye say! Come on, thin!”
At first Neale had no sensations of heat, weariness, thirst, or pain. He
dragged the little Irishman forward to drop the ties--then strode back
ahead of him. Neale was obsessed by a profound emotion. This was a new
beginning for him. For him the world and life had seemed to cease when
yesternight the sun sank and Allie Lee passed out of sight. His motive
in working there, he imagined, was to lay a few rails, drive a few
spikes along the last miles of the road that he had surveyed. He meant
to work this way only a little while, till the rails from east met those
from west.
This profound emotion seemed accompanied by a procession of thoughts,
each thought in turn, like a sun with satellites, reflecting its
radiance upon them and rousing strange, dreamy, full-hearted
fancies... Allie lived--as good, as innocent as ever, incomparably
beautiful--sad-eyed, eloquent, haunting. From that mighty thought sprang
both Neale’s exaltation and his activity. He had loved her so well that
conviction of her death had broken his heart, deadened his ambition,
ruined his life. But since, by the mercy of God and the innocence that
had made men heroic, she had survived all peril, all evil, then had
begun a colossal overthrow in Neale’s soul of the darkness, the despair,
the hate, the indifference. He had been flung aloft, into the heights,
and he had seen into heaven. He asked for nothing in the world.
All-satisfied, eternally humble, grateful with every passionate drop of
blood throbbing through his heart, he dedicated all his spiritual
life to memory. And likewise there seemed a tremendous need in him of
sustained physical action, even violence. He turned to the last stages
of the construction of the great railroad.
What fine comrades these hairy-breasted toilers made! Neale had admired
them once; now he loved them. Every group seemed to contain a trio like
that one he had known so well--Casey, Shane, and McDermott. Then he
divined that these men were all alike. They all toiled, swore, fought,
drank, gambled. Hundreds of them went to nameless graves. But the work
went on--the great, driving, united heart beat on.
Neale was under its impulse, in another sense.
When he lifted a tie and felt the hard, splintering wood, he wondered
where it had come from, what kind of a tree it was, who had played in
its shade, how surely birds had nested in it and animals had grazed
beneath it. Between him and that square log of wood there was an
affinity. Somehow his hold upon it linked him strangely to a long past,
intangible spirit of himself. He must cling to it, lest he might lose
that illusive feeling. Then when he laid it down he felt regret fade
into a realization that the yellow-gravel road-bed also inspirited him.
He wanted to feel it, work in it, level it, make it somehow his own.
When he strode back for another load his magnifying eyes gloated over
the toilers in action--the rows of men carrying and laying rails, and
the splendid brawny figures of the spikers, naked to the waist, swinging
the heavy sledges. The blows rang out spang--spang--spang! Strong music,
full of meaning! When his turn came to be a spiker, he would love that
hardest work of all.
The engine puffed smoke and bumped the cars ahead, little by little as
the track advanced; men on the train carried ties and rails forward,
filling the front cars as fast as they were emptied; long lines of
laborers on the ground passed to and fro, burdened going forward,
returning empty-handed; the rails and the shovels and the hammers and
the picks all caught the hot gleam from the sun; the dust swept up in
sheets; the ring, the crash, the thump, the scrape of iron and wood and
earth in collision filled the air with a sound rising harshly above the
song and laugh and curse of men.
A shifting, colorful, strenuous scene of toil!
Gradually Neale felt that he was fitting into this scene, becoming a
part of it, an atom once more in the great whole. He doubted while
he thrilled. Clearly as he saw, keenly as he felt, he yet seemed
bewildered. Was he not gazing out at this construction work through
windows of his soul, once more painted, colored, beautiful, because the
most precious gift he might have prayed for had been given him--life and
hope for Allie Lee?
He did not know. He could not think.
His comrade, Pat, wiped floods of sweat from his scarlet face. “I’ll be
domned if ye ain’t a son-of-a-gun fer worrk!” he complained.
“Pat, we’ve been given the honor of pace-makers. They’ve got to keep up
with us. Come on,” replied Neale.
“Be gad! there ain’t a mon in the gang phwat’ll trade fer me honor,
thin,” declared Pat. “Fri’nd, I’d loike to live till next pay-day.”
“Come on, then, work up an appetite,” rejoined Neale.
“Shure I’ll die.... An’ I’d loike to ask, beggin’ ye’re pardon, hevn’t
ye got some Irish in ye?”
“Yes, a little.”
“I knowed thot.... All roight, I’ll die with ye, thin.”
In half an hour Pat was in despair again. He had to rest.
“Phwat’s--ye’re--name?” he queried.
“Neale.”
“It ought to be Casey. Fer there was niver but wan loike ye--an’ he was
Casey.... Mon, ye’re sweatin’ blood roight now!”
Pat pointed at Neale’s red, wet shirt. Neale slapped his breast, and
drops of blood and sweat spattered from under his hand.
“An’ shure ye’re hands are bladin’, too!” ejaculated Pat.
They were, indeed, but Neale had not noted that.
The boss, Reilly, passing by, paused to look and grin.
“Pat, yez got some one to kape up with to-day. We’re half a mile ahead
of yestidy this time.”
Then he turned to Neale.
“I’ve seen one in yer class--Casey by name. An’ thot’s talkin’.”
He went his way. And Neale, plodding on, saw the red face of the great
Casey, with its set grin and the black pipe. Swiftly then he saw it
as he had heard of it last, and a shadow glanced fleetingly across the
singular radiance of his mind.
The shrill whistle of the locomotive halted the work and called the
men to dinner and rest. Instantly the scene changed. The slow, steady,
rhythmic motions of labor gave place to a scramble back to the long line
of cars. Then the horde of sweaty toilers sought places in the shade,
and ate and drank and smoked and rested. As the spirit of work had been
merry, so was that of rest, with always a dry, grim earnestness in the
background.
Neale slowed down during the afternoon, to the unconcealed thankfulness
of his partner. The burn of the sun, the slippery sweat, the
growing ache of muscles, the never-ending thirst, the lessening of
strength--these sensations impinged upon Neale’s emotion and gradually
wore to the front of his consciousness. His hands grew raw, his back
stiff and sore, his feet crippled. The wound in his breast burned and
bled and throbbed. At the end of the day he could scarcely walk.
He rode in with the laborers, slept twelve hours, and awoke
heavy-limbed, slow, and aching. But he rode out to work, and his second
day was one of agony.
The third was a continual fight between will and body, between spirit
and pain. But so long as he could step and lift he would work on. From
that time he slowly began to mend.
Then came his siege with the rails. That was labor which made carrying
ties seem light. He toiled on, sweating thin, wearing hard, growing
clearer of mind. As pain subsided, and weariness of body no longer
dominated him, slowly thought and feeling returned until that morning
dawned when, like a flash of lightning illuminating his soul, the
profound and exalted emotion again possessed him. Soon he came to divine
that the agony of toil and his victory over weak flesh had added to his
strange happiness. Hour after hour he bent his back and plodded beside
his comrades, doing his share, burdened as they were, silent, watchful,
listening, dreaming, keen to note the progress of the road, yet deep in
his own intense abstraction. He seemed to have two minds. He saw every
rod of the ten miles of track laid every day, knew, as only an engineer
could know, the wonder of such progress; and, likewise, always in his
sight, in his mind, shone a face, red-lipped, soulful, lovely like a
saint’s, with mournful violet eyes, star-sweet in innocence. Life had
given Allie Lee back to him--to his love and his memory; and all that
could happen to him now must be good. At first he had asked for nothing,
so grateful was he to fate, but now he prayed for hours and days and
nights to remember.