division of labor to him had always represented the finest spirit of the
building. The drivers--the spikers--the men who nailed the rails--who
riveted the last links--these brawny, half-naked wielders of the
sledges, bronzed as Indians, seemed to embody both the romance and the
achievement. Neale experienced a subtle perception with the first touch
and lift and swing of the great hammer. And there seemed born in him a
genius for the stroke. He had a free, easy swing, with tremendous power.
He could drive so fast that his comrade on the opposite rail, and the
carriers and layers, could not keep up with him. Moments of rest seemed
earned. During these he would gaze with glinting eyes back at the gangs
and the trains, at the smoke, dust, and movement; and beyond toward the
east.
One day he drove spikes for hours, with the gangs in uninterrupted labor
around him, while back a mile along the road the troopers fought the
Sioux; and all this time, when any moment he might be ordered to drop
his sledge for a rifle, he listened to the voice in his memory and saw
the face.
Another day dawned in which he saw the grading gangs return from work
ahead. They were done. Streams of horses, wagons, and men on the return!
They had met the graders from the west, and the two lines of road-bed
had been connected. As these gangs passed, cheer on cheer greeted them
from the rail-layers. It was a splendid moment.
From lip to lip then went the word that the grading-gangs from east and
west had passed each other in plain sight, working on, grading on for
a hundred miles farther than necessary. They had met and had passed on,
side by side, doubling the expense of construction.
This knowledge gave Neale a melancholy reminder of the dishonest aspect
of the road-building. And he thought of many things. The spirit of the
work was grand, the labor heroic, but, alas! side by side with these
splendid and noble attributes stalked the specters of greed and gold and
lust of blood and of death.
But neither knowledge such as this, nor peril from Indians, nor the
toil-pangs of a galley slave had power to change Neale’s supreme state
of joy.
He gazed back toward the east, and then with mighty swing he drove a
spike. He loved Allie Lee beyond all conception, and next he loved the
building of the railroad.
When such thoughts came he went back to pure sensations, the great, bold
peaks looming dark, the winding, level road-bed, the smoky desert-land,
reflecting heat, the completed track and gangs of moving men like bright
ants in the sunlight, and the exhaust of the engines, the old song,
“Drill, ye terriers, drill!” the ring and crash and thud and scrape
of labor, the whistle of the seeping sand on the wind, the feel of the
heavy sledge that he could wield as a toy, the throb of pulse, the
smell of dust and sweat, the sense of his being there, his action, his
solidarity, his physical brawn--once more manhood.
But at last human instincts encroached upon Neale’s superlative
detachment from self. It seemed all of a sudden that he stepped toward
an east-bound train. When he reached the coach something halted him--a
thought--where was he going? The west-bound work-train was the one
he wanted. He laughed, a little grimly. Certainly he had grown
absentminded. And straightway he became thoughtful, in a different way.
Not many moments of reflection were needed to assure him that he had
moved toward the east-bound train with the instinctive idea of going to
Allie Lee. The thing amazed him.
“But she--she’s gone out of my life,” he soliloquized. “And I am--I was
glad!”
The lightning-swift shift to past tense enlightened Neale.
He went out to work. That work still loomed splendid to him, but it
seemed not the same. He saw and felt the majesty of common free men,
sweating and bleeding and groaning over toil comparable to the building
of the Pyramids; he felt the best that had ever been in him quicken and
broaden as he rubbed elbows with these simple, elemental toilers;
with them he had gotten down to the level of truth. His old genius for
achievement, the practical and scientific side of him, still thrilled
with the battle of strong hands against the natural barriers of
the desert. He saw the thousands of plodding, swearing, fighting,
blaspheming, joking laborers on the field of action--saw the picture
they made, red and bronzed and black, dust-begrimed; and how here with
the ties and the rails and the road-bed was the heart of that epical
turmoil. What approach could great and rich engineers and directors have
made to that vast enterprise without these sons of brawn? Neale now saw
what he had once dreamed, and that was the secret of his longing to get
down to the earth with these men.
He loved to swing that sledge, to hear the spang of the steel ring out.
He had a sheer physical delight in the power of his body, long since
thinned-out, hardened, tough as the wood into which he drove the spikes.
He loved his new comrade, Pat, the gnarled and knotted little Irishman
who cursed and complained of his job and fought his fellow-workers, yet
who never lagged, never shirked, and never failed, though his days of
usefulness must soon be over. Soon Pat would drop by the roadside, a
victim to toil and whisky and sun. And he was great in his obscurity. He
wore a brass tag with a number; he signed his wage receipt with a cross;
he cared only for drink and a painted hag in a squalid tent; yet in all
the essentials that Neale now called great his friend Pat reached up to
them--the spirit to work, to stand his share, to go on, to endure, to
fulfill his task.
Neale might have found salvation in this late-developed and splendid
relation to labor and to men. But there was a hitch in his brain. He
would see all that was beautiful and strenuous and progressive around
him; and then, in a flash, that hiatus in his mind would operate to make
him hopeless. Then he would stand as in a trance, with far-away gaze
in his eyes, until his fellow-spiker would recall him to his neglected
work. These intervals of abstraction grew upon him until he would leave
off in the act of driving a spike.
And sometimes in these strange intervals he longed for his old friend,
brother, shadow--Larry Red King. He held to Larry’s memory, though with
it always would return that low, strange roar of Benton’s gold and lust
and blood and death. Neale did not understand the mystery of what he had
been through. It had been a phase of wildness never to be seen again by
his race. His ambition and effort, his fall, his dark siege with hell,
his friendship and loss, his agony and toil, his victory, were all
symbolical of the progress of a great movement. In his experience lay
hid all that development.
The coming of night was always a relief now, for with the end of
the day’s work he need no longer fight his battle. It was a losing
battle--that he knew. Shunning everybody, he paced to and fro out on the
dark, windy desert, under the lonely, pitiless stars.
His longing to see Allie Lee grew upon him. While he had believed her
dead he had felt her spirit hovering near him, in every shadow, and
her voice whispered on the wind. She was alive now, but gone away,
far distant, over mountains and plains, out of his sight and reach,
somewhere to take up a new life alien to his. What would she do? Could
she bear, it? Never would she forget him--be faithless to his memory!
Yet she was young and her life had been hard. She might yield to that
cold Allison Lee’s dictation. In happy surroundings her beauty and
sweetness would bring a crowd of lovers to her.
“But that’s all--only natural,” muttered Neale, in perplexity. “I
want her to forget--to be happy--to find a home.... For her to grow
old--alone! No! She must love some man--marry--”
And with the spoken words Neale’s heart contracted. He knew that he lied
to himself. If she ever cared for another man, that would be the end of
Warren Neale. But then, he was ended, anyhow. Jealousy, strange, new,
horrible, added to Neale’s other burdens, finished him. He had the
manhood to try to fight selfishness, but he had failed to subdue it; and
he had nothing left to fight his consuming love and hatred of life and
terrible loneliness and that fierce thing--jealousy. He had saved Allie
Lee! Why had he given her up? He had stained his hands with blood for
her sake. And that awful moment came back to him when, maddened by the
sting of a bullet, he had gloried in the cracking of Durade’s bones, in
the ghastly terror and fear of death upon the Spaniard’s face, in the
feel of the knife-blade as he forced Durade to stab himself. Always
Neale had been haunted by this final scene of his evil life in
the construction camps. A somber and spectral shape, intangible,
gloomy-faced, often, attended him in the shadow. He justified his deed,
for Durade would have killed Allison Lee. But that fact did not prevent
the haunting shape, the stir in the dark air, the nameless step upon
Neale’s trail.
And jealousy, stronger than all except fear, wore Neale out of his
exaltation, out of his dream, out of his old disposition to work.
He could persist in courage if not in joy. But jealous longing would
destroy him--he felt that. It was so powerful, so wonderful that it
brought back to him words and movements which until then he had been
unable to recall.
And he lived over the past. Much still baffled him, yet gradually more
and more of what had happened became clear specifically in his memory.
He could not think from the present back over the past. He had to ponder
the other way. One day, leaning on his sledge, Neale’s torturing self,
morbid, inquisitive, growing by what it fed on, whispered another
question to his memory.
“What were some of the last words she spoke to me?” And there, limned
white on the dark background of his mind, the answer appeared, “NEALE,
_I_ FORGIVE YOU!”
He recalled her face, the tragic eyes, the outstretched arms.
“Forgive me! For what?” Neale muttered, dazed and troubled. He dropped
his sledge and remained standing there, though the noon whistle called
the gang to dinner. Looking out across the hot, smoky, arid desert he
saw again that scene where he had appealed to Allison Lee.
The picture was etched out vividly, and again he lived through those big
moments of emotion.
The room full of men--Lee’s cold acceptance of fact, his thanks,
his offer, his questions, his refusal--General Lodge’s earnest
solicitation--the rapid exchange of passionate words between them--the
query put to Neale and his answer--the sudden appearance of Allie,
shocking his heart with rapture--her sweet, wild words--and so the end!
How vivid now--how like flashes of lightning in his mind!
“Lee thought I’d killed Stanton,” muttered Neale, in intense perplexity.
“But she--she told them Larry did it.... What a strange idea Lee
had--and General Lodge, too. He defended me.... Ah!”
Suddenly Neale drew from his pocket the little leather note-book
that had been Stanton’s, and which contained her letter to him.
With trembling hands he opened it. Again this letter was to mean a
revelation.
General Lodge had said his engineer had read aloud only the first of
that message to Neale; and from this Allison Lee and all the listeners
had formed their impressions.
Neale read these first lines.
“No wonder they imagined I killed her!” he exclaimed. “She accuses me.
But she never meant what they imagined she meant. Why, that evidence
could hang me!... Allie told them she saw Larry do it. And it’s
common knowledge now--I’ve heard it here.... What, then, had Allie to
forgive--to forgive with eyes that will haunt me to my grave?”
Then the truth burst upon him with merciless and stunning force.
“My God! Allie believed what they all believed--what I must have blindly
made seem true!... That I was Beauty Stanton’s lover!”
34
The home to which Allie Lee was brought stood in the outskirts of Omaha
upon a wooded bank above the river.
Allie watched the broad, yellow Missouri swirling by. She liked best
to be alone outdoors in the shade of the trees. In the weeks since her
arrival there she had not recovered from the shock of meeting Neale only
to be parted from him.
But the comfort, the luxury of her home, the relief from constant dread,
such as she had known for years, the quiet at night--these had been so
welcome, so saving, that her burden of sorrow seemed endurable. Yet in
time she came to see that the finding of a father and a home had only
added to her bitterness.
Allison Lee’s sister, an elderly woman of strong character, resented
the home-bringing of this strange, lost daughter. Allie had found no
sympathy in her. For a while neighbors and friends of the Lees’ flocked
to the house and were kind, gracious, attentive to Allie. Then somehow
her story, or part of it, became gossip. Her father, sensitive, cold,
embittered by the past, suffered intolerable shame at the disgrace of a
wife’s desertion and a daughter’s notoriety. Allie’s presence hurt him;
he avoided her as much as possible; the little kindnesses that he had
shown, and his feelings of pride in her beauty and charm, soon vanished.
There was no love between them. Allie had tried hard to care for him,
but her heart seemed to be buried in that vast grave of the West. She
was obedient, dutiful, passive, but she could not care for him. And
there came a day when she realized that he did not believe she had come
unscathed through the wilds of the gold-fields and the vileness of the
construction camps. She bore this patiently, though it stung her. But
the loss of respect for her father did not come until she heard men in
his study, loud-voiced and furious, wrangle over contracts and accuse
him of double-dealing.
Later he told her that he had become involved in financial straits, and
that unless he could raise a large sum by a certain date he would be
ruined.
And it was this day that Allie sat on a bench in the little arbor and
watched the turbulent river. She was sorry for her father, but she could
not help him. Moreover, alien griefs did not greatly touch her. Her
own grief was deep and all-enfolding. She was heart-sick, and always
yearning--yearning for that she dared not name.
The day was hot, sultry; no birds sang, but the locusts were noisy; the
air was full of humming bees.
Allie watched the river. She was idle because her aunt would not let her
work. She could only remember and suffer. The great river soothed her.
Where did it come from and where did it go? And what was to become of
her? Almost it would have been better--
A servant interrupted her. “Missy, heah’s a gennelman to see yo’,”
announced the Negro girl.
Allie looked. She thought she saw a tall, buckskin-clad man carrying
a heavy pack. Was she dreaming or had she lost her mind? She got up,
shaking in every limb. This tall man moved; he seemed real; his bronzed
face beamed. He approached; he set the pack down on the bench. Then his
keen, clear eyes pierced Allie.
“Wal, lass,” he said, gently.
The familiar voice was no dream, no treachery of her mind. Slingerland!
She could not speak. She could hardly see. She swayed into his arms.
Then when she felt the great, strong clasp and the softness of buckskin
on her face and the odor of pine and sage--and desert dust, she believed
in his reality.
Her heart seemed to collapse. All within her was riot.
“Neale!” she whispered, in anguish.
“All right an’ workin’ hard. He sent me,” replied Slingerland, swift to
get his message out.
Allie quivered and closed her eyes and leaned against him. A beautiful
something pervaded her soul. Slowly the tumult within her breast
subsided. She recovered.
“Uncle Al!” she called him, tenderly.
“Wal, I should smile! An’ glad to see you--why Lord! I’d never
tell you!... You’re white an’ shaky, lass.... Set down hyar--on the
bench--beside me. Thar!... Allie, I’ve a powerful lot to tell you.”
“Wait! To see you--and to hear--of him--almost killed me with joy,” she
panted. Her little hands, once so strong and brown, but now thin and
white, fastened tight in the fringe of his buckskin hunting-coat.
“Lass, sight of you sort of makes me young agin--but--Allie, those are
not the happy eyes I remember.”
“I--am very unhappy,” she whispered.
“Wal, if thet ain’t too bad! Shore it’s natural you’d be downhearted,
losin’ Neale thet way.”
“It’s not all--that,” she murmured, and then she told him.
“Wal, wal!” ejaculated the trapper, stroking his beard in thoughtful
sorrow. “But I reckon thet’s natural, too. You’re strange hyar, an’ thet
story will hang over you.... Lass, with all due respect to your father,
I reckon you’d better come back to me an’ Neale.”
“Did he tell you--to say that?” she whispered, tremulously.
“Lord, no!” ejaculated Slingerland.
“Does he--care--for me still?”
“Lass, he’s dyin’ fer you--an’ I never spoke a truer word.”
Allie shuddered close to him, blinded, stormed by an exquisite
bitter-sweet fury of love. She seemed rising, uplifted, filled with
rich, strong joy.
“I forgave him,” she murmured, dreamily low to herself.
“War, mebbe you’ll be right glad you did--presently,” said Slingerland,
with animation. “‘Specially when thar wasn’t nothin’ much to forgive.”
Allie became mute. She could not lift her eyes.
“Lass, listen!” began Slingerland. “After you left Roarin’ City Neale
went at hard work. Began by heavin’ ties an’ rails, an’ now he’s
slingin’ a sledge.... This was amazin’ to me. I seen him only onct
since, an’ thet was the other day. But I heerd about him. I rode over to
Roarin’ City several times. An’ I made it my bizness to find out about
Neale.... He never came into the town at all. They said he worked like a
slave the first day, bleedin’ hard. But he couldn’t be stopped. An’ the
work didn’t kill him, though thar was some as swore it would. They said
he changed, an’ when he toughened up thar was never but one man as could
equal him, an’ thet was an Irish feller named Casey. I heerd it was
somethin’ worth while to see him sling a sledge.... Wal, I never seen
him do it, but mebbe I will yet.
“A few days back I met him gettin’ off a train at Roarin’ City. Lord! I
hardly knowed him! He stood like an Injun, with the big muscles bulgin’,
an’ his face was clean an’ dark, his eye like fire.... He nearly shook
the daylights out of me. ‘Slingerland, I want you!’ he kept yellin’ at
me. An’ I said, ‘So it ‘pears, but what fer?’ Then he told me he was
goin’ after the gold thet Horn had buried along the old Laramie Trail.
Wal, I took my outfit, an’ we rode back into the hills. You remember
them. Wal, we found the gold, easy enough, an’ we packed it back to
Roarin’ City. Thar Neale sent me off on a train to fetch the gold to
you. An’ hyar I am an’ thar’s the gold.”
Allie stared at the pack, bewildered by Slingerland’s story. Suddenly
she sat up and she felt the blood rush to her cheeks.
“Gold! Horn’s gold! But it’s not mine! Did Neale send it to me?”
“Every ounce,” replied the trapper, soberly. “I reckon it’s yours.
Thar was no one else left--an’ you recollect what Horn said. Lass, it’s
yours--an’ I’m goin’ to make you keep it.”
“How much is there?” queried Allie, with thrills of curiosity. How well
she remembered Horn! He had told her he had no relatives. Indeed, the
gold was hers.
“Wal, Neale an’ me couldn’t calkilate how much, hevin’ nothin’ to weigh
the gold. But it’s a fortune.”
Allie turned from the pack to the earnest face of the trapper. There had
been many critical moments in her life, but never one with the suspense,
the fullness, the inevitableness of this.
“Did Neale send anything else?” she flashed.
“Wal, yes, an’ I was comin’ to thet,” replied Slingerland, as he unlaced
the front of his hunting-frock. Presently he drew forth a little leather
note-book, which he handed to Allie. She took it while looking up at
him. Never had she seen his face radiate such strange emotion. She
divined it to be the supreme happiness inherent in the power to give
happiness.
Allie trembled. She opened the little book. Surely it would contain a
message that would be as sweet as life to dying eyes. She read a name,
written in ink, in a clear script: “Beauty Stanton.”
Her pulses ceased to beat, her blood to flow, her heart to throb. All
seemed to freeze within her except her mind. And that leaped fearfully
over the first lines of a letter--then feverishly on to the close--only
to fly back and read again. Then she dropped the book. She hid her face
on Slingerland’s breast. She clutched him with frantic hands. She clung
there, her body all held rigid, as if some extraordinary strength or
inspiration or joy had suddenly inhibited weakness.
“Wal, lass, hyar you’re takin’ it powerful hard--an’ I made sure--”
“Hush!” whispered Allie, raising her face. She kissed him. Then she
sprang up like a bent sapling released. She met Slingerland’s keen
gaze--saw him start--then rise as if the better to meet a shock.
“I am going back West with you,” she said, coolly.
“Wal, I knowed you’d go.”
“Divide that gold. I’ll leave half for my father.” Slingerland’s great
hands began to pull at the pack.
“Thar’s a train soon. I calkilated to stay over a day. But the sooner
the better.... Lass, will you run off or tell him?”
“I’ll tell him. He can’t stop me, even if he would.... The gold will
save him from ruin....He will let me go.”
She stooped to pick up the little leather note-book and placed it in
her bosom. Her heart seemed to surge against it. The great river rolled
on--rolled on--magnified in her sight. A thick, rich, beautiful light
shone under the trees. What was this dance of her blood while she seemed
so calm, so cool, so sure?
“Does he have any idea--that I might return to him?” she asked.
“None, lass, none! Thet I’ll swear,” declared Slingerland. “When I left
him at Roarin’ City the other day he was--wal, like he used to be. The
boy come out in him again, not jest the same, but brave. Sendin’ thet
gold an’ thet little book made him happy.... I reckon Neale found his
soul then. An’ he never expects to see you again in this hyar world.”
35
Building a railroad grew to be an exact and wonderful science with
the men of the Union Pacific, from engineers down to the laborers who
ballasted and smoothed the road-bed.
Wherever the work-trains stopped there began a hum like a bee-hive.
Gangs loaded rails on a flat-car, and the horses or mules were driven at
a gallop to the front. There two men grasped the end of a rail and began
to slide it off. In couples, other laborers of that particular gang laid
hold, and when they had it off the car they ran away with it to drop
it in place. While they were doing this other gangs followed with more
rails. Four rails laid to the minute! When one of the cars was empty it
was tipped off the track to make room for the next one. And as that next
one passed the first was levered back again on the rails to return for
another load.
Four rails down to the minute! It was Herculean toil. The men who fitted
the rails were cursed the most frequently, because they took time, a few
seconds, when there was no time.
Then the spikers! These brawny, half-naked, sweaty giants--what a grand
spanging music of labor rang from under their hammers! Three strokes to
a spike for most spikers! Only two strokes for such as Casey or Neale!
Ten spikes to a rail--four hundred rails to a mile! ... How many million
times had brawny arms swung and sledges clanged!
Forward every day the work-trains crept westward, closer and closer to
that great hour when they would meet the work-trains coming east.
The momentum now of the road-laying was tremendous. The spirit that
nothing could stop had become embodied in a scientific army of toilers,
a mass, a machine, ponderous, irresistible, moving on to the meeting of
the rails.
Every day the criss-cross of ties lengthened out along the winding
road-bed, and the lines of glistening rails kept pace with them. The
sun beat down hot--the dust flew in sheets and puffs--the smoky veils
floated up from the desert. Red-shirted toilers, blue-shirted toilers,
half-naked toilers, sweat and bled, and laughed grimly, and sucked at
their pipes, and bent their broad backs. The pace had quickened to the
limit of human endurance. Fury of sound filled the air. Its rhythmical
pace was the mighty gathering impetus of a last heave, a last swing.
Promontory Point was the place destined to be famous as the meeting of
the rails.