trains arrived from west and east. The Governor of California, who was
also president of the western end of the line, met the Vice-President of
the United States and the directors of the Union Pacific. Mormons from
Utah were there in force. The Government was represented by officers
and soldiers in uniform; and these, with their military band, lent the
familiar martial air to the last scene of the great enterprise. Here
mingled the Irish and Negro laborers from the east with the Chinese and
Mexican from the west. Then the eastern paddies laid the last rails on
one end, while the western coolies laid those on the other. The rails
joined. Spikes were driven, until the last one remained.
The Territory of Arizona had presented a spike of gold, silver, and
iron; Nevada had given one of silver, and a railroad tie of laurel wood;
and the last spike of all--of solid gold--was presented by California.
The driving of the last spike was to be heard all over the United
States. Omaha was the telegraphic center. The operator here had informed
all inquirers, “When the last spike is driven at Promontory Point we
will say, ‘Done!’”
The magic of the wire was to carry that single message abroad over the
face of the land.
The President of the United States was to be congratulated, as were the
officers of the army, and the engineers of the work. San Francisco
had arranged a monster celebration marked by the booming of cannon and
enthusiastic parades. Free railroad tickets into Sacramento were to
fill that city with jubilant crowds. At Omaha cannons were to be fired,
business abandoned, and the whole city given over to festivity. Chicago
was to see a great parade and decoration. In New York a hundred guns
were to boom out the tidings. Trinity Church was to have special
services, and the famous chimes were to play “Old Hundred.” In
Philadelphia a ringing of the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall would
initiate a celebration. And so it would be in all prominent cities of
the Union.
Neale was at Promontory Point that summer day. He stood aloof from the
crowd, on a little bank, watching with shining eyes.
To him the scene was great, beautiful, final.
Only a few hundreds of that vast army of laborers were present at the
meeting of the rails, but enough were there to represent the whole.
Neale’s glances were swift and gathering. His comrades, Pat and
McDermott, sat near, exchanging lights for their pipes. They seemed
reposeful, and for them the matter was ended. Broken hulks of toilers
of the rails! Neither would labor any more. A burly Negro, with crinkly,
bullet-shaped head, leaned against a post; a brawny spiker, naked to the
waist, his wonderful shoulders and arms brown, shiny, knotted, scarred,
stood near, sledge in hand; a group of Irishmen, red-and blue-shirted,
puffed their black pipes and argued; swarthy, sloe-eyed Mexicans, with
huge sombreros on their knees, lolled in the shade of a tree, talking
low in their mellow tones and fingering cigarettes; Chinamen, with long
pig-tails and foreign dress, added strangeness and colorful contrast.
Neale heard the low murmur of voices of the crowd, and the slow puffing
of the two engines, head on, only a few yards apart, so strikingly
different in shape. Then followed the pounding of hoofs and tread of
many feet, the clang of iron as the last rail went down. How clear,
sweet, spanging the hammer blows! And there was the old sighing sweep of
the wind. Then came a gun-shot, the snort of a horse, a loud laugh.
Neale heard all with sensitive, recording ears.
“Mac, yez are so dom’ smart--now tell me who built the U. P.?” demanded
Pat.
“Thot’s asy. Me fri’nd Casey did, b’gorra,” retorted McDermott.
“Loike hell he did! It was the Irish.”
“Shure, thot’s phwat I said,” McDermott replied.
“Wal, thin, phwat built the U. P.? Tell me thot. Yez knows so much.”
McDermott scratched his sun-blistered, stubble-field of a face, and
grinned. “Whisky built the eastern half, an’ cold tay built the western
half.”
Pat regarded his comrade with considerable respect. “Mac, shure yez is
intilligint,” he granted. “The Irish lived on whisky an’ the Chinamons
on tay.... Wal, yez is so dom’ orful smart, mebbe yez can tell me who
got the money for thot worrk.”
“B’gorra, I know where ivery dollar wint,” replied McDermott.
And so they argued on, oblivious to the impressive last stage.
Neale sensed the rest, the repose in the attitude of all the laborers
present. Their hour was done. And they accepted that with the equanimity
with which they had met the toil, the heat and thirst, the Sioux. A
splendid, rugged, loquacious, crude, elemental body of men, unconscious
of heroism. Those who had survived the five long years of toil and snow
and sun, and the bloody Sioux, and the roaring camps, bore the scars,
the furrows, the gray hairs of great and wild times.
A lane opened up in the crowd to the spot where the rails had met.
Neale got a glimpse of his associates, the engineers, as they stood near
the frock-coated group of dignitaries and directors. Then Neale felt
the stir and lift of emotion, as if he were on a rising wave. His blood
began to flow fast and happily. He was to share their triumphs. The
moment had come. Some one led him back to his post of honor as the head
of the engineer corps.
A silence fell then over that larger, denser multitude. It grew
impressive, charged, waiting.
Then a man of God offered up a prayer. His voice floated dreamily
to Neale. When he had ceased there were slow, dignified movements of
frock-coated men as they placed in position the last spike.
The silver sledge flashed in the sunlight and fell. The sound of the
driving-stroke did not come to Neale with the familiar spang of iron; it
was soft, mellow, golden.
A last stroke! The silence vibrated to a deep, hoarse acclaim from
hundreds of men--a triumphant, united hurrah, simultaneously sent out
with that final message, “Done!”
A great flood of sound, of color seemed to wave over Neale. His eyes
dimmed with salt tears, blurring the splendid scene. The last moment had
passed--that for which he had stood with all faith, all spirit--and the
victory was his. The darkness passed out of his soul.
Then, as he stood there, bareheaded, at the height of this
all-satisfying moment, when the last echoing melody of the sledge had
blended in the roar of the crowd, a strange feeling of a presence struck
Neale. Was it spiritual--was it divine--was it God? Or was it only
baneful, fateful--the specter of his accomplished work--a reminder of
the long, gray future?
A hand slipped into his--small, soft, trembling, exquisitely thrilling.
Neale became still as a stone--transfixed. He knew that touch. No dream,
no fancy, no morbid visitation! He felt warm flesh--tender,
clinging fingers; and then the pulse of blood that beat of
hope--love--life--Allie Lee!
36
Slingerland saw Allie Lee married to Neale by that minister of God whose
prayer had followed the joining of the rails.
And to the old trapper had fallen the joy and the honor of giving the
bride away and of receiving her kiss, as though he had been her father.
Then the happy congratulations from General Lodge and his staff; the
merry dinner given the couple, and its toasts warm with praise of the
bride’s beauty and the groom’s luck and success; Neale’s strange, rapt
happiness and Allie’s soul shining through her dark-blue eyes--this hour
was to become memorable for Slingerland’s future dreams.
Slingerland’s sight was not clear when, as the train pulled away, he
waved a last good-bye to his young friends. Now he had no hope, no
prayer left unanswered, except to be again in his beloved hills.
Abruptly he hurried away to the corrals where his pack-train was all
in readiness to start. He did not speak to a man. He had packed a dozen
burros--the largest and completest pack-train he had ever driven. The
abundance of carefully selected supplies, tools, and traps should last
him many years--surely all the years that he would live.
Slingerland did not intend to return to civilization, and he never
even looked back at that blotch on the face of the bluff--that hideous
Roaring City.
He drove the burros at a good trot, his mind at once busy and absent,
happy with the pictures of that last hour, gloomy with the undefined,
unsatisfied cravings of his heart. Friendship with Neale, affection
for Allie, acquainted him with the fact that he had missed something in
life--not friendship, for he had had hunter friends, but love, perhaps
of a sweetheart, surely love of a daughter.
For the rest the old trapper was glad to see the last of habitations,
and of men, and of the railroad. Slingerland hated that great,
shining steel band of progress connecting East and West. Every ringing
sledge-hammer blow had sung out the death-knell of the trapper’s
calling. This railroad spelled the end of the wilderness. What one group
of greedy men had accomplished others would imitate; and the grass of
the plains would be burned, the forests blackened, the fountains dried
up in the valleys, and the wild creatures of the mountains driven and
hunted and exterminated. The end of the buffalo had come--the end of the
Indian was in sight--and that of the fur-bearing animal and his hunter
must follow soon with the hurrying years.
Slingerland hated the railroad, and he could not see as Neale did, or
any of the engineers or builders. This old trapper had the vision of
the Indian--that far-seeing eye cleared by distance and silence, and
the force of the great, lonely hills. Progress was great, but nature
undespoiled was greater. If a race could not breed all stronger men,
through its great movements, it might better not breed any, for the
bad over-multiplied the good, and so their needs magnified into greed.
Slingerland saw many shining bands of steel across the plains and
mountains, many stations and hamlets and cities, a growing and marvelous
prosperity from timber, mines, farms, and in the distant end--a gutted
West.
He made his first camp on a stream watering a valley twenty miles from
the railroad. There were Indian tracks on the trails. But he had nothing
to fear from Indians. That night, though all was starry and silent
around him as he lay, he still held the insupportable feeling.
Next day he penetrated deeper into the foothills, and soon he had gained
the fastnesses of the mountains. No longer did he meet trails except
those of deer and wildcat and bear. And so day after day he drove his
burros, climbing and descending the rocky ways, until he had penetrated
to the very heart of the great wild range.
In all his roaming over untrodden lands he had never come into such a
wild place. No foot, not--even an Indian’s, had ever desecrated this
green valley with its clear, singing stream, its herds of tame deer, its
curious beaver, its pine-covered slopes, its looming, gray, protective
peaks. And at last he was satisfied to halt there--to build his cabin
and his corral.
Discontent and longing, and then hate, passed into oblivion. These
useless passions could not long survive in such an environment. By and
by the old trapper’s only link with the past was memory of a stalwart
youth, and of a girl with violet eyes, and of their sad and wonderful
romance, in which he had played a happy part.
The rosy dawn, the days of sun and cloud, the still, windy nights,
the solemn stars, the moon-blanched valley with its grazing herds, the
beautiful wild mourn of the hunting wolf and the whistle of the stag,
and always and ever the murmur of the stream--in these, and in the
solitude and loneliness of their haunts, he found his goal, his
serenity, the truth and best of remaining life for him.
37
A band of Sioux warriors rode out upon a promontory of the hills,
high above the great expanse of plain. Long, lean arms were raised and
pointed.
A chief dismounted and strode to the front of his band. His war-bonnet
trailed behind him; there were unhealed scars upon his bronze body; his
face was old, full of fine, wavy lines, stern, craggy, and inscrutable;
his eyes were dark, arrowy lightnings.
They beheld, far out and down upon the plain, a long, low, moving object
leaving a trail of smoke. It was a train on the railroad. It came from
the east and crept toward the west. The chief watched it, and so did his
warriors. No word was spoken, no sign made, no face changed.
But what was in the mind and the heart and the soul of that great chief?
This beast that puffed smoke and spat fire and shrieked like a devil of
an alien tribe; that split the silence as hideously as the long track
split the once smooth plain; that was made of iron and wood; this thing
of the white man’s, coming from out of the distance where the Great
Spirit lifted the dawn, meant the end of the hunting-grounds and the
doom of the Indian. Blood had flowed; many warriors lay in their last
sleep under the trees; but the iron monster that belched fire had gone
only to return again. Those white men were many as the needles of the
pines. They fought and died, but always others came.
The chief was old and wise, taught by sage and star and mountain and
wind and the loneliness of the prairie-land. He recognized a superior
race, but not a nobler one. White men would glut the treasures of water
and earth. The Indian had been born to hunt his meat, to repel his red
foes, to watch the clouds and serve his gods. But these white men would
come like a great flight of grasshoppers to cover the length and breadth
of the prairie-land. The buffalo would roll away, like a dust-cloud, in
the distance, and never return. No meat for the Indian--no grass for his
mustang--no place for his home. The Sioux must fight till he died or be
driven back into waste places where grief and hardship would end him.
Red and dusky, the sun was setting beyond the desert. The old chief
swept aloft his arm, and then in his acceptance of the inevitable
bitterness he stood in magnificent austerity, somber as death, seeing in
this railroad train creeping, fading into the ruddy sunset, a symbol of
the destiny of the Indian--vanishing--vanishing--vanishing--