The
Irishman, Casey by name, was raw-boned, red-faced, and hard-
featured, a man inured to exposure and rough life. His expression
was one of extreme and fixed good humor, as if his face had been
set, mask-like, during a grin. He removed the pipe from his lips.
"Gineral, the flag I've been holdin' fer thot dom' young surveyor is
the wrong color. I want a green flag."
Baxter waved the Irishman to his errand, but General Lodge looked up
from the maps and plans before him with a faint smile. He had a
dark, stern face and the bearing of a soldier.
"Casey, you can have any color you like," he said. "Maybe green
would change our luck."
"Gineral, we'll niver git no railroad built, an' if we do it'll be
the Irish thot builds it," responded Casey, and went his way.
Truly only one hope remained--that the agile and daring Neale, with
his eye of a mountaineer and his genius for estimating distance and
grade, might run a line around the gorge.
While waiting for Neale the engineers went over the maps and
drawings again and again, with the earnestness of men who could not
be beaten.
Lodge had been a major-general in the Civil War just ended, and
before that he had traveled through this part of the West many
times, and always with the mighty project of a railroad looming in
his mind.
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