It's only a few months. Go
on to your work, pard. You'll be a big man on the road some day."
Neale left North Platte with a wagon-train.
After a long, slow journey the point was reached where the graders
had left off work for that year. Here had been a huge construction
camp; and the bare and squalid place looked as if it once had been a
town of crudest make, suddenly wrecked by a cyclone and burned by
prairie fire. Fifty miles farther on, representing two more long,
tedious, and unendurable days, and Neale heard the whistle of a
locomotive. It came from far off. But it was a whistle. He yelled,
and the men journeying with him joined in.
Smoke showed on the horizon, together with a wide, low, uneven line
of shacks and tents.
Neale was all eyes when he rode into that construction camp. The
place was a bedlam. A motley horde of men appeared to be doing
everything under the sun but work, and most of them seemed
particularly eager to board a long train of box-cars and little old
passenger-coaches. Neale made a dive for the train, and his sojourn
in that camp was a short and exciting one of ten minutes.
He felt unutterably proud. He had helped survey the line along which
the train was now rattling and creaking and swaying. All that
swiftly passed under his keen eyes was recorded in his memory--the
uncouth crowd of laborers, the hardest lot he had ever seen; the
talk, noise, smoke; the rickety old clattering coaches; the wayside
dumps and heaps and wreckage.
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