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.
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