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.
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