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.
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