4

In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the Wyoming hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical.  They had charge of the laying out of the Union Pacific Railroad.

This party, escorted by a company of United States troops under Colonel Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable.  And now, having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of the Rockies they were halted by a seemingly impassable barrier—­a gorge too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.

General Lodge, chief engineer of the corps, gave an order to one of his assistants.  “Put young Neale on the job.  If we ever survey a line through this awful place we’ll owe it to him.”

The assistant, Baxter, told an Irishman standing by and smoking a short, black pipe to find Neale and give him the chief’s orders.  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.  It had taken years to evolve the plan of a continental railroad, and it came to fruition at last through many men and devious ways, through plots and counterplots.  The wonderful idea of uniting East and West by a railroad originated in one man’s brain; he lived for it, and finally he died for it.  But the seeds he had sown were fruitful.  One by one other men divined and believed, despite doubt and fear, until the day arrived when Congress put the Government of the United States, the army, a group of frock-coated directors, and unlimited gold back of General Lodge, and bade him build the road.

In all the length and breadth of the land no men but the chief engineer and his assistants knew the difficulty, the peril of that undertaking.  The outside world was interested, the nation waited, mostly in doubt.  But Lodge and his engineers had been seized by the spirit of some great thing to be, in the making of which were adventure, fortune, fame, and that strange call of life which foreordained a heritage for future generations.  They were grim; they were indomitable.