Warren Neale came hurrying up.  He was a New Englander of poor family, self-educated, wild for adventure, keen for achievement, eager, ardent, bronze-faced, and keen-eyed, under six feet in height, built like a wedge, but not heavy—­a young man of twenty-three with strong latent possibilities of character.

General Lodge himself explained the difficulties of the situation and what the young surveyor was expected to do.  Neale flushed with pride; his eyes flashed; his jaw set.  But he said little while the engineers led him out to the scene of the latest barrier.  It was a rugged gorge, old and yellow and crumbled, cedar-fringed at the top, bare and white at the bottom.  The approach to it was through a break in the walls, so that the gorge really extended both above and below this vantage-point.

“This is the only pass through these foot-hills,” said Engineer Henney, the eldest of Lodge’s corps.

The passage ended where the break in the walls fronted abruptly upon the gorge.  It was a wild scene.  Only inspired and dauntless men could have entertained any hope of building a railroad through such a place.  The mouth of the break was narrow; a rugged slope led up to the left; to the right a huge buttress of stone wall bulged over the gorge; across stood out the seamed and cracked cliffs, and below yawned the abyss.  The nearer side of the gorge could only be guessed at.

Neale crawled to the extreme edge of the precipice, and, lying flat, he tried to discover what lay beneath.  Evidently he did not see much, for upon getting up he shook his head.  Then he gazed at the bulging wall.

“The side of that can be blown off,” he muttered.

“But what’s around the corner?  If it’s straight stone wall for miles and miles we are done,” said Boone, another of the engineers.

“The opposite wall is just that,” added Henney.  “A straight stone wall.”

General Lodge gazed at the baffling gorge.  His face became grimmer, harder.  “It seems impossible to go on, but we must go on!” he said.

A short silence ensued.  The engineers faced one another like men confronted by a last and crowning hindrance.  Then Neale laughed.  He appeared cool and confident.

“It only looks bad,” he said.  “We’ll climb to the top and I’ll go down over the wall on a rope.”

Neale had been let down over many precipices in those stony hills.  He had been the luckiest, the most daring and successful of all the men picked out and put to perilous tasks.  No one spoke of the accidents that had happened, or even the fatal fall of a lineman who a few weeks before had ventured once too often.  Every rod of road surveyed made the engineers sterner at their task, just as it made them keener to attain final success.

The climb to the top of the bluff was long and arduous.  The whole corps went, and also some of the troopers.

“I’ll need a long rope,” Neale had said to King, his lineman.