He loved to swing that sledge, to hear the spang of the steel ring out.  He had a sheer physical delight in the power of his body, long since thinned-out, hardened, tough as the wood into which he drove the spikes.  He loved his new comrade, Pat, the gnarled and knotted little Irishman who cursed and complained of his job and fought his fellow-workers, yet who never lagged, never shirked, and never failed, though his days of usefulness must soon be over.  Soon Pat would drop by the roadside, a victim to toil and whisky and sun.  And he was great in his obscurity.  He wore a brass tag with a number; he signed his wage receipt with a cross; he cared only for drink and a painted hag in a squalid tent; yet in all the essentials that Neale now called great his friend Pat reached up to them—­the spirit to work, to stand his share, to go on, to endure, to fulfill his task.

Neale might have found salvation in this late-developed and splendid relation to labor and to men.  But there was a hitch in his brain.  He would see all that was beautiful and strenuous and progressive around him; and then, in a flash, that hiatus in his mind would operate to make him hopeless.  Then he would stand as in a trance, with far-away gaze in his eyes, until his fellow-spiker would recall him to his neglected work.  These intervals of abstraction grew upon him until he would leave off in the act of driving a spike.

And sometimes in these strange intervals he longed for his old friend, brother, shadow—­Larry Red King.  He held to Larry’s memory, though with it always would return that low, strange roar of Benton’s gold and lust and blood and death.  Neale did not understand the mystery of what he had been through.  It had been a phase of wildness never to be seen again by his race.  His ambition and effort, his fall, his dark siege with hell, his friendship and loss, his agony and toil, his victory, were all symbolical of the progress of a great movement.  In his experience lay hid all that development.

The coming of night was always a relief now, for with the end of the day’s work he need no longer fight his battle.  It was a losing battle—­that he knew.  Shunning everybody, he paced to and fro out on the dark, windy desert, under the lonely, pitiless stars.

His longing to see Allie Lee grew upon him.  While he had believed her dead he had felt her spirit hovering near him, in every shadow, and her voice whispered on the wind.  She was alive now, but gone away, far distant, over mountains and plains, out of his sight and reach, somewhere to take up a new life alien to his.  What would she do?  Could she bear, it?  Never would she forget him—­be faithless to his memory!  Yet she was young and her life had been hard.  She might yield to that cold Allison Lee’s dictation.  In happy surroundings her beauty and sweetness would bring a crowd of lovers to her.

“But that’s all—­only natural,” muttered Neale, in perplexity.  “I want her to forget—­to be happy—­to find a home....  For her to grow old—­alone!  No!  She must love some man—­marry—­”