The U. P. Trail Part 77

All-satisfied, eternally humble, grateful with every pa.s.sionate drop of blood throbbing through his heart, he dedicated all his spiritual life to memory. And likewise there seemed a tremendous need in him of sustained physical action, even violence. He turned to the last stages of the construction of the great railroad.

What fine comrades these hairy-breasted toilers made! Neale had admired them once; now he loved them. Every group seemed to contain a trio like that one he had known so well--Casey, Shane, and McDermott. Then he divined that these men were all alike. They all toiled, swore, fought, drank, gambled. Hundreds of them went to nameless graves. But the work went on--the great, driving, united heart beat on.

Neale was under its impulse, in another sense.

When he lifted a tie and felt the hard, splintering wood, he wondered where it had come from, what kind of a tree it was, who had played in its shade, how surely birds had nested in it and animals had grazed beneath it. Between him and that square log of wood there was an affinity. Somehow his hold upon it linked him strangely to a long past, intangible spirit of himself. He must cling to it, lest he might lose that illusive feeling. Then when he laid it down he felt regret fade into a realization that the yellow-gravel road-bed also inspirited him.

He wanted to feel it, work in it, level it, make it somehow his own.

When he strode back for another load his magnifying eyes gloated over the toilers in action--the rows of men carrying and laying rails, and the splendid brawny figures of the spikers, naked to the waist, swinging the heavy sledges. The blows rang out spang--spang--spang! Strong music, full of meaning! When his turn came to be a spiker, he would love that hardest work of all.

The engine puffed smoke and b.u.mped the cars ahead, little by little as the track advanced; men on the train carried ties and rails forward, filling the front cars as fast as they were emptied; long lines of laborers on the ground pa.s.sed to and fro, burdened going forward, returning empty-handed; the rails and the shovels and the hammers and the picks all caught the hot gleam from the sun; the dust swept up in sheets; the ring, the crash, the thump, the sc.r.a.pe of iron and wood and earth in collision filled the air with a sound rising harshly above the song and laugh and curse of men.

A shifting, colorful, strenuous scene of toil!

Gradually Neale felt that he was fitting into this scene, becoming a part of it, an atom once more in the great whole. He doubted while he thrilled. Clearly as he saw, keenly as he felt, he yet seemed bewildered. Was he not gazing out at this construction work through windows of his soul, once more painted, colored, beautiful, because the most precious gift he might have prayed for had been given him--life and hope for Allie Lee?

He did not know. He could not think.

His comrade, Pat, wiped floods of sweat from his scarlet face. "I'll be domned if ye ain't a son-of-a-gun fer worrk!" he complained.

"Pat, we've been given the honor of pace-makers. They've got to keep up with us. Come on," replied Neale.

"Be gad! there ain't a mon in the gang phwat'll trade fer me honor, thin," declared Pat. "Fri'nd, I'd loike to live till next pay-day."

"Come on, then, work up an appet.i.te," rejoined Neale.

"Shure I'll die.... An' I'd loike to ask, beggin' ye're pardon, hevn't ye got some Irish in ye?"

"Yes, a little."

"I knowed thot.... All roight, I'll die with ye, thin."

In half an hour Pat was in despair again. He had to rest.

"Phwat's--ye're--name?" he queried.

"Neale."

"It ought to be Casey. Fer there was niver but wan loike ye--an' he was Casey.... Mon, ye're sweatin' blood roight now!"

Pat pointed at Neale's red, wet shirt. Neale slapped his breast, and drops of blood and sweat spattered from under his hand.

"An' shure ye're hands are bladin', too!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Pat.

They were, indeed, but Neale had not noted that.

The boss, Reilly, pa.s.sing by, paused to look and grin.

"Pat, yez got some one to kape up with to-day. We're half a mile ahead of yestidy this time."

Then he turned to Neale.

"I've seen one in yer cla.s.s--Casey by name. An' thot's talkin'."

He went his way. And Neale, plodding on, saw the red face of the great Casey, with its set grin and the black pipe. Swiftly then he saw it as he had heard of it last, and a shadow glanced fleetingly across the singular radiance of his mind.

The shrill whistle of the locomotive halted the work and called the men to dinner and rest. Instantly the scene changed. The slow, steady, rhythmic motions of labor gave place to a scramble back to the long line of cars. Then the horde of sweaty toilers sought places in the shade, and ate and drank and smoked and rested. As the spirit of work had been merry, so was that of rest, with always a dry, grim earnestness in the background.

Neale slowed down during the afternoon, to the unconcealed thankfulness of his partner. The burn of the sun, the slippery sweat, the growing ache of muscles, the never-ending thirst, the lessening of strength--these sensations impinged upon Neale's emotion and gradually wore to the front of his consciousness. His hands grew raw, his back stiff and sore, his feet crippled. The wound in his breast burned and bled and throbbed. At the end of the day he could scarcely walk.

He rode in with the laborers, slept twelve hours, and awoke heavy-limbed, slow, and aching. But he rode out to work, and his second day was one of agony.

The third was a continual fight between will and body, between spirit and pain. But so long as he could step and lift he would work on. From that time he slowly began to mend.

Then came his siege with the rails. That was labor which made carrying ties seem light. He toiled on, sweating thin, wearing hard, growing clearer of mind. As pain subsided, and weariness of body no longer dominated him, slowly thought and feeling returned until that morning dawned when, like a flash of lightning illuminating his soul, the profound and exalted emotion again possessed him. Soon he came to divine that the agony of toil and his victory over weak flesh had added to his strange happiness. Hour after hour he bent his back and plodded beside his comrades, doing his share, burdened as they were, silent, watchful, listening, dreaming, keen to note the progress of the road, yet deep in his own intense abstraction. He seemed to have two minds. He saw every rod of the ten miles of track laid every day, knew, as only an engineer could know, the wonder of such progress; and, likewise, always in his sight, in his mind, shone a face, red-lipped, soulful, lovely like a saint's, with mournful violet eyes, star-sweet in innocence. Life had given Allie Lee back to him--to his love and his memory; and all that could happen to him now must be good. At first he had asked for nothing, so grateful was he to fate, but now he prayed for hours and days and nights to remember.

The day came when Neale graduated into the cla.s.s of spikers. This division of labor to him had always represented the finest spirit of the building. The drivers--the spikers--the men who nailed the rails--who riveted the last links--these brawny, half-naked wielders of the sledges, bronzed as Indians, seemed to embody both the romance and the achievement. Neale experienced a subtle perception with the first touch and lift and swing of the great hammer. And there seemed born in him a genius for the stroke. He had a free, easy swing, with tremendous power.

He could drive so fast that his comrade on the opposite rail, and the carriers and layers, could not keep up with him. Moments of rest seemed earned. During these he would gaze with glinting eyes back at the gangs and the trains, at the smoke, dust, and movement; and beyond toward the east.

One day he drove spikes for hours, with the gangs in uninterrupted labor around him, while back a mile along the road the troopers fought the Sioux; and all this time, when any moment he might be ordered to drop his sledge for a rifle, he listened to the voice in his memory and saw the face.

Another day dawned in which he saw the grading gangs return from work ahead. They were done. Streams of horses, wagons, and men on the return!

They had met the graders from the west, and the two lines of road-bed had been connected. As these gangs pa.s.sed, cheer on cheer greeted them from the rail-layers. It was a splendid moment.

From lip to lip then went the word that the grading-gangs from east and west had pa.s.sed each other in plain sight, working on, grading on for a hundred miles farther than necessary. They had met and had pa.s.sed on, side by side, doubling the expense of construction.

This knowledge gave Neale a melancholy reminder of the dishonest aspect of the road-building. And he thought of many things. The spirit of the work was grand, the labor heroic, but, alas! side by side with these splendid and n.o.ble attributes stalked the specters of greed and gold and l.u.s.t of blood and of death.

But neither knowledge such as this, nor peril from Indians, nor the toil-pangs of a galley slave had power to change Neale's supreme state of joy.

He gazed back toward the east, and then with mighty swing he drove a spike. He loved Allie Lee beyond all conception, and next he loved the building of the railroad.

When such thoughts came he went back to pure sensations, the great, bold peaks looming dark, the winding, level road-bed, the smoky desert-land, reflecting heat, the completed track and gangs of moving men like bright ants in the sunlight, and the exhaust of the engines, the old song, "Drill, ye terriers, drill!" the ring and crash and thud and sc.r.a.pe of labor, the whistle of the seeping sand on the wind, the feel of the heavy sledge that he could wield as a toy, the throb of pulse, the smell of dust and sweat, the sense of his being there, his action, his solidarity, his physical brawn--once more manhood.

But at last human instincts encroached upon Neale's superlative detachment from self. It seemed all of a sudden that he stepped toward an east-bound train. When he reached the coach something halted him--a thought--where was he going? The west-bound work-train was the one he wanted. He laughed, a little grimly. Certainly he had grown absentminded. And straightway he became thoughtful, in a different way.

Not many moments of reflection were needed to a.s.sure him that he had moved toward the east-bound train with the instinctive idea of going to Allie Lee. 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.

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 bra.s.s 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.