ow rattling and creaking and swaying. All that swiftly passed
under his keen eyes was recorded in his memory--the uncouth crowd of
laborers, the hardest lot he had ever seen; the talk, noise, smoke;
the rickety old clattering coaches; the wayside dumps and heaps and
wreckage. But they all seemed parts of a beautiful romance to him. Neale
saw through the eyes of golden ambition and illimitable dreams.

And not for a moment of that endless ride, with interminable stops, did
he weary of the two hundred and sixty miles of rails laid that year,
and of the forty miles of the preceding year. Then came Omaha, a
beehive--the making of a Western metropolis!

Neale plunged into the bewildering turmoil of plans, tasks, schemes,
land-grants, politics, charters, inducements, liens and loans,
Government and army and State and national interests, grafts and deals
and bosses--all that mass of selfish and unselfish motives, all that
wealth of cunning and noble aims, all that congested assemblage of
humanity which went to make up the building of the Union Pacific.

Neale was a dreamer, like the few men whose minds had first given birth
to the wonderful idea of a railroad from East to West. Neale found
himself confronted by a singularly disturbing fact. However grand this
project, its political and mercenary features could not be beautiful to
him. Why could not all men be right-minded about a noble cause and work
unselfishly for the development of the West and the future generations?
It was a melancholy thing to learn that men of sincere and generous
purpose had spent their all trying to raise the money to build the Union
Pacific; on the other hand, it was a satisfaction to hear that many
capitalists with greedy claws had ruined themselves in like efforts.

The President of the United States and Congress had their own troubles
at the close of the war, and the Government could do but little
money-raising with land-grants and loans. But they offered a great bonus
to the men who would build the railroad.

The first construction company subscribed over a million and a half
dollars, and paid in one-quarter of that. The money went so swiftly
that it opened the company's eyes to the insatiable gulf beneath that
enterprise, and they quit.

Thereupon what was called the Credit Mobilier was inaugurated, and it
became both famous and infamous.

It was a type of the construction company by which it was the custom
to build railroads at that time