uilding of the U. P. R. as it advanced westward caused many camps
and towns to spring up and flourish, like mushrooms, in a single night;
and trains were run as far as the rails were laid.

Therefore strange towns and communities were born, like to nothing that
the world had ever seen before.

Warren Neale could not get away from the fascination of the work and
life, even though he had lost all his ambition and was now nothing more
than an ordinary engineer, insignificant and idle. He began to drink and
gamble in North Platte, more in a bitter defiance to fate than from any
real desire; then with Larry King he drifted out to Kearney.

At Kearney, Larry got into trouble--characteristic trouble. In a quarrel
with a construction boss named Smith, Larry accused Smith of being the
crooked tool of the crooked commissioners who had forced Neale to quit
his job. Smith grew hot and profane. The cowboy promptly slapped his
face. Then Smith, like the fool he was, went after his gun. He never got
it out.

It distressed Neale greatly that Larry had shot up a man--and a railroad
man at that. No matter what Larry said, Neale knew the shooting was on
his account. This deed made the cowboy a marked man. It changed him,
also, toward Neale, inasmuch as that he saw his wildness, was making
small Neale's chances of returning to work. Larry never ceased
importuning Neale to go back to his job. After shooting Smith the cowboy
made one more eloquent appeal to Neale and then left for Cheyenne. Neale
followed him.

Cheyenne was just sobering up after its brief and tempestuous reign as
headquarters town, and though depleted and thin, it was now making a bid
for permanency. But the sting and wildness of life had departed with
the construction operations, and now Benton had become the hub of the
railway universe.

Neale boarded a train for Benton and watched with bitterness the
familiar landmarks he had learned to know so well while surveying the
line. He was no longer connected with the great project--no more a
necessary part of the great movement.

Beyond Medicine Bow the grass and the green failed and the immense train
of freight-cars and passenger-coaches, loaded to capacity, clattered on
into arid country. Gray and red, the drab and fiery colors of the desert
lent the ridges character--forbidding and barren.

From a car window Neale got his first glimpse of the wonderful
terminus city, and for once his old thrills returned. He recalle