rt.... How few of
the honest toilers dream of the spirit that is working on them. That
Irishman, Shane, think of him. He fought while his brains oozed from a
hole in his head; I saw, but I didn't know then. I wanted to take his
place. He said, no, he wasn't hurt, and Casey would laugh at him. Aye,
Casey would have laughed!.... They are men. There are thousands of them.
The U. P. R. goes on. It can't be stopped. It has the momentum of a
great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I
cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton
with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that
mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that
we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and depth of
impossible things."

"You must be drunk," said Place, gravely, "and yet what you say hits me
hard. I'm a gambler. But sometimes--there are moments when I might be
less or more. There's mystery in the air. This Benton is a chaos. Those
hairy toilers of the rails! I've watched them hammer and lift and dig
and fight. By day they sweat and they bleed, they sing and joke and
quarrel--and go on with the work. By night they are seized by the
furies. They fight among themselves while being plundered and murdered
by Benton's wolves. Heroic by day--hellish by night.... And so, spirit
or what--they set the pace."

Next afternoon, when parasitic Benton awoke, it found the girl Ruby dead
in her bed.

Her door had to be forced. She had not been murdered. She had destroyed
much of the contents of a trunk. She had dressed herself in simple
garments that no one in Benton had ever seen. It did not appear what
means she had employed to take her life. She was only one of many. More
than one girl of Benton's throng had sought the same short road and
cheated life of further pain.

When Neale heard about it, upon his return to Benton, late that
afternoon, Ruby was in her grave. It suited him to walk out in the
twilight and stand awhile in the silence beside the bare sandy mound. No
stone--no mark. Another nameless grave! She had been a child once, with
dancing eyes and smiles, loved by some one, surely, and perhaps mourned
by some one living. The low hum of Benton's awakening night life was
borne faintly on the wind. The sand seeped; the coyotes wailed; and
yet there was silence. Twilight lingered. Out on the desert the shadows
deepened.

By some chance the grave