tance, and a singular grace that Neale felt rather than saw.

Strangest of all to him was the glimpse he got into the labyrinthine
plot built around the stock, the finance, the gold that was constructing
the road. He was an engineer, with a deductive habit of mind, but
he would never be able to trace the intricacy of this monumental
aggregation of deals. Yet he was hugely, interested. Much of the scorn
and disgust he had felt out on the line for the mercenaries connected
with the work he forgot here among these frock-coated gentlemen.

An hour later Neale accompanied Warburton to the station where the
director was to board a train for his return to New York.

"You'll start back to-morrow," said Warburton. "I'll see you soon, I
hope--out there in Utah where the last spike is to be driven. That
will be THE day--THE hour!... It will be celebrated all over the United
States."

Neale returned to his hotel, trying to make out the vital thing that
had come to him on this hurried and apparently useless journey. His mind
seemed in a whirl. Yet as he pondered, there gradually loomed up the
reflection that in the eastern, or constructive, end of the great
plan there were the same spirits of evil and mystery as existed in the
western, or building, end. Here big men were interested, involved; out
there bigger men sweat and burned and aged and died. The difference was
that these toilers gave all for an ideal while the directors and their
partners thought only of money, of profits.

Neale restrained what might have been contempt, but he thought that if
these financiers could have seen the life of the diggers and spikers as
he knew it they might be actuated by a nobler motive. Before he dropped
to sleep that night he concluded that his trip to Washington, and the
recognition accorded him by Warburton's circle, had fixed a new desire
in his heart to heave some more rails and drive some more spikes for the
railroad he loved so well. To him the work had been something for which
he had striven with all his might and for which he had risked his life.
Not only had his brain been given to the creation, but his muscles had
ached from the actual physical toil attendant upon this biggest of big
jobs.

When Neale at last reached Benton it was night. Benton and night! And he
had forgotten. A mob of men surged down and up on the train. Neale had
extreme difficulty in getting off at all. But the excitement, the hurry,
the discordant and hoarse