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 passed, 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 passed each other in plain sight, working on, grading on for
a hundred miles farther than necessary. They had met and had passed 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 noble attributes stalked the specters of greed and gold and
lust 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 scrape
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 assure 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