," he soliloquized. "And I am--I was
glad!"

The lightning-swift shift to past tense enlightened Neale.

He went out to work. That work still loomed splendid to him, but it
seemed not the same. He saw and felt the majesty of common free men,
sweating and bleeding and groaning over toil comparable to the building
of the Pyramids; he felt the best that had ever been in him quicken and
broaden as he rubbed elbows with these simple, elemental toilers;
with them he had gotten down to the level of truth. His old genius for
achievement, the practical and scientific side of him, still thrilled
with the battle of strong hands against the natural barriers of
the desert. He saw the thousands of plodding, swearing, fighting,
blaspheming, joking laborers on the field of action--saw the picture
they made, red and bronzed and black, dust-begrimed; and how here with
the ties and the rails and the road-bed was the heart of that epical
turmoil. What approach could great and rich engineers and directors have
made to that vast enterprise without these sons of brawn? Neale now saw
what he had once dreamed, and that was the secret of his longing to get
down to the earth with these men.

He loved to swing that sledge, to hear the spang of the steel ring out.
He had a sheer physical delight in the power of his body, long since
thinned-out, hardened, tough as the wood into which he drove the spikes.
He loved his new comrade, Pat, the gnarled and knotted little Irishman
who cursed and complained of his job and fought his fellow-workers, yet
who never lagged, never shirked, and never failed, though his days of
usefulness must soon be over. Soon Pat would drop by the roadside, a
victim to toil and whisky and sun. And he was great in his obscurity. He
wore a brass tag with a number; he signed his wage receipt with a cross;
he cared only for drink and a painted hag in a squalid tent; yet in all
the essentials that Neale now called great his friend Pat reached up to
them--the spirit to work, to stand his share, to go on, to endure, to
fulfill his task.

Neale might have found salvation in this late-developed and splendid
relation to labor and to men. But there was a hitch in his brain. He
would see all that was beautiful and strenuous and progressive around
him; and then, in a flash, that hiatus in his mind would operate to make
him hopeless. Then he would stand as in a trance, with far-away gaze
in his eyes, until his fellow-spiker would recall