The mere sight of Warren Neale had transformed life for Allie Lee. The shame of being forced to meet degraded men, the pain from Durade’s blows, the dread that every hour he would do the worst by her or kill her, the sudden and amazing recognition between her and her father—these became dwarfed and blurred in the presence of the glorious truth that Neale was there.
She had recognized him with reeling senses and through darkening eyes. She had seen him leap before her father to confront that glittering-eyed Durade. She had neither fear for him nor pity for the Spaniard.
Sensations of falling, of being carried, of the light and dust and noise of the street, of men around her, of rooms and the murmur of voices, of being worked over and spoken to by a kindly woman, of swallowing what was put to her mouth, of answering questions, of letting other clothes be put upon her; she was as if in a trance, aware of all going on about her, but with consciousness riveted upon one stunning fact—his presence. When she was left alone this state gradually wore away, and there remained a throbbing, quivering suspense of love. Her despair had ended. The spirit that had upheld her through all the long, dark hours had reached its fulfilment.
She lay on a couch in a small room curtained off from another, the latter large and light, and from which came a sound of low voices. She heard the quick tread of men; a door opened.
“Lee, I congratulate you. A narrow escape!” exclaimed a deep voice, with something sharp, authoritative in it.
“General Lodge, it was indeed a narrow shave for me,” replied another voice, low and husky.
Allie slowly sat up, with the dreamy waiting abstraction less strong. Her father, Allison Lee, and General Lodge, Neale’s old chief, were there in the other room.
“Neale almost killed Durade! Broke him! Cut him all up!” said the general, with agitation. “I had it from McDermott, one of my spikers—a reliable man.... Neale was shot—perhaps cut, too.... But he doesn’t seem to know it.”
Allie sprang up, transfixed and thrilling.
“Neale almost killed—him!” echoed Allison Lee, hoarsely. Then followed a sound of a chair falling.
“Indeed, Allison, it’s true,” broke in a strange voice. “The street’s full of men—all talking—all stirred up.”
Other men entered the room.
“Is Neale here?” queried General Lodge, sharply.
“They’re trying to hold him up—in the office. The boys want to pat him on the back.... Durade was not liked,” replied some one.
“Is Neale badly hurt?”
“I don’t know. He looked it. He was all bloody.”
“Colonel Dillon, did you see Neale?” went on the sharp, eager voice.
“Yes. He seemed dazed—wild. Probably badly hurt. Yet he moved steadily. No one could stop him,” answered another strange voice.
“Ah! here comes McDermott!” exclaimed General Lodge. Allie’s ears throbbed to a slow, shuffling, heavy tread. Her consciousness received the fact of Neale’s injury, but her heart refused to accept it as perilous. God could not mock her faith by a last catastrophe.
“Sandy—you’ve seen Neale?”
Allie loved this sharp, keen voice for its note of dread. “Shure. B’gorra, yez couldn’t hilp seein’ him. He’s as big as a hill an’ his shirt’s as red as Casey’s red wan. I wint to give him the little gun wot Durade pulled on him. Dom’ me! he looked roight at me an’ niver seen me,” replied the Irishman.
“Lee, you will see Neale?” queried General Lodge. There was a silence.
“No,” presently came a cold reply. “It is not necessary. He saved me—injury perhaps. I am grateful. I’ll reward him.”
“How?” rang General Lodge’s voice.
“Gold, of course. Neale was a gambler. Probably he had a grudge against this Durade.... I need not meet Neale, it seems, I am somewhat—overwrought. I wish to spare myself further excitement.”
“Lee—listen!” returned General Lodge, violently. “Neale is a splendid young man—the nerviest, best engineer I ever knew. I predicted great things for him. They have come true.”
“That doesn’t interest me.”
“You’ll hear it, anyhow. He saved the life of this girl who has turned out to be your daughter. He took care of her. He loved her—was engaged to marry her.... Then he lost her. And after that he was half mad. It nearly ruined him.”
“I do not credit that. It was gambling, drink—and bad women that ruined him.”
“No!”
“But, pardon me, General. If—as you intimate—there was an attachment between him and my unfortunate child, would he have become an associate of gamblers and vicious women?”
“He would not. The nature of his fury, the retribution he visited upon this damned Spaniard, prove the manner of man he is.”
“Wild indeed. But hardly from a sense of loyalty. These camps breed blood-spillers. I heard you say that.”
“You’ll hear me say something more, presently,” retorted the other, with heat scarcely controlled. “But we’re wasting time. I don’t insist that you see Neale. That’s your affair. It seems to me the least you could do would be to thank him. I certainly advise you not to offer him gold. I do insist, however, that you let him see the girl!”
“No!”
“But, man.... Say, McDermott, go fetch Neale in here.”
Allie Lee heard all this strange talk with consternation. An irresistible magnet drew her toward those curtains, which she grasped with trembling hands, ready, but not able, to part them and enter the room. It seemed that in there was a friend of Neale’s whom she was going to love, and an enemy whom she was going to hate. As for Neale seeing her—at once—only death could rob her of that.
“General Lodge, I have no sympathy for Neale,” came the cold voice of Allison Lee.
There was no reply. Some one coughed. Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and a hum of distant voices.
“You forget,” continued Lee, “what happened not many hours ago when your train was saved by that dare-devil Casey—the little book held tight in his locked teeth—the letter meant for this Neale from one of Benton’s camp-women.... Your engineer read enough. You heard. I heard.... A letter from a dying woman. She accused Neale of striking her—of killing her.... She said she was dying, but she loved him.... Do you remember that, General Lodge?”
“Yes, alas!... Lee, I don’t deny that. But—”
“There are no buts.”
“Lee, you’re hard, hard as steel. Appearances seem against Neale. I don’t seek to extenuate them. But I know men. Neale might have fallen—it seems he must have. These are terrible times. In anger or drink Neale might have struck this woman.... But kill her—No!”
A gleam pierced Allie Lee’s dark bewilderment. They meant Beauty Stanton, that beautiful, fair woman with such a white, soft bosom and such sad eyes—she whom Larry King had shot. What a tangle of fates and lives! She could tell them why Beauty Stanton was dying. Then other words, like springing fire, caught Allie’s thought, and a sickening ripple of anguish convulsed her. They believed Beauty Stanton had loved Neale—had—Allie would have died before admitting that last thought to her consciousness. For a second the room turned black. Her hold on the curtains kept her from falling. With frantic and terrible earnestness—the old dominance Neale had acquired over her—she clung to the one truth that mattered. She loved Neale—belonged to him—and he was there! That they were about to meet again was as strange and wonderful a thing as had ever happened. What had she not endured? What must he have gone through? The fiery, stinging nature of her new and sudden pain she could not realize.
Again the strong speech became distinct to her.
“... You’ll stay here—and you, Dillon.... Don’t any one leave this room.... Lee, you can leave, if you want. But we’ll see Neale, and so will Allie Lee.”
Allie spread the curtains and stood there. No one saw her. All the men faced the door through which sounded slow, heavy tread of boots. An Irishman entered. Then a tall man. Allie’s troubled soul suddenly calmed. She saw Neale.
Slowly he advanced a few steps. Another man entered, and Allie knew him by his buckskin garb. Neale turned, his face in the light. And a poignant cry leaped up from Allie’s heart to be checked on her lips. Was this her young and hopeful and splendid lover? She recognized him, yet now did not know him. He stood bareheaded, and her swift, all-embracing glance saw the gray over his temples, and the eyes that looked out from across the border of a dark hell, and face white as death and twitching with spent passion.
“Mr.—Lee,” he panted, very low, and the bloody patch on his shirt heaved with his breath, “my only—regret—is—I didn’t—think to make—Durade—tell the truth.... He lied.... He wanted to—revenge himself—on Allie’s mother—through Allie.... What he said—about Allie—was a lie—as black as his heart. He meant evil—for her. But—somehow she was saved. He was a tiger—playing—and he waited—too long. You must realize—her innocence—and understand. God has watched over Allie Lee! It was not luck—nor accident. But innocence!... Hough died to save her! Then Ancliffe! Then my old friend—Larry King! These men—broken—gone to hell—out here—felt an innocence that made them—mad—as I have just been.... That is proof—if you need it.... Men of ruined lives—could not rise—and die—as they did—victims of a false impression—of innocence.... They knew!”
Neale’s voice sank to a whisper, his eyes intent to read belief in the cold face of Allison Lee.
“I thank you, Neale, for your service to me and your defense of her,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“Sir—I—I—”
“Can I reward you in any way?”
The gray burned out of Neale’s face. “I ask—nothing—except that you believe me.”
Lee did not grant this, nor was there any softening of his cold face.
“I would like to ask you a few questions,” he said. “General Lodge here informed me that you saved my—my daughter’s life long ago.... Can you tell me what became of her mother?”
“She was in the caravan—massacred by Sioux,” replied Neale. “I saw her buried. Her grave is not so many miles from here.”
Then a tremor changed Allison Lee’s expression. He turned away an instant: his hand closed tight; he bit his lips. This evidence of feeling in him relaxed the stony scrutiny of the watchers, and they shifted uneasily on their feet.
Allie stood watching—waiting, with her heart at her lips.
“Where did you take my daughter?” queried Lee, presently.
“To the home of a trapper. My friend—Slingerland,” replied Neale, indicating the buckskin-clad figure. “She lived there—slowly recovering. You don’t know that she lost her mind—for a while. But she recovered.... And during an absence of Slingerland’s—she was taken away.”
“Were you and she—sweethearts?”
“Yes.”
“And engaged to marry?”
“Of course,” replied Neale, dreamily.
“That cannot be now.”
“I understand. I didn’t expect—I didn’t think....”
Allie Lee had believed many times that her heart was breaking, but now she knew it had never broken till then. Why did he not turn to see her waiting there—stricken motionless and voiceless, wild to give the lie to those cold, strange words?
“Then, Neale—if you will not accept anything from me, let us terminate this painful interview,” said Allison Lee.
“I’m sorry. I only wanted to tell you—and ask to see—Allie—a moment,” replied Neale.
“No. It might cause a breakdown. I don’t want to risk anything that might prevent my taking the next train with her.”
“Going to take her—back East?” asked Neale, as if talking to himself.
“Certainly.”
“Then—I—won’t see her!” Neale murmured, dazedly.
At this juncture General Lodge stepped out. His face was dark, his mouth stern.
His action caused a breaking of the strange, vise-like clutch—the mute and motionless spell—that had fallen upon Allie. She felt the gathering of tremendous forces in her; in an instant she would show these stupid men the tumult of a woman’s heart.
“Lee, be generous,” spoke up General Lodge, feelingly. “Let Neale see the girl.”
“I said no!” snapped Lee.
“But why not, in Heaven’s name?”
“Why? I told you why,” declared Lee, passionately.
“But, Lee—that implication may not be true. We didn’t read all that letter,” protested General Lodge.
“Ask him.”
Then the general turned to Neale. “Boy—tell me—did this Stanton woman love you—did you strike her? Did you—” The general’s voice failed.
Neale faced about with a tragic darkening of his face. “To my shame—it is true,” he said, clearly.
Then Allie Lee swept forward. “Oh, Neale!”
He seemed to rise and leap at once. And she ran straight into his arms. No man, no trouble, no mystery, no dishonor, no barrier—nothing could have held her back the instant she saw how the sight of her, how the sound of her voice, had transformed Neale. For one tumultuous, glorious, terrible moment she clung to his neck, blind, her heart bursting. Then she fell back with hands seeking her breast.
“I heard!” she cried. “I know nothing of Beauty Stanton’s letter.... But you didn’t shoot her. It was Larry. I saw him do it.”
“Allie!” he whispered.
At last he had realized her actual presence, the safety of her body and soul; and all that had made him strange and old and grim and sad vanished in a beautiful transfiguration.
“You know Larry did it!” implored Allie. “Tell them so.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied. “But I did worse. I—”
She saw him shaken by an agony of remorse; and that agony was communicated to her.
“Neale! she loved you?”
He bowed his head.
“Oh!” Her cry was almost mute, full of an unutterable realization of tragic fatality for her. “And you—you—”
Allison Lee strode between them facing Neale. “See! She knows... and if you would spare her—go!” he exclaimed.
“She knows—what?” gasped Neale, in a frenzy between doubt and certainty.
Allie felt a horrible, nameless, insidious sense of falsity—a nightmare unreality—an intangible Neale, fated, drifting away from her.
“Good-bye—Allie!... Bless you! I’ll be—happy—knowing—you’re—” He choked, and the tears streamed down his face. It was a face convulsed by renunciation, not by guilt. Whatever he had done, it was not base.
“DON’T LET ME—GO!...I—FORGIVE YOU!” she burst out. She held out her arms. “THERE’S NO ONE IN THE WORLD BUT YOU!”
But Neale plunged away, upheld by Slingerland, and Allie’s world grew suddenly empty and black.
The train swayed and creaked along through the Night with that strain and effort which told of upgrade. The oil-lamps burned dimly in corners of the coach. There were soldiers at open windows looking out. There were passengers asleep sitting up and lying down and huddled over their baggage.
But Allie Lee was not asleep. She lay propped up with pillows and blankets, covered by a heavy coat. Her window was open, and a cool desert wind softly blew her hair. She stared out into the night, and the wheels seemed to be grinding over her crushed heart.
It was late. An old moon, misshapen and pale, shone low down over a dark, rugged horizon. Clouds hid the stars. The desert void seemed weirdly magnified by the wan light, and all that shadowy waste, silent, lonely, bleak, called out to Allie Lee the desolation of her soul. For what had she been saved? The train creaked on, and every foot added to her woe. Her unquenchable spirit, pure as a white flame that had burned so wonderfully through the months of her peril, flickered now that her peril ceased to be. She had no fount of emotion left to draw upon, else she would have hated this creaking train.
It moved on. And there loomed bold outlines of rock and ridge familiar to her. They had been stamped upon her memory by the strain of her lonely wanderings along that very road. She knew every rod of the way, dark, lonely, wild as it was. In the midst of that stark space lay the spot where Benton had been. A spot lost in the immensity of the desert. If she had been asleep she would have awakened while passing there. There was not a light. Flat patches and pale gleams, a long, wan length of bare street, shadows everywhere—these marked Benton’s grave.
Allie stared with strained eyes. They were there—in the blackness—those noble men who had died for her in vain. No—not in vain! She breathed a prayer for them—a word of love for Larry. Larry, the waster of life, yet the faithful, the symbol of brotherhood. As long as she lived she would see him stalk before her with his red, blazing fire, his magnificent effrontery, his supreme will. He, who had been the soul of chivalry, the meekest of men before a woman, the inheritor of a reverence for womanhood, had ruthlessly shot out of his way that wonderful white-armed Beauty Stanton.
She, too, must lie there in the shadow. Allie shivered with the cool desert wind that blew in her face from the shadowy spaces. She shut her eyes to hide the dim passing traces of terrible Benton and the darkness that hid the lonely graves.
The train moved on and on, leaving what had been Benton far behind; and once more Allie opened her weary eyes to the dim, obscure reaches of the desert. Her heart beat very slowly under its leaden weight, its endless pang. Her blood flowed at low ebb. She felt the long-forgotten recurrence of an old morbid horror, like a poison lichen fastening upon the very spring of life. It passed and came again, and left her once more. Her thoughts wandered back along the night track she had traversed, until again her ears were haunted by that strange sound which had given Roaring City its name. She had been torn away from hope, love, almost life itself. Where was Neale? He had turned from her, obedient to Allison Lee and the fatal complexity and perversenes’s of life. The vindication of her spiritual faith and the answer to her prayers lay in the fact that she had been saved; but rather than to be here in this car, daughter of a rich father, but separated from Neale, she would have preferred to fill one of the nameless graves in Benton.
The sun set pale-gold and austere as Neale watched the train bear Allie Lee away. No thought of himself entered into that solemn moment of happiness. Allie Lee—alive—safe—her troubles ended—on her way home with her father! The long train wound round the bold bluff and at last was gone. For Neale the moment held something big, final. A phase—a part of his life ended there.
“Son, it’s over,” said Slingerland, who watched with him. “Allie’s gone home—back to whar she belongs—to come into her own. Thank God! An’ you—why this day turns you back to whar you was once.... Allie owes her life to you an’ her father’s life. Think, son, of these hyar times—how much wuss it might hev been.”
Neale’s sense of thankfulness was unutterable. Passively he went with Slingerland, silent and gentle. The trapper dressed his wounds, tended him, kept men away from him, and watched by him as if he were a sick child.
Neale suffered only the weakness following the action and stress of great passion. His mind seemed full of beautiful solemn bells of blessing, resonant, ringing the wonder of an everlasting unchangeable truth. Night fell—the darkness thickened—the old trapper kept his vigil—and Neale sank to sleep, and the sweet, low-toned bells claimed him in his dreams.
How strange for Neale to greet a dawn without hatred! He and Slingerland had breakfast together.
“Son, will you go into the hills with me?” asked the old trapper.
“Yes, some day, when the railroad’s built,” replied Neale, thoughtfully.
Slingerland’s keen eyes quickened. “But the railroad’s about done—an’ you need a vacation,” he insisted.
“Yes,” Neale answered, dreamily.
“Son, mebbe you ought to wait awhile. You’re packin’ a bullet somewhar in your carcass.”
“It’s here,” said Neale, putting his hand to his breast, high up toward the shoulder. “I feel it—a dull, steady, weighty pain.... But that’s nothing. I hope I always have it.”
“Wal, I don’t.... An’, son, you ain’t never goin’ back to drink an’ cards-an’ all thet hell?... Not now!”
Neale’s smile was a promise, and the light of it was instantly reflected on the rugged face of the trapper.
“Reckon I needn’t asked thet. Wal, I’ll be sayin’ good-bye.... You kin expect me back some day.... To see the meetin’ of the rails from east an’ west—an’ to pack you off to my hills.”
Neale rode out of Roaring City on the work-train, sitting on a flat-car with a crowd of hairy-breasted, red-shirted laborers.
That train carried hundreds of men, tons of steel rails, thousands of ties; and also it was equipped to feed the workers and to fight Indians. It ran to the end of the rails, about forty miles out of Roaring City.
Neale sought out Reilly, the boss. This big Irishman was in the thick of the start of the day—which was like a battle. Neale waited in the crowd, standing there in his shirt-sleeves, with the familiar bustle and color strong as wine to his senses. At last Reilly saw him and shoved out a huge paw.
“Hullo, Neale! I’m glad to see ye.... They tell me ye did a dom’ foine job.”
“Reilly, I need work,” said Neale.
“But, mon—ye was shot!” ejaculated the boss.
“I’m all right.”
“Ye look thot an’ no mistake.... Shure, now, ye ain’t serious about work? You—that’s chafe of all thim engineer jobs?”
“I want to work with my hands. Let me heave ties or carry rails or swing a sledge—for just a few days. I’ve explained to General Lodge. It’s a kind of vacation for me.”
Reilly gazed with keen, twinkling eyes at Neale. “Ye can’t be drunk an’ look sober.”
“Reilly, I’m sober—and in dead earnest,” appealed Neale. “I want to go back—be in the finish—to lay some rails—drive some spikes.”
The boss lost his humorous, quizzing expression. “Shure—shure,” replied Reilly, as if he saw, but failed to comprehend. “Ye’re on.... An’ more power to ye!”
He sent Neale out with the gang detailed to heave railroad ties.
A string of flat-cars, loaded with rails and ties, stood on the track where the work of yesterday had ended. Beyond stretched the road-bed, yellow, level, winding as far as eye could see. The sun beat down hot; the dry, scorching desert breeze swept down from the bare hills, across the waste; dust flew up in puffs; uprooted clumps of sage, like balls, went rolling along; and everywhere the veils of heat rose from the sun-baked earth.
“Drill, ye terriers, drill!” rang out a cheery voice. And Neale remembered Casey.
Neale’s gang was put to carrying ties. Neale got hold of the first tie thrown off the car.
“Phwat the hell’s ye’re hurry!” protested his partner. This fellow was gnarled and knotted, brick-red in color, with face a network of seams, and narrow, sun-burnt slits for eyes. He answered to the name of Pat.
They carried the tie out to the end of the rails and dropped it on the level road-bed. Men there set it straight and tamped the gravel around it. Neale and his partner went back for another, passing a dozen couples carrying ties forward. Behind these staggered the rows of men burdened with the heavy iron rails.
So the day’s toil began.
Pat had glanced askance at Neale, and then had made dumb signs to his fellow-laborers, indicating his hard lot in being yoked to this new wild man on the job. But his ridicule soon changed to respect. Presently he offered his gloves to Neale. They were refused.
“But, fri’nd, ye ain’t tough loike me,” he protested.
“Pat, they’ll put you to bed to-night—if you stay with me,” replied Neale.
“The hell ye say! Come on, thin!”
At first Neale had no sensations of heat, weariness, thirst, or pain. He dragged the little Irishman forward to drop the ties—then strode back ahead of him. Neale was obsessed by a profound emotion. This was a new beginning for him. For him the world and life had seemed to cease when yesternight the sun sank and Allie Lee passed out of sight. His motive in working there, he imagined, was to lay a few rails, drive a few spikes along the last miles of the road that he had surveyed. He meant to work this way only a little while, till the rails from east met those from west.
This profound emotion seemed accompanied by a procession of thoughts, each thought in turn, like a sun with satellites, reflecting its radiance upon them and rousing strange, dreamy, full-hearted fancies... Allie lived—as good, as innocent as ever, incomparably beautiful—sad-eyed, eloquent, haunting. From that mighty thought sprang both Neale’s exaltation and his activity. He had loved her so well that conviction of her death had broken his heart, deadened his ambition, ruined his life. But since, by the mercy of God and the innocence that had made men heroic, she had survived all peril, all evil, then had begun a colossal overthrow in Neale’s soul of the darkness, the despair, the hate, the indifference. He had been flung aloft, into the heights, and he had seen into heaven. He asked for nothing in the world. All-satisfied, eternally humble, grateful with every passionate drop of blood throbbing through his heart, he dedicated all his spiritual life to memory. And likewise there seemed a tremendous need in him of sustained physical action, even violence. He turned to the last stages of the construction of the great railroad.
What fine comrades these hairy-breasted toilers made! Neale had admired them once; now he loved them. Every group seemed to contain a trio like that one he had known so well—Casey, Shane, and McDermott. Then he divined that these men were all alike. They all toiled, swore, fought, drank, gambled. Hundreds of them went to nameless graves. But the work went on—the great, driving, united heart beat on.
Neale was under its impulse, in another sense.
When he lifted a tie and felt the hard, splintering wood, he wondered where it had come from, what kind of a tree it was, who had played in its shade, how surely birds had nested in it and animals had grazed beneath it. Between him and that square log of wood there was an affinity. Somehow his hold upon it linked him strangely to a long past, intangible spirit of himself. He must cling to it, lest he might lose that illusive feeling. Then when he laid it down he felt regret fade into a realization that the yellow-gravel road-bed also inspirited him. He wanted to feel it, work in it, level it, make it somehow his own.
When he strode back for another load his magnifying eyes gloated over the toilers in action—the rows of men carrying and laying rails, and the splendid brawny figures of the spikers, naked to the waist, swinging the heavy sledges. The blows rang out spang—spang—spang! Strong music, full of meaning! When his turn came to be a spiker, he would love that hardest work of all.
The engine puffed smoke and bumped the cars ahead, little by little as the track advanced; men on the train carried ties and rails forward, filling the front cars as fast as they were emptied; long lines of laborers on the ground passed to and fro, burdened going forward, returning empty-handed; the rails and the shovels and the hammers and the picks all caught the hot gleam from the sun; the dust swept up in sheets; the ring, the crash, the thump, the scrape of iron and wood and earth in collision filled the air with a sound rising harshly above the song and laugh and curse of men.
A shifting, colorful, strenuous scene of toil!
Gradually Neale felt that he was fitting into this scene, becoming a part of it, an atom once more in the great whole. He doubted while he thrilled. Clearly as he saw, keenly as he felt, he yet seemed bewildered. Was he not gazing out at this construction work through windows of his soul, once more painted, colored, beautiful, because the most precious gift he might have prayed for had been given him—life and hope for Allie Lee?
He did not know. He could not think.
His comrade, Pat, wiped floods of sweat from his scarlet face. “I’ll be domned if ye ain’t a son-of-a-gun fer worrk!” he complained.
“Pat, we’ve been given the honor of pace-makers. They’ve got to keep up with us. Come on,” replied Neale.
“Be gad! there ain’t a mon in the gang phwat’ll trade fer me honor, thin,” declared Pat. “Fri’nd, I’d loike to live till next pay-day.”
“Come on, then, work up an appetite,” rejoined Neale.
“Shure I’ll die.... An’ I’d loike to ask, beggin’ ye’re pardon, hevn’t ye got some Irish in ye?”
“Yes, a little.”
“I knowed thot.... All roight, I’ll die with ye, thin.”
In half an hour Pat was in despair again. He had to rest.
“Phwat’s—ye’re—name?” he queried.
“Neale.”
“It ought to be Casey. Fer there was niver but wan loike ye—an’ he was Casey.... Mon, ye’re sweatin’ blood roight now!”
Pat pointed at Neale’s red, wet shirt. Neale slapped his breast, and drops of blood and sweat spattered from under his hand.
“An’ shure ye’re hands are bladin’, too!” ejaculated Pat.
They were, indeed, but Neale had not noted that.
The boss, Reilly, passing by, paused to look and grin.
“Pat, yez got some one to kape up with to-day. We’re half a mile ahead of yestidy this time.”
Then he turned to Neale.
“I’ve seen one in yer class—Casey by name. An’ thot’s talkin’.”
He went his way. And Neale, plodding on, saw the red face of the great Casey, with its set grin and the black pipe. Swiftly then he saw it as he had heard of it last, and a shadow glanced fleetingly across the singular radiance of his mind.
The shrill whistle of the locomotive halted the work and called the men to dinner and rest. Instantly the scene changed. The slow, steady, rhythmic motions of labor gave place to a scramble back to the long line of cars. Then the horde of sweaty toilers sought places in the shade, and ate and drank and smoked and rested. As the spirit of work had been merry, so was that of rest, with always a dry, grim earnestness in the background.
Neale slowed down during the afternoon, to the unconcealed thankfulness of his partner. The burn of the sun, the slippery sweat, the growing ache of muscles, the never-ending thirst, the lessening of strength—these sensations impinged upon Neale’s emotion and gradually wore to the front of his consciousness. His hands grew raw, his back stiff and sore, his feet crippled. The wound in his breast burned and bled and throbbed. At the end of the day he could scarcely walk.
He rode in with the laborers, slept twelve hours, and awoke heavy-limbed, slow, and aching. But he rode out to work, and his second day was one of agony.
The third was a continual fight between will and body, between spirit and pain. But so long as he could step and lift he would work on. From that time he slowly began to mend.
Then came his siege with the rails. That was labor which made carrying ties seem light. He toiled on, sweating thin, wearing hard, growing clearer of mind. As pain subsided, and weariness of body no longer dominated him, slowly thought and feeling returned until that morning dawned when, like a flash of lightning illuminating his soul, the profound and exalted emotion again possessed him. Soon he came to divine that the agony of toil and his victory over weak flesh had added to his strange happiness. Hour after hour he bent his back and plodded beside his comrades, doing his share, burdened as they were, silent, watchful, listening, dreaming, keen to note the progress of the road, yet deep in his own intense abstraction. He seemed to have two minds. He saw every rod of the ten miles of track laid every day, knew, as only an engineer could know, the wonder of such progress; and, likewise, always in his sight, in his mind, shone a face, red-lipped, soulful, lovely like a saint’s, with mournful violet eyes, star-sweet in innocence. Life had given Allie Lee back to him—to his love and his memory; and all that could happen to him now must be good. At first he had asked for nothing, so grateful was he to fate, but now he prayed for hours and days and nights to remember.
The day came when Neale graduated into the class of spikers. This division of labor to him had always represented the finest spirit of the building. The drivers—the spikers—the men who nailed the rails—who riveted the last links—these brawny, half-naked wielders of the sledges, bronzed as Indians, seemed to embody both the romance and the achievement. Neale experienced a subtle perception with the first touch and lift and swing of the great hammer. And there seemed born in him a genius for the stroke. He had a free, easy swing, with tremendous power. He could drive so fast that his comrade on the opposite rail, and the carriers and layers, could not keep up with him. Moments of rest seemed earned. During these he would gaze with glinting eyes back at the gangs and the trains, at the smoke, dust, and movement; and beyond toward the east.
One day he drove spikes for hours, with the gangs in uninterrupted labor around him, while back a mile along the road the troopers fought the Sioux; and all this time, when any moment he might be ordered to drop his sledge for a rifle, he listened to the voice in his memory and saw the face.
Another 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,” 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 him to his neglected work. These intervals of abstraction grew upon him until he would leave off in the act of driving a spike.
And sometimes in these strange intervals he longed for his old friend, brother, shadow—Larry Red King. He held to Larry’s memory, though with it always would return that low, strange roar of Benton’s gold and lust and blood and death. Neale did not understand the mystery of what he had been through. It had been a phase of wildness never to be seen again by his race. His ambition and effort, his fall, his dark siege with hell, his friendship and loss, his agony and toil, his victory, were all symbolical of the progress of a great movement. In his experience lay hid all that development.
The coming of night was always a relief now, for with the end of the day’s work he need no longer fight his battle. It was a losing battle—that he knew. Shunning everybody, he paced to and fro out on the dark, windy desert, under the lonely, pitiless stars.
His longing to see Allie Lee grew upon him. While he had believed her dead he had felt her spirit hovering near him, in every shadow, and her voice whispered on the wind. She was alive now, but gone away, far distant, over mountains and plains, out of his sight and reach, somewhere to take up a new life alien to his. What would she do? Could she bear, it? Never would she forget him—be faithless to his memory! Yet she was young and her life had been hard. She might yield to that cold Allison Lee’s dictation. In happy surroundings her beauty and sweetness would bring a crowd of lovers to her.
“But that’s all—only natural,” muttered Neale, in perplexity. “I want her to forget—to be happy—to find a home.... For her to grow old—alone! No! She must love some man—marry—”
And with the spoken words Neale’s heart contracted. He knew that he lied to himself. If she ever cared for another man, that would be the end of Warren Neale. But then, he was ended, anyhow. Jealousy, strange, new, horrible, added to Neale’s other burdens, finished him. He had the manhood to try to fight selfishness, but he had failed to subdue it; and he had nothing left to fight his consuming love and hatred of life and terrible loneliness and that fierce thing—jealousy. He had saved Allie Lee! Why had he given her up? He had stained his hands with blood for her sake. And that awful moment came back to him when, maddened by the sting of a bullet, he had gloried in the cracking of Durade’s bones, in the ghastly terror and fear of death upon the Spaniard’s face, in the feel of the knife-blade as he forced Durade to stab himself. Always Neale had been haunted by this final scene of his evil life in the construction camps. A somber and spectral shape, intangible, gloomy-faced, often, attended him in the shadow. He justified his deed, for Durade would have killed Allison Lee. But that fact did not prevent the haunting shape, the stir in the dark air, the nameless step upon Neale’s trail.
And jealousy, stronger than all except fear, wore Neale out of his exaltation, out of his dream, out of his old disposition to work. He could persist in courage if not in joy. But jealous longing would destroy him—he felt that. It was so powerful, so wonderful that it brought back to him words and movements which until then he had been unable to recall.
And he lived over the past. Much still baffled him, yet gradually more and more of what had happened became clear specifically in his memory. He could not think from the present back over the past. He had to ponder the other way. One day, leaning on his sledge, Neale’s torturing self, morbid, inquisitive, growing by what it fed on, whispered another question to his memory.
“What were some of the last words she spoke to me?” And there, limned white on the dark background of his mind, the answer appeared, “NEALE,IFORGIVE YOU!”
He recalled her face, the tragic eyes, the outstretched arms.
“Forgive me! For what?” Neale muttered, dazed and troubled. He dropped his sledge and remained standing there, though the noon whistle called the gang to dinner. Looking out across the hot, smoky, arid desert he saw again that scene where he had appealed to Allison Lee.
The picture was etched out vividly, and again he lived through those big moments of emotion.
The room full of men—Lee’s cold acceptance of fact, his thanks, his offer, his questions, his refusal—General Lodge’s earnest solicitation—the rapid exchange of passionate words between them—the query put to Neale and his answer—the sudden appearance of Allie, shocking his heart with rapture—her sweet, wild words—and so the end! How vivid now—how like flashes of lightning in his mind!
“Lee thought I’d killed Stanton,” muttered Neale, in intense perplexity. “But she—she told them Larry did it.... What a strange idea Lee had—and General Lodge, too. He defended me.... Ah!”
Suddenly Neale drew from his pocket the little leather note-book that had been Stanton’s, and which contained her letter to him. With trembling hands he opened it. Again this letter was to mean a revelation.
General Lodge had said his engineer had read aloud only the first of that message to Neale; and from this Allison Lee and all the listeners had formed their impressions.
Neale read these first lines.
“No wonder they imagined I killed her!” he exclaimed. “She accuses me. But she never meant what they imagined she meant. Why, that evidence could hang me!... Allie told them she saw Larry do it. And it’s common knowledge now—I’ve heard it here.... What, then, had Allie to forgive—to forgive with eyes that will haunt me to my grave?”
Then the truth burst upon him with merciless and stunning force.
“My God! Allie believed what they all believed—what I must have blindly made seem true!... That I was Beauty Stanton’s lover!”