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He was whirling a wheel and rolling a ball and calling out in his heavy voice. With him was a little, sallow-faced man, like a wolf, with sneaky, downcast eyes and restless hands. He answered to the name of Andy. These two were engaged in fleecing several blue-shirted, half- drunken spikers. Durade was playing faro with four other men, or at least there were that number seated with him.
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 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.
The foreman instantly gauged them, the horse moved ahead, and thirty spikers armed with heavy mauls drove the spikes furiously and regularly, three strokes to the spike, into the new-laid ties. The bolters followed with the fish-plates, and while Bucks looked the railroad was made before his eyes. The excitement of the scene was unforgettable. In less than sixty seconds four rails had gone down.
Giving the sentry on the right wing an overhaul to see that he, like his comrade was all safe, I immediately withdrew the spikers, and picking up the other party in our retreat we silently made the best of our way to the beach, which we safely reached in about a quarter of an hour, and, jumping into our boat, pulled cheerily out to seaward.
Henry Spiker was this lady's name; and her husband was there too: so cold a man, that his head, instead of being grey, seemed to be sprinkled with hoar-frost. Immense deference was shown to the Henry Spikers, male and female; which Agnes told me was on account of Mr. Henry Spiker being solicitor to something Or to Somebody, I forget what or which, remotely connected with the Treasury.
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.
These brawny, half-naked, sweaty giants what a grand spanging music of labor rang from under their hammers! Three strokes to a spike for most spikers! Only two strokes for such as Casey or Neale! Ten spikes to a rail four hundred rails to a mile! ... How many million times had brawny arms swung and sledges clanged!
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.
"I am that, an' first thing when I get my pay," was the reply. "Reminds me, I owe for this suit I'm wearin'. I'll drop in an' settle." A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track, at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails with lusty blows. "Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the line," said one.
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