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Updated: May 5, 2025
"Close behind the track-layers comes the gaugers, then the spikers and bolters. Three strokes to the spike, ten spikes to the rail, four hundred rails to the mile. Quick work you say, but the fellows on the Union Pacific are tremendously in earnest." Or as another writer has it, "We witnessed here the fabulous speed with which the line was built.
Sometimes it was a coatless dump-boss blaspheming his toiling army of spick-a-dees. Sometimes he talked with graders and car-men and track-layers in Chinese saloons along Bottle Alley.
Come up, and you may read your warrants to us all day." Deckert withdrew his men, and at Winton's signal the track-layers came in and the earth began to fly again. Virginia sighed her relief, and Bessie plucked up courage to go to the window, which she had deserted in the moment of impending battle.
I know these men of the Eighth can whittle, and I presume they can say "Darn it," if occasion requires; but just now track-laying was the business on hand. "Wanted, experienced track-layers!" was the word along the files. All at once the line of the road became densely populated with experienced track-layers, fresh from Massachusetts.
"With Dick to lead them, the track-layers would sack this place in about five minutes. If I could only get to the wire!" Brissac heard the "if." "Let me try to run their picket line, Ford," he said eagerly. "If I can get around to our quarters and into the telegraph tent " "You couldn't do it, Roy. There is the proof of it," pointing to the body of the slain negro.
If that is true now which it isn't it will no longer be true when we come in with our own employees, the track-layers." But now Kenneth was shaking his head. "I can't believe it, Ford. You're blue because Mr. Colbrith has thrown Mr. North into your boat as ballast. I don't blame you: but you mustn't let it make you color-blind." Ford said nothing.
Judah went back to the mountains and studied the pines in summer and the winter snowbanks, to make sure of the easiest grades and the shortest and best way for the track-layers. He found that to follow the Truckee River from near Lake Donner to the Humboldt Desert, would mean the least work.
It was after Gallagher had picked up the lights of the waiting train of armed track-layers, and was whistling to announce his success, that the end came. For the three watchers on the rear platform of the president's car the little constellation of arc-stars in the valley below was suddenly blotted out in a skyward belching of gray flame; a huge volcano-burst of momentarily illuminated dust.
While the level country enabled rapid progress to be made in grading, it was almost impossible to bring forward the requisite material to keep up with the graders and track-layers. The contract for the first hundred miles had been let May, 1864, to Hubert M. Hoxie. By its terms he was to receive securities to the face value of $50,000 per mile.
For reasons charitable, as well as practical, Ford had planned to leave Frisbie out of this second dance of attendance upon the president. The track-layers were well up toward the head of Horse Creek gulch, with Brissac to drive; but during the night the Louisianian had reported in with a touch of mountain fever, and Ford had asked Frisbie to go up and take his place.
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