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Gangs of laborers rode in on the work-trains from the grading-camps and the camps at the head of the rails, now miles west of Benton. A rest of several days inevitably followed the visit of the pay-car. It was difficult to keep enough men at work to feed and water the teams, and there would have been sorry protection from the Indians had not the troops been on duty.
You would see men in the two uniforms hobnobbing in the open freight-cars as the work-trains rolled up the line, and sometimes a score or so of husky Russians working in the wheat, guarded by some miniature, lone, Landsturm man. Of all the various war victims I had seen, these struck me as the most lucky they could not even, like the wounded, be sent back again.
Along this new-graveled line, still unused except by work-trains, we rode in our six negro-power car, dropping off in the gravel each time we caught sight of any species of human being.
Forward every day the work-trains crept westward, closer and closer to that great hour when they would meet the work-trains coming east. The momentum now of the road-laying was tremendous. The spirit that nothing could stop had become embodied in a scientific army of toilers, a mass, a machine, ponderous, irresistible, moving on to the meeting of the rails.
In the cañon it was already dark. Men were eating around campfires, and in the narrow strip of eastern sky between the walls the moon was rising. Work-trains with signal lanterns were moving above and below the break, dumping ballast behind the track layers.
Sendin' thet gold an' thet little book made him happy.... I reckon Neale found his soul then. An' he never expects to see you again in this hyar world." Building a railroad grew to be an exact and wonderful science with the men of the Union Pacific, from engineers down to the laborers who ballasted and smoothed the road-bed. Wherever the work-trains stopped there began a hum like a bee-hive.
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