by Grey, Zane
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 ba
ttle. 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 hi 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, _I_ FORGIVE 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!"
Chapter 34
The home to which Allie Lee was brought stood in the outskirts of Omaha upon a wooded bank above the river.
Allie watched the broad, yellow Missouri swirling by. She liked best to be alone outdoors in the shade of the trees. In the weeks since her arrival there she had not recovered from the shock of meeting Neale only to be parted from him.
But the comfort, the luxury of her home, the relief from constant dread, such as she had known for years, the quiet at night; these had been so welcome, so saving, that her burden of sorrow seemed endurable. Yet in time she came to see that the finding of a father and a home had only added to her bitterness.
Allison Lee's sister, an elderly woman of strong character, resented the home-bringing of this strange, lost daughter. Allie had found no sympathy in her. For a while neighbors and friends of the Lees' flocked to the house and were kind, gracious, attentive to Allie. Then somehow her story, or part of it, became gossip. Her father, sensitive, cold, embittered by the past, suffered intolerable shame at the disgrace of a wife's desertion and a daughter's notoriety. Allie's presence hurt him; he avoided her as much as possible; the little kindnesses that he had shown, and his feelings of pride in her beauty and charm, soon vanished. There was no love between them. Allie had tried hard to care for him, but her heart seemed to be buried in that vast grave of the West.
She was obedient, dutiful, passive, but she could not care for him. And there came a day when she realized that he did not believe she had come unscathed through the wilds of the gold-fields and the vileness of the construction camps.
She bore this patiently, though it stung her. But the loss of respect for her father did not come until she heard men in his study, loud-voiced and furious, wrangle over contracts and accuse him of double-dealing.
Later he told her that he had become involved in financial straits, and that unless he could raise a large sum by a certain date he would be ruined.
And it was this day that Allie sat on a bench in the little arbor and watched the turbulent river. She was sorry for her father, but she could not help him.
Moreover, alien griefs did not greatly touch her. Her own grief was deep and all-enfolding. She was heart-sick, and always yearning; yearning for that she dared not name.
The day was hot, sultry; no birds sang, but the locusts were noisy; the air was full of humming bees.
Allie watched the river. She was idle because her aunt would not let her work.
She could only remember and suffer. The great river soothed her. Where did it come from and where did it go? And what was to become of her? Almost it would have been better;
A servant interrupted her. "Missy, heah's a gennelman to see yo'," announced the
Negro girl.
Allie looked. She thought she saw a tall, buckskin-clad man carrying a heavy pack. Was she dreaming or had she lost her mind? She got up, shaking in every limb. This tall man moved; he seemed real; his bronzed face beamed. He approached; he set the pack down on the bench. Then his keen, clear eyes pierced
Allie.
"Wal, lass," he said, gently.
The familiar voice was no dream, no treachery of her mind. Slingerland! She could
not speak. She could hardly see. She swayed into his arms. Then when she felt the great, strong clasp and the softness of buckskin on her face and the odor of pine and sage; and desert dust, she believed in his reality.
Her heart seemed to collapse. All within her was riot.
"Neale!" she whispered, in anguish.
"All right an' workin' hard. He sent me," replied Slingerland, swift to get his message out.
Allie quivered and closed her eyes and leaned against him. A beautiful something pervaded her soul. Slowly the tumult within her breast subsided. She recovered.
"Uncle Al!" she called him, tenderly.
"Wal, I should smile! An' glad to see you; why Lord! I'd never tell you! ...
You're white an' shaky, lass.... Set down hyar; on the bench; beside me. Thar! ...
Allie, I've a powerful lot to tell you."
"Wait! To see you; and to hear; of him; almost killed me with joy," she panted. Her little hands, once so strong and brown, but now thin and white, fastened tight in the fringe of his buckskin hunting- coat.
"Lass, sight of you sort of makes me young agin; but; Allie, those are not the happy eyes I remember."
"I; am very unhappy," she whispered.
"Wal, if thet ain't too bad! Shore it's natural you'd be downhearted, losin'
Neale thet way."
"It's not all; that," she murmured, and then she told him.
"Wal, wal!" ejaculated the trapper, stroking his beard in thoughtful sorrow.
"But I reckon thet's natural, too. You're strange hyar, an' thet story will hang over you.... Lass, with all due respect to your father, I reckon you'd better come back to me an' Neale."
"Did he tell you; to say that?" she whispered, tremulously.
"Lord, no!" ejaculated Slingerland.
"Does he; care; for me still?"
