It was night when they reached their destination.  How quiet and dark after Benton!  Neale was glad to get there.  He wondered if he could conquer his unrest.  Would he go on wandering again?  He doubted himself and dismissed the thought.  Perhaps the companionship of his old friends and the anticipation of action would effect a change in him.

Neale and Larry spent the night in Slingerland’s tent.  Next morning the trapper was ready with horses at an early hour, but, owing to the presence of Sioux in the vicinity, it was thought best to wait for the work-train and ride out on the plains under its escort.

By and by the train, with its few cars and half a hundred workmen, was ready, and the trapper and his comrades rode out alongside.  Some few miles from camp the train halted at a place where stone-work and filling awaited the laborers.  Neale was again interested, in spite of himself.  Yet his love for that railroad was quite as hopeless as other things in his life.

These laborers were picked men, all soldiers, and many Irish; they stacked their guns before taking up shovels and bars.

“Dom me if it ain’t me ould fri’nd Neale!” exclaimed a familiar voice.

And there stood Casey, with the same old grin, the same old black pipe.

Neale’s first feeling of pleasure at seeing the old flagman was counteracted by one of dismay at the possibility of coming in contact with old acquaintances.  It would hurt him to meet General Lodge or any of the engineers who had predicted a future for him.

Shane and McDermott were also in this gang, and they slouched forward.

“It’s thot gun-throwin’ cowboy as wuz onct goin’ to kill Casey!” exclaimed McDermott, at sight of Larry.

Neale, during the few moments of reunion with his old comrades of the survey, received a melancholy insight into himself and a clearer view of them.  The great railroad had gone on, growing, making men change.  He had been passed by.  He was no longer a factor.  Along with many, many other men, he had retrograded.  The splendid spirit of the work had not gone from him, but it had ceased to govern his actions.  He had ceased to grow.  But these uncouth Irishmen, they had changed.  In many ways they were the same slow, loquacious, quarreling trio as before, but they showed the effect of toil, of fight, of growth under the great movement and its spirit—­the thing which great minds had embodied; and these laborers were no longer ordinary men.  Something shone out of them.  Neale saw it.  He felt an inexplicable littleness in their presence.  They had gone on; he had been left.  They would toil and fight until they filled nameless graves.  He, too, would find a nameless grave, he thought, but he would not lie in it as one of these.  The moment was poignant for Neale, exceedingly bitter, and revealing.

Slingerland was not long in sighting buffalo.  After making a careful survey of the rolling country for lurking Indians he rode out with Neale, Larry, and two other men—­Brush and an Irishman named Pat—­ who were to skin the buffalo the hunters killed, and help load the meat into wagons which would follow.