Casey got his black pipe well lit, puffed a cloud of smoke, and picked up his rifle.

“Drill, ye terriers, drill!” he sang, and shoved his weapon through a port-hole.  He squinted, over the breech.

“Mac, it’s the same bunch as attacked us day before yisteddy,” he observed.

“It shure ain’t,” replied McDermott.  “There’s a million of thim to-day.”

He aimed his rifle as if following a moving object, and fired.

“Mac, you git excited in a foight.  Now I niver do.  An’ I’ve seen thot pinto hoss an’ thot dom’ redskin a lot of times.  I’ll kill him yit.”

Casey kept squinting and aiming, and then, just as he pressed the trigger, the train started with a sudden lurch.

“Sp’iled me aim!  Thot engineer’s savin’ of the Sooz tribe! ...  Drill, ye terriers, drill!  Drill, ye terriers, drill! ...  Shane, I don’t hear yez shootin’.”

“How’n hell can I shoot whin me eye is full of blood?” demanded Shane.

Neale then saw blood on Shane’s face.  He crawled quietly to the Irishman.

“Man, are you shot?  Let me see.”

“Jist a bullet hit me, loike,” replied Shane.

Neale found that a bullet, perhaps glancing from the wood, had cut a gash over Shane’s eye, from which the blood poured.  Shane’s hands and face and shirt were crimson.  Neale bound a scarf tightly over the wound.

“Let me take the rifle now,” he said.

“Thanks, lad.  I ain’t hurted.  An’ hev Casey make me loife miserable foriver?  Not much.  He’s a harrd mon, thot Casey.”

Shane crouched back to his port-hole, with his bloody bandaged face and his bloody hands.  And just then the train stopped with a rattling crash.

“Whin we git beyond thim ties as was scattered along here mebbe we’ll go on in,” remarked McDermott.

“Mac, yez looks on the gloomy side,” replied Casey.  Then quickly he aimed the shot.  “I loike it better whin we ain’t movin’,” he soliloquized, with satisfaction.  “Thot red-skin won’t niver scalp a soldier of the U. P. R....  Drill, ye terriers!  Drill, ye terriers, drill!”

The engine whistle shrieked out and once more the din of conflict headed to the front.  Neale lay there, seeing the reality of what he had so often dreamed.  These old soldiers, these toilers with rail and sledge and shovel, these Irishmen with the rifles, they were the builders of the great U. P. R. Glory might never be theirs, but they were the battle-scarred heroes.  They were as used to fighting as to working.  They dropped their sledges or shovels to run for their guns.

Again the train started up and had scarcely gotten under way when with jerk and bump it stopped once more.  The conflict grew fiercer as the Indians became more desperate.  But evidently they were kept from closing in, for during the thick of the heaviest volleying the engine again began to puff and the wheels to grind.  Slowly the train moved on.  Like hail the bullets pattered against the car.  Smoke drifted away on the wind.