At nine o’clock a mob of five thousand men had congregated around the station, most of them out in the open, on the desert side of the track.  They were waiting for the pay-train to arrive.  This hour was the only orderly one that Benton ever saw.  There were laughter, profanity, play—­a continuous hum, but compared to Benton’s usual turmoil, it was pleasant.  The workmen talked in groups, and, like all crowds of men sober and unexcited, they were given largely to badinage and idle talk.

“Wot was ut I owed ye, Moike?” asked a strapping grader.

Mike scratched his head.  “Wor it thorty dollars this toime?”

“It wor,” replied the other.  “Moike, yez hev a mimory.”

A big Negro pushed out his huge jaw and blustered at his fellows.

“I’s a-gwine to bust thet yaller nigger’s haid,” he declared.

“Bill, he’s your fr’en’.  Cool down, man, cool down,” replied a comrade.

A teamster was writing a letter in lead-pencil, using a board over his knees.

“Jim, you goin’ to send money home?” queried a fellow-laborer.

“I am that, an’ first thing when I get my pay,” was the reply.

“Reminds me, I owe for this suit I’m wearin’.  I’ll drop in an’ settle.”

A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track, at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails with lusty blows.

“Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the line,” said one.

“Bandy, your eyes are pore,” replied another.

“Yep, she’s comin’,” said another. “’Bout time, for I haven’t two-bits to my name.”

“Boys, no buckin’ the tiger for me to-day,” declared Bandy.

He was laughed at by all except one quiet comrade who gazed thoughtfully eastward, back over the vast and rolling country.  This man was thinking of home, of wife and little girl, of what pay-day meant for them.

Bandy gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.

“Frank, you got drunk an’ laid out all night, last payday.”

Frank remembered, but he did not say what he had forgotten that last pay-day.

A long and gradual slope led from Benton down across the barren desert toward Medicine Bow.  The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere thread upon the horizon.  The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object.  Through the big throng ran a restless murmur.  The train was in sight.  It might have been a harbinger of evil, for a subtle change, nervous, impatient, brooding, visited that multitude.  A slow movement closed up the disintegrated crowd and a current of men worked forward to encounter resistance and opposing currents.  They had begun to crowd for advantageous positions closer to the pay-car so as to be the first in line.

A fight started somewhere, full of loud curses and dull blows; and then a jostling mass tried the temper of the slow-marching men.  Some boss yelled an order from a box-car, and he was hooted.  There was no order.  When the train whistled for Benton a hoarse and sustained shout ran through the mob, not from all lips, nor from any massed group, but taken up from man to man—­a strange sound, the first note of calling Benton.