How strange to realize that the great railroad had its nucleus, its impetus, and its completion in such a center as this!  Here were the frock-coated, soft-voiced, cigar-smoking gentlemen among whom Warburton and his directors had swung the colossal enterprise.  What a vast difference between these men and the builders!  With the handsome white-haired Warburton, and his associates, as they smoked their rich cigars and drank their wine, Neale contrasted Casey and McDermott and many another burly spiker or teamster out on the line.  Each class was necessary to this task.  These Easterners talked of money, of gold, as a grade foreman might have talked of gravel.  They smoked and conversed at ease, laughing at sallies, gossiping over what was a tragedy west of North Platte; and about them was an air of luxury, of power, of importance, and a singular grace that Neale felt rather than saw.

Strangest of all to him was the glimpse he got into the labyrinthine plot built around the stock, the finance, the gold that was constructing the road.  He was an engineer, with a deductive habit of mind, but he would never be able to trace the intricacy of this monumental aggregation of deals.  Yet he was hugely, interested.  Much of the scorn and disgust he had felt out on the line for the mercenaries connected with the work he forgot here among these frock-coated gentlemen.

An hour later Neale accompanied Warburton to the station where the director was to board a train for his return to New York.

“You’ll start back to-morrow,” said Warburton.  “I’ll see you soon, I hope—­out there in Utah where the last spike is to be driven.  That will be the day—­the hour! ...  It will be celebrated all over the United States.”

Neale returned to his hotel, trying to make out the vital thing that had come to him on this hurried and apparently useless journey.  His mind seemed in a whirl.  Yet as he pondered, there gradually loomed up the reflection that in the eastern, or constructive, end of the great plan there were the same spirits of evil and mystery as existed in the western, or building, end.  Here big men were interested, involved; out there bigger men sweat and burned and aged and died.  The difference was that these toilers gave all for an ideal while the directors and their partners thought only of money, of profits.

Neale restrained what might have been contempt, but he thought that if these financiers could have seen the life of the diggers and spikers as he knew it they might be actuated by a nobler motive.  Before he dropped to sleep that night he concluded that his trip to Washington, and the recognition accorded him by Warburton’s circle, had fixed a new desire in his heart to heave some more rails and drive some more spikes for the railroad he loved so well.  To him the work had been something for which he had striven with all his might and for which he had risked his life.  Not only had his brain been given to the creation, but his muscles had ached from the actual physical toil attendant upon this biggest of big jobs.