The phenomenon appeared remarkable to him.  Indeed, it stood alone.  He measured the nature of this job by that forgetfulness.  And memories thrilled him.  With his eye clear on the track that split the gray expanse, with his whole being permeated by the soothing influence of smoke, with his task almost done, Casey experienced an unprecedented thing for him—­he lived over past performances and found them vivid, thrilling, somehow sweet.  Battles of the Civil War; the day he saved a flag; and, better, the night he saved Pat Shane, who had lived only to stop a damned Sioux bullet; many and many an adventure with McDermott, who, just a few minutes past, had watched him with round, shining eyes; and the fights he had seen and shared—­all these things passed swiftly through Casey’s mind and filled him with a lofty and serene pride.

He was pleased with himself; more pleased with what McDermott would think.  Casey’s boyhood did not return to him, but his mounting exhilaration and satisfaction were boyish.  It was great to ride this way! ...  There! he saw a long, black dot down in the gray.  The train! ...  General Lodge had once shaken hands with Casey.

Somebody had to do these things, since the U. P. R. must reach across to the Pacific.  A day would come when a splendid passenger-train would glide smoothly down this easy grade where Casey jolted along on his gravel-car.  The fact loomed large in the simplicity of the Irishman’s mind.  He began to hum his favorite song.  Facing westward, he saw the black dot grow into a long train.  Likewise he saw the beauty of the red-gold sunset behind the hills.  Casey gloried in the wildness of the scene—­in the meaning of his ride—­ particularly in his loneliness.  He seemed strangely alone there on that vast gray slope—­a man and somehow accountable for all these things.  He felt more than he understood.  His long-tried nerves and courage and strength had never yielded this wonderful buoyancy and sense of loftiness.  He was Casey—­Casey who had let all the gang run for shelter from the Sioux while he had remained for one last and final drive at a railroad spike.  But the cool, devil-may-care indifference, common to all his comrades as well as to himself, was not the strongest factor in the Casey of to-day.  Up out of the rugged and dormant soul had burst the spirit of a race embodied in one man.  Casey was his own audience, and the light upon him was the glory of the setting sun.  A nightingale sang in his heart, and he realized that this was his hour.  Here the bloody, hard years found their reward.  Not that he had ever wanted one or thought of one, but it had come—­out of the toil, the pain, the weariness.  So his nerves tingled, his pulses beat, his veins glowed, his heart throbbed; and all the new, sweet, young sensations of a boy wildly reveling in the success of his first great venture, all the vague, strange, deep, complex emotions of a man who has become conscious of what he is giving to the world—­these shook Casey by storm, and life had no more to give.  He knew that, whatever he was, whatever this incomprehensible driving spirit in him, whatever his unknown relation to man and to duty, there had been given him in the peril just passed, in this wonderful ride, a gift splendid and divine.