“Drill, ye terriers, drill!” rang out a cheery voice.  And Neale remembered Casey.

Neale’s gang was put to carrying ties.  Neale got hold of the first tie thrown off the car.

“Phwat the hell’s ye’re hurry!” protested his partner.  This fellow was gnarled and knotted, brick-red in color, with face a network of seams, and narrow, sun-burnt slits for eyes.  He answered to the name of Pat.

They carried the tie out to the end of the rails and dropped it on the level road-bed.  Men there set it straight and tamped the gravel around it.  Neale and his partner went back for another, passing a dozen couples carrying ties forward.  Behind these staggered the rows of men burdened with the heavy iron rails.

So the day’s toil began.

Pat had glanced askance at Neale, and then had made dumb signs to his fellow-laborers, indicating his hard lot in being yoked to this new wild man on the job.  But his ridicule soon changed to respect.  Presently he offered his gloves to Neale.  They were refused.

“But, fri’nd, ye ain’t tough loike me,” he protested.

“Pat, they’ll put you to bed to-night—­if you stay with me,” replied Neale.

“The hell ye say!  Come on, thin!”

At first Neale had no sensations of heat, weariness, thirst, or pain.  He dragged the little Irishman forward to drop the ties—­then strode back ahead of him.  Neale was obsessed by a profound emotion.  This was a new beginning for him.  For him the world and life had seemed to cease when yesternight the sun sank and Allie Lee passed out of sight.  His motive in working there, he imagined, was to lay a few rails, drive a few spikes along the last miles of the road that he had surveyed.  He meant to work this way only a little while, till the rails from east met those from west.

This profound emotion seemed accompanied by a procession of thoughts, each thought in turn, like a sun with satellites, reflecting its radiance upon them and rousing strange, dreamy, full-hearted fancies ...  Allie lived—­as good, as innocent as ever, incomparably beautiful—­sad-eyed, eloquent, haunting.  From that mighty thought sprang both Neale’s exaltation and his activity.  He had loved her so well that conviction of her death had broken his heart, deadened his ambition, ruined his life.  But since, by the mercy of God and the innocence that had made men heroic, she had survived all peril, all evil, then had begun a colossal overthrow in Neale’s soul of the darkness, the despair, the hate, the indifference.  He had been flung aloft, into the heights, and he had seen into heaven.  He asked for nothing in the world.  All-satisfied, eternally humble, grateful with every passionate drop of blood throbbing through his heart, he dedicated all his spiritual life to memory.  And likewise there seemed a tremendous need in him of sustained physical action, even violence.  He turned to the last stages of the construction of the great railroad.