What fine comrades these hairy-breasted toilers made!  Neale had admired them once; now he loved them.  Every group seemed to contain a trio like that one he had known so well—­Casey, Shane, and McDermott.  Then he divined that these men were all alike.  They all toiled, swore, fought, drank, gambled.  Hundreds of them went to nameless graves.  But the work went on—­the great, driving, united heart beat on.

Neale was under its impulse, in another sense.

When he lifted a tie and felt the hard, splintering wood, he wondered where it had come from, what kind of a tree it was, who had played in its shade, how surely birds had nested in it and animals had grazed beneath it.  Between him and that square log of wood there was an affinity.  Somehow his hold upon it linked him strangely to a long past, intangible spirit of himself.  He must cling to it, lest he might lose that illusive feeling.  Then when he laid it down he felt regret fade into a realization that the yellow-gravel road-bed also inspirited him.  He wanted to feel it, work in it, level it, make it somehow his own.

When he strode back for another load his magnifying eyes gloated over the toilers in action—­the rows of men carrying and laying rails, and the splendid brawny figures of the spikers, naked to the waist, swinging the heavy sledges.  The blows rang out spang—­spang—­ spang!  Strong music, full of meaning!  When his turn came to be a spiker, he would love that hardest work of all.

The engine puffed smoke and bumped the cars ahead, little by little as the track advanced; men on the train carried ties and rails forward, filling the front cars as fast as they were emptied; long lines of laborers on the ground passed to and fro, burdened going forward, returning empty-handed; the rails and the shovels and the hammers and the picks all caught the hot gleam from the sun; the dust swept up in sheets; the ring, the crash, the thump, the scrape of iron and wood and earth in collision filled the air with a sound rising harshly above the song and laugh and curse of men.

A shifting, colorful, strenuous scene of toil!

Gradually Neale felt that he was fitting into this scene, becoming a part of it, an atom once more in the great whole.  He doubted while he thrilled.  Clearly as he saw, keenly as he felt, he yet seemed bewildered.  Was he not gazing out at this construction work through windows of his soul, once more painted, colored, beautiful, because the most precious gift he might have prayed for had been given him —­life and hope for Allie Lee?

He did not know.  He could not think.

His comrade, Pat, wiped floods of sweat from his scarlet face.  “I’ll be domned if ye ain’t a son-of-a-gun fer worrk!” he complained.

“Pat, we’ve been given the honor of pace-makers.  They’ve got to keep up with us.  Come on,” replied Neale.

“Be gad! there ain’t a mon in the gang phwat’ll trade fer me honor, thin,” declared Pat.  “Fri’nd, I’d loike to live till next pay-day,”