The summer and early fall passed.

Neale was ordered to Omaha.  The news stunned him.  He had built all his hopes on another winter out in the Wyoming hills, and this disappointment was crushing.  It made him ill for a day.  He almost threw up his work.  It did not seem possible to live that interminable stretch without seeing Allie Lee.  The nature of his commission, however, brought once again to mind the opportunity that knocked at his door.  Neale had run all the different surveys for bridges in the Wyoming hills and now he was needed in the office of the staff, where plans and drawings were being made.  Again he bowed to the inevitable.  But he determined to demand in the spring that he be sent ahead to the forefront of the construction work.

Another disappointment seemed in order.  Larry King refused to go any farther back east.  Neale was exceedingly surprised.

“Do you throw up your job?” he asked.

“Shore not.  I can work heah,” replied Larry.

“There won’t be any outside work on these bleak plains in winter.”

“Wal, I reckon I’ll loaf, then,” he drawled.

Neale could not change him.  Larry vowed he would take his old place with Neale next spring, if it should be open to him.

“But why?  Red, I can’t figure you,” protested Neale.

“Pard, I reckon I’m fur enough back east right heah,” said Larry, significantly.

A light dawned upon Neale.  “Red!  You’ve done something bad!” exclaimed Neale, in genuine dismay.

“Wal, I don’t know jest how bad it was, but it shore was hell,” replied Larry, with a grin.

“Red, you aren’t afraid,” asserted Neale, positively.

The cowboy flushed and looked insulted.  “If any one but you said thet to me he’d hev to eat it.”

“I beg your pardon, old man.  But I’m surprised.  It doesn’t seem like you....  And then—­Lord!  I’ll miss you.”

“No more ’n I’ll miss you, pard,” replied Larry.

Suddenly Neale had a happy thought.  “Red, you go back to Slingerland’s and help take care of Allie.  I’d feel she was safer.”

“Wal, she might be safer, but I wouldn’t be,” declared the cowboy, bluntly.

“You red-head!  What do you mean?” demanded Neale.

“I mean this heah.  If I stayed around another winter near Allie Lee —­with her alone, fer thet trapper never set up before thet fire—­ I’d—­why, Neale, I’d ambush you like an Injun when you come back!”

“You wouldn’t,” rejoined Neale.  He wanted to laugh but had no mirth.

Larry did not mean that, but neither did he mean to be funny.  “I’ll be hangin’ round heah, waitin’ fer you.  It’s only a few months.  Go on to your work, pard.  You’ll be a big man on the road some day.”

Neale left North Platte with a wagon-train.

After a long, slow journey the point was reached where the graders had left off work for that year.  Here had been a huge construction camp; and the bare and squalid place looked as if it once had been a town of crudest make, suddenly wrecked by a cyclone and burned by prairie fire.  Fifty miles farther on, representing two more long, tedious, and unendurable days, and Neale heard the whistle of a locomotive.  It came from far off.  But it was a whistle.  He yelled, and the men journeying with him joined in.