Neale lay ill of a deeper wound while the bullet-hole healed in his side.  Day and night Larry tended him or sat by him or slept near him in a shack on the outskirts of the camp.  Shock, grief, starvation, exhaustion, loss of blood and sleep—­all these brought Warren Neale close to death.  He did not care to live.  It was the patient, loyal friend who fought fever and heartbreak and the ebbing tide of life.

Baxter and Henney visited North Platte and called to see him, and later the chief came and ordered Larry to take Neale to the tents of the corps.  Every one was kind, solicitous, earnest.  He had been missed.  The members of his corps knew the strange story of Allie Lee; they guessed the romance and grieved over the tragedy.  They did all they could do, and the troop doctor added his attention; but it was the nursing, the presence, and the spirit of Larry King that saved Neale.

He got well and went back to work with the cowboy for his helper.

In that camp of toil and disorder none but the few with whom Neale was brought in close touch noted anything singular about him.  The engineers, however, observed that he did not work so well, nor so energetically, nor so accurately.  His enthusiasm was lacking.  The cowboy, always with him, was the one who saw the sudden spells of somber abstraction and the poignant, hopeless, sleepless pain, the eternal regret.  And as Neale slackened in his duty Larry King grew more faithful.

Neale began to drink and gamble.  For long the cowboy fought, argued, appealed against this order of things, and then, failing to change or persuade Neale, he went to gambling and drinking with him.  But then it was noted that Neale never got under the influence of liquor or lost materially at cards.  The cowboy spilled the contents of Neale’s glass and played the game into his hands.

Both of them shrank instinctively from the women of the camp.  The sight of anything feminine hurt.

North Platte stirred with the quickening stimulus of the approach of the rails and the trains, and the army of soldiers whose duty was to protect the horde of toilers, and the army of tradesmen and parasites who lived off them.

The construction camp of the graders moved on westward, keeping ahead of the camps of the layers.

The first train that reached North Platte brought directors of the U. P. R.—­among them Warburton and Rudd and Rogers; also Commissioners Lee and Dunn and a host of followers on a tour of inspection.

The five miles of Neale’s section of road that the commissioners had judged at fault had been torn up, resurveyed, and relaid.

Neale rode back over the line with Baxter and surveyed the renewed part.  Then, returning to North Platte, he precipitated consternation among directors and commissioners and engineers, as they sat in council, by throwing on the table figures of the new survey identical with his old data.