All that Allie heard of Benton increased her dread, and at last she determined that she would run any risk rather than be taken there.  And so one night, as soon as it grew dark, she slipped out of the wagon and, under cover of darkness, made her escape.

15

The building of the U. P. R. as it advanced westward caused many camps and towns to spring up and flourish, like mushrooms, in a single night; and trains were run as far as the rails were laid.

Therefore strange towns and communities were born, like to nothing that the world had ever seen before.

Warren Neale could not get away from the fascination of the work and life, even though he had lost all his ambition and was now nothing more than an ordinary engineer, insignificant and idle.  He began to drink and gamble in North Platte, more in a bitter defiance to fate than from any real desire; then with Larry King he drifted out to Kearney.

At Kearney, Larry got into trouble—­characteristic trouble.  In a quarrel with a construction boss named Smith, Larry accused Smith of being the crooked tool of the crooked commissioners who had forced Neale to quit his job.  Smith grew hot and profane.  The cowboy promptly slapped his face.  Then Smith, like the fool he was, went after his gun.  He never got it out.

It distressed Neale greatly that Larry had shot up a man—­and a railroad man at that.  No matter what Larry said, Neale knew the shooting was on his account.  This deed made the cowboy a marked man.  It changed him, also, toward Neale, inasmuch as that he saw his wildness, was making small Neale’s chances of returning to work.  Larry never ceased importuning Neale to go back to his job.  After shooting Smith the cowboy made one more eloquent appeal to Neale and then left for Cheyenne.  Neale followed him.

Cheyenne was just sobering up after its brief and tempestuous reign as headquarters town, and though depleted and thin, it was now making a bid for permanency.  But the sting and wildness of life had departed with the construction operations, and now Benton had become the hub of the railway universe.

Neale boarded a train for Benton and watched with bitterness the familiar landmarks he had learned to know so well while surveying the line.  He was no longer connected with the great project—­no more a necessary part of the great movement.

Beyond Medicine Bow the grass and the green failed and the immense train of freight-cars and passenger-coaches, loaded to capacity, clattered on into arid country.  Gray and red, the drab and fiery colors of the desert lent the ridges character—­forbidding and barren.

From a car window Neale got his first glimpse of the wonderful terminus city, and for once his old thrills returned.  He recalled the distance—­seven hundred—­no, six hundred and ninety-eight miles from Omaha.  So far westward was Benton.