Moments of awful suspense pa.s.sed. Nothing but the fitful beating of hearts came to the ears of the fugitives--ears that strained to the stealthy approach of the red foe--ears that throbbed prayerfully for the tramp of the troopers" horses. But only silence ensued, a horrible silence, more nerve-racking than the clash of swift, sure death.
Then out of the gray gloom burst jets of red flame; rifles cracked, and the air suddenly filled with hideous clamor. The men began to shoot at gliding shadows, grayer than the gloom. And every shot brought a volley in return. Smoke mingled with the gloom. In the slight intervals between rifleshots there were swift, rustling sounds and sharp thuds from arrows. Then the shrill strife of sound became continuous; it came from all around and closed in upon the doomed caravan. It swelled and rolled away and again there was silence.
4
In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the Wyoming hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical. They had charge of the laying out of the Union Pacific Railroad.
This party, escorted by a company of United States troops under Colonel Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable. And now, having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of the Rockies they were halted by a seemingly impa.s.sable barrier--a gorge too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.
General Lodge, chief engineer of the corps, gave an order to one of his a.s.sistants. "Put young Neale on the job. If we ever survey a line through this awful place we"ll owe it to him."
The a.s.sistant, Baxter, told an Irishman standing by and smoking a short, black pipe to find Neale and give him the chief"s orders. The Irishman, Casey by name, was raw-boned, red-faced, and hard-featured, a man inured to exposure and rough life. His expression was one of extreme and fixed good humor, as if his face had been set, mask-like, during a grin. He removed the pipe from his lips.
"Gineral, the flag I"ve been holdin" fer thot dom" young surveyor is the wrong color. I want a green flag."
Baxter waved the Irishman to his errand, but General Lodge looked up from the maps and plans before him with a faint smile. He had a dark, stern face and the bearing of a soldier.
"Casey, you can have any color you like," he said. "Maybe green would change our luck."
"Gineral, we"ll niver git no railroad built, an" if we do it"ll be the Irish thot builds it," responded Casey, and went his way.
Truly only one hope remained--that the agile and daring Neale, with his eye of a mountaineer and his genius for estimating distance and grade, might run a line around the gorge.
While waiting for Neale the engineers went over the maps and drawings again and again, with the earnestness of men who could not be beaten.
Lodge had been a major-general in the Civil War just ended, and before that he had traveled through this part of the West many times, and always with the mighty project of a railroad looming in his mind. It had taken years to evolve the plan of a continental railroad, and it came to fruition at last through many men and devious ways, through plots and counterplots. The wonderful idea of uniting East and West by a railroad originated in one man"s brain; he lived for it, and finally he died for it. But the seeds he had sown were fruitful. One by one other men divined and believed, despite doubt and fear, until the day arrived when Congress put the Government of the United States, the army, a group of frock-coated directors, and unlimited gold back of General Lodge, and bade him build the road.
In all the length and breadth of the land no men but the chief engineer and his a.s.sistants knew the difficulty, the peril of that undertaking.
The outside world was interested, the nation waited, mostly in doubt.
But Lodge and his engineers had been seized by the spirit of some great thing to be, in the making of which were adventure, fortune, fame, and that strange call of life which foreordained a heritage for future generations. They were grim; they were indomitable.
Warren Neale came hurrying up. He was a New Englander of poor family, self-educated, wild for adventure, keen for achievement, eager, ardent, bronze-faced, and keen-eyed, under six feet in height, built like a wedge, but not heavy--a young man of twenty-three with strong latent possibilities of character.
General Lodge himself explained the difficulties of the situation and what the young surveyor was expected to do. Neale flushed with pride; his eyes flashed; his jaw set. But he said little while the engineers led him out to the scene of the latest barrier. It was a rugged gorge, old and yellow and crumbled, cedar-fringed at the top, bare and white at the bottom. The approach to it was through a break in the walls, so that the gorge really extended both above and below this vantage-point.
"This is the only pa.s.s through these foot-hills," said Engineer Henney, the eldest of Lodge"s corps.
The pa.s.sage ended where the break in the walls fronted abruptly upon the gorge. It was a wild scene. Only inspired and dauntless men could have entertained any hope of building a railroad through such a place. The mouth of the break was narrow; a rugged slope led up to the left; to the right a huge b.u.t.tress of stone wall bulged over the gorge; across stood out the seamed and cracked cliffs, and below yawned the abyss. The nearer side of the gorge could only be guessed at.
Neale crawled to the extreme edge of the precipice, and, lying flat, he tried to discover what lay beneath. Evidently he did not see much, for upon getting up he shook his head. Then he gazed at the bulging wall.
"The side of that can be blown off," he muttered.
"But what"s around the corner? If it"s straight stone wall for miles and miles we are done," said Boone, another of the engineers.
"The opposite wall is just that," added Henney. "A straight stone wall."
General Lodge gazed at the baffling gorge. His face became grimmer, harder. "It seems impossible to go on, but we must go on!" he said.
A short silence ensued. The engineers faced one another like men confronted by a last and crowning hindrance. Then Neale laughed. He appeared cool and confident.
"It only looks bad," he said. "We"ll climb to the top and I"ll go down over the wall on a rope."
Neale had been let down over many precipices in those stony hills. He had been the luckiest, the most daring and successful of all the men picked out and put to perilous tasks. No one spoke of the accidents that had happened, or even the fatal fall of a lineman who a few weeks before had ventured once too often. Every rod of road surveyed made the engineers sterner at their task, just as it made them keener to attain final success.
The climb to the top of the bluff was long and arduous. The whole corps went, and also some of the troopers.
"I"ll need a long rope," Neale had said to King, his lineman.
It was this order that made King take so much time in ascending the bluff. Besides, he was a cowboy, used to riding, and could not climb well.
"Wal--I--sh.o.r.e--rustled--all the line--aboot heah," he drawled, pantingly, as he threw la.s.soes and coils of rope at Neale"s feet.
Neale picked up some of the worn pieces. He looked dubious. "Is this all you could get?" he asked.
"Sh.o.r.e is. An" thet includes what Casey rustled from the soldiers."
"Help me knot these," went on Neale.
"Wal, I reckon this heah time I"ll go down before you," drawled King.
Neale laughed and looked curiously at his lineman. Back somewhere in Nebraska this cowboy from Texas had attached himself to Neale. They worked together; they had become friends. Larry Red King made no bones of the fact that Texas had grown too hot for him. He had been born with an itch to shoot. To Neale it seemed that King made too much of a service Neale had rendered--the mere matter of a helping hand. Still, there had been danger.
"Go down before me!" exclaimed Neale.
"I reckon," replied King.
"You will not," rejoined the other, bluntly. "I may not need you at all.
What"s the sense of useless risk?"
"Wal, I"m goin"--else I throw up my job."
"Oh, h.e.l.l!" burst out Neale as he strained hard on a knot. Again he looked at his lineman, this time with something warmer than curiosity in his glance.
Larry Red King was tall, slim, hard as iron, and yet undeniably graceful in outline--a singularly handsome and picturesque cowboy with flaming hair and smooth, red face and eyes of flashing blue. From his belt swung a sheath holding a heavy gun.
"Wal, go ahaid," added Neale, mimicking his comrade. "An" I sh.o.r.e hope thet this heah time you-all get aboot enough of your job."
One by one the engineers returned from different points along the wall, and they joined the group around Neale and King.
"Test that rope," ordered General Lodge.
The long rope appeared to be amply strong. When King fastened one end round his body under his arms the question arose among the engineers, just as it had arisen for Neale, whether or not it was needful to let the lineman down before the surveyor. Henney, who superintended this sort of work, decided it was not necessary.
"I reckon I"ll go ahaid," said King. Like all Texans of his type, Larry King was slow, easy, cool, careless. Moreover, he gave a singular impression of latent nerve, wildness, violence.