Union Pacific

by Zane Grey

  “Way off the beaten track up hyar,” said one.

  “Yes. I’m a trapper,” replied Slingerland. “Whar do you hail from?”

  “Ogden. We’re packin’ east.”

  “Much travel on the trail?”

  “Right smart fer wild country. An’ all goin’ east. We haven’t met an outfit headin’ west. Hev you heerd any talk of a railroad buildin’ out of Omaha?”

  Here King put a word in. “Shore. We’ve had soldiers campin’ around aboot all heah.”

  “Soldiers!” ejaculated one of the gang.

  “Shore, the road’s bein’ built by soldiers.”

  The men made no further comment and turned away without any good-byes.

  Slingerland called out for them to have an eye open for Indians on the warpath. “Wal, I don’t like the looks of them fellars,” he declared.

  Neale likewise took an unfavorable view of the visit, but King scorned the idea of there being any danger in a gang like that.

  “Shore, they’d be afraid of a man,” he declared.

  “Red, can you look at men and tell whether or not there’s danger in them?” inquired Neale.

  “I shore can. One man could bluff thet outfit . . . But I reckon I’d hate to have them find Allie aboot heah alone.”

  “I can take care of myself,” spoke up Allie spiritedly.

  Neale and Slingerland, for all their respect for the cowboy’s judgment, regarded the advent of these visitors as a forerunner of an evil time for lonely trappers.

  “I’ll hev to move back deeper in the mountains, away from the railroad,” said Slingerland.

  This incident also put a different light upon the intention Neale had of hunting for the buried gold. Just now he certainly did not want to risk being seen digging up the gold or packing it away, and Slingerland was just as loath to have it concealed in or near the cabin.

  “Wal, seein’ we’re not sure it’s really thar, let’s wait till you come back in summer or fall,” he suggested. “If it’s thar, it’ll stay thar.”

  All too soon the dawn came for Neale’s departure with King. Allie was braver than he. At the last he was white and shaken. She kissed King.

  “Reddy, you’ll take care of yourself . . . and him,” she said.

  “Allie, I shore will. Good bye.” And King rode down the trail in the dim gray dawn.

  “Watch sharp for Indians,” she breathed, and her face whitened momentarily. Then the color returned. Her eyes were full of sweet, soft light.

  “Allie, I can’t go,” said Neale hoarsely. The clasp of her arms unnerved him.

  “You must. It’s your work. Remember the big job . . . Dearest . . . dearest! Hurry . . . and . . . go!”

  Neale could no longer see her face clearly. He did not know what he was saying. “You’ll . . . always . . . love me?” he implored.

  “Do you need to ask? All my life. I promise.”

  “Kiss me then,” he whispered hoarsely, blindly leaning down. “It’s hell . . . to leave you . . . Wonderful girl . . . treasure . . . precious. Allie! Kiss me . . . enough . . . I . . .”

  She held him with strong and passionate clasp and kissed him again and again.

  “Good bye.” Her last word was low, choked, poignant—and had in it a mournful reminder of her old tragic woe.

  Then he was alone. Mounting clumsily, with blurred eyes, he rode into the winding trail.

  Chapter Ten

  Neale and King traveled light, without pack animals, and at sunrise reached the main trail. It bore evidence of considerable use and was no longer a trail but a high road. Fresh tracks of horses and oxen, wagon-wheel ruts, dead campfires, and scattered brush that had been used for windbreaks—all attested to the impetus of that movement that was to become extraordinary.

  All this was Indian country. Neale and his companion had no idea whether or not the Sioux had left their winter quarters for the warpath. But it was a vast region, and the Indians could not be everywhere. Neale and King took chances, as had all these travelers, although perhaps the risk was not so great because they rode fleet horses. Their watchfulness did not discover to them any signs of Indians, and it appeared as if they were alone in a wilderness.

  They covered sixty miles from early dawn to dusk, with a short rest at noon, and reached Fort Fetterman safely without incident or accident. Troops were there, but none of the U.P. engineering staff. Neale did not meet any soldiers with whom he was acquainted. Orders were there for him, however, to report at North Platte as soon as it was possible to reach there. Troops were moving soon, Neale learned, and the long overland journey could be made in comparative safety.

  Here Neale received the tidings that forty miles of railroad had been built during the last summer and trains had been run that distance west from Omaha. His heart swelled. Not for many a week had he heard anything favorable to the great U.P. project, and here was news of rails laid, trains run. Already this spring the graders were breaking ground far ahead of the rail layers. Report and rumor there at the fort had it that lively times had attended the construction work. But the one absorbing topic was the Sioux Indians, who were expected to swarm out of the hills that summer and give the troops hot work.

  In due time Neale and King arrived at North Platte, which was little more than a camp. The construction gangs were not expected to reach there until late in the fall. Baxter was at North Platte, with a lame surveyor, and no other helpers, and he hailed Neale and King with open arms. A summer’s work in the hot monotonous plains stared Neale in the face, and all he could do was to resign himself to the inevitable. He worked, as always, with that ability and energy that had made him invaluable to his superiors. Here, however, the labor was a hot grind, without any thrills. Neale filled the long, glaring days with duty, and seldom let his mind wander. In leisure hours, however, he dreamed of Allie and the future. There was no trouble passing time that way. Also, he watched for arrivals from the west, whom he questioned about Indians in the Black Hills, and from troops or travelers coming from the east, he heard all the news of the advancing railroad construction. It was absorbing, interesting, yet Neale could credit so few of the tales. Nowhere on earth had things happened as rumor brought them.

  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 Black Hills, and this disappointment was crushing. It made him ill for a day. He almost threw up his work. It did not seem possible at all 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 difficult surveys for bridges in the Black 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 foremost of the construction work.

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

  “Do you throw up your job?” he asked.

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

  “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. King vowed he would take his old place with Neale next spring, if it would be open to him.

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

  “Pard, I reckon I’m far enough back east right heah,” said King 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 King, with a grin.

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

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

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

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

  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’ll ambush you like an Injun when you come back.”

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

  * * * * *

  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—ten 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.

  Smoke showed on the horizon and a wide low uneven line of shacks and tents.

  Neale was all eyes when he rode into that construction camp. The place was a bedlam. A motley horde of men appeared to be doing everything under the sun but work, and most of them seemed particularly eager to board a long train of boxcars and little old passenger coaches. Neale made a dive for the train, and his sojourn in that camp was a short and exciting one of ten minutes.

  He felt utterly proud. He had helped swing the line along which the train was now rattling and creaking and swaying. All that swiftly passed under his keen eyes was recorded in his memory—the uncouth crowd of laborers, the hardest lot he had ever seen; the talk, noise, smoke; the rickety old clattering coaches; the wayside dumps and heaps and wreckage. But they all seemed parts of a beautiful romance to him. Neale saw through the eyes of ambition and dreams.

  And not for a moment of another endless ride, with interminable stops, did he weary of the two hundred and sixty miles of rails laid that year, and the forty miles of the preceding year. Then Omaha, a beehive—the making of a Western metropolis!

  * * * * *

  Neale plunged into the thickest of the bewildering turmoil of plans, tasks, schemes, land grants, politics, charters, inducements, liens and loans, government and Army and state and national interests, grafts and deals and bosses, all that mass of selfish and unselfish motives, all that cunning and noble aim, all the congested assembly of humans that went to make up the building of the Union Pacific.

  Neale was a dreamer, like the few men whose minds had first given birth to the wonderful idea of a railroad from East to West. Neale found himself confronted by a singularly disturbing fact. However grand this project was, the political and mercenary end of it was not going to be beautiful to him. Why could not all men be right-minded about a noble cause and work for the development of the West and the future generations? It was a melancholy thing to learn that men of sincere and unselfish purpose had spent their all trying to raise the money to build the Union Pacific, just as it was a satisfaction to learn that many capitalists with greedy claws had ruined themselves in like effort.

  The President of the United States and Congress had their troubles at the close of the war, and the government could do but little with their land grants and loans to raise the money. But they offered a great bonus to the men who would build the road.

  The first construction company subscribed over a million and a half dollars and paid in one quarter of that. The money went so swiftly that it opened the company’s eyes to the insatiable gulf beneath that enterprise, and they quit.

  Thereupon what was called the Crédit Mobilier was inaugurated, and it became both famous and infamous. It was a type of the construction company by which it was the custom to build railroads at that time. The directors, believing that whatever money would be made out of the Union Pacific would be made during the construction, organized a clever system for just this purpose, an extravagant sum was to be paid to the Crédit Mobilier for the construction work, thus securing for stockholders of the Union Pacific, who now controlled the Crédit Mobilier, the bonds loaned by the U.S. government.

  The operations of the Crédit Mobelier finally gave rise to one of the most serious political scandals in the history of the U.S. Congress. The cost of all material was high and rose with leaps and bounds until it was prodigious. Omaha had no railroad entering it, and so all the supplies, materials, engines, cars, machinery, and laborers had to be transported from St. Louis up the swift Missouri on boats. This in itself was a work calling for the limit of practical management and energy. Out in the prairie land, for hundreds of miles, were to be found no trees, no wood, scarcely any brush. That prairie land was beautiful ground for buffalo, but it was the most barren desert for the exigencies of railroad men. Moreover, not only did wood and fuel and railroad ties have to be brought from afar, but all stone for bridges and abutments. Then thousands of men had to be employed, and those who hired out for reasonable money soon learned the fact that others were getting more, and, having the company at their mercy, they demanded exorbitant wages.

  One of the peculiar features of the construction so far, and one over which Neale grew impotently furious, was the law that when a certain section of so many miles had been laid and equipped as required, the government of the United States would send out expert commissioners, who would go over the line and pass judgment upon the construction and finished work. No two groups of commissioners seemed to agree. Those experts, who had to hold up their bid in the bewildering and labyrinthine magic of men’s contrary plans and plots, reported that certain sections had to be done over again.

  The fault found with one of these purported to be in the grade, which was too steep, and as Neale had surveyed that section he soon heard of his poor work. He went over his figures and notes with the result that he called on Henney and absolutely and irrevocably swore that the grade was right. Henney swore, too, in a different and more forcible way, agreed with Neale, and advised him to call on the expert commissioners.

  Neale did so, and found them, with one exception, open to conviction. The exception was a man named Allison Lee. The name Lee gave Neale a little shock. He was a gray-looking man, with lined face, and that concentrated air Neale learned to associate with those who were high in the affairs of the U.P.

  Neale stated that his business was to show that his work had been done right and he had the figures to prove it. Mr. Lee replied that the survey was poor and would have to be done over.

  “Are you a surveyor?” queried Neale sharply, with the blood beating in his temples.

  “I have some knowledge of civil engineering,” replied the commissioner.

  “Well, it can’t be very much,” declared Neale, whose temper was up.

  “Young man, be careful what you say,” replied the other.

  “But Mister . . . Mister Lee . . . listen to me, will you?” burst out Neale. “It’s all here in my notes. You’ve hurried over the line . . . and just slipped up on a foot or so in your observations of that section.”

  Mr. Lee refused to look at the notes and waved Neale aside.

  “It’ll hurt my chance for a big job,” Neale said stubbornly.

  “You probably will lose your job, judging from the way you address your superiors.”

  That finished Neale. He grew perfectly white. “All this expert commissioner business is rot!” he flung at Lee. “Rot! Lodge knows it. Henney knows it. We all do. And so do you. It’s a lot of damn’ red
tape! Every last man who can pull a stroke with the government runs in here to annoy good efficient engineers who are building the road. It’s an outrage. It’s more. It’s not honest . . . That section has forty miles in it. Five miles you claim must be resurveyed . . . regraded . . . relaid. Forty-six thousand dollars a mile! That’s the secret! Two hundred and thirty thousand dollars for a construction company!”

  Neale left the office and, returning to Henney, reported the interview to him word for word. Henney complimented Neale’s spirit, but deplored the incident. It could do no good and might do harm. Many of these commissioners were politicians, working in close touch with the directors, and not averse to bleeding the Crédit Mobilier.

  All the engineers, including the chief, although he was non-committal, were bitter about this expert commissioner law. If a good roadbed had been surveyed, the engineer knew more about it than anyone else. They were the pioneers of the work. It was exceedingly annoying and exasperating to have a number of men travel leisurely in trains over the line and criticize the labors of engineers who had toiled in heat and cold and wet, with brains and heart in the task. But so it was.

  * * * * *

  In May, 1866, a wagon train escorted by troops rolled into the growing camp of North Platte, and the first man to alight was Warren Neale, strong, active, eager-eyed as ever, but older, and with face pale from his indoor work and hope long deferred.

  The first man to greet him was Larry Red King, in whom time did not make changes.

  They met as long-separated brothers.

  “Red, how’re your horses?” was Neale’s query following the greeting.