The U.P. Trail | Page 7

too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.
General Lodge, chief engineer of the corps, gave an order to one of his
assistants. "Put young Neale on the job. If we ever survey a line
through this awful place we'll owe it to him."
The assistant, 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 assistants 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 pass through these foot-hills," said Engineer Henney,
the eldest of Lodge's corps.
The passage 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 buttress 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