Later, one by one, other men divined and believed despite doubt and fear, until the day arrived when Congress put the government of the U.S., the Army, and a group of frock-coated directors with 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 grasped 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 saw a heritage for those to come. 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 undertook to explain the difficulties of the situation, and what was hoped for from the young surveyor. 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 was really both above and below this vantage point.

“This is the only passage through these foothills,” said Engineer Henney, the eldest of Lodge’s corps.

The passage mentioned ended where the break in the walls fronted abruptly on the gorge. It was a wild scene. Only inspired and implacable men could have entertained any hope of building a railroad through there. 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, tried to see what was 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 that,” added Henney. “You can see a long way.”

General Lodge gazed at the baffling gorge. His face worked grimmer, harder. “It seems impossible to go on, but we must go on,” he said.

A short silence ensued. The engineers faced each other 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 number of men put to perilous tasks. One spoke of the accidents that had happened, or even of 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 in realization of the tragedy that must attend this work.

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 .