past a long construction
train in which the men lived. The big box-cars contained sleeping-bunks,
and those men who preferred more air and seclusion had swung
sleeping-hammocks under the cars; others had spread their beds on top
of the cars. Climbing a little embankment, Bucks watched the sturdy,
broad-shouldered pioneers. A light car drawn by a single, galloping
horse was rushed to the extreme end of the laid rails. Before it had
fairly stopped, two men waiting on either side seized the end of a rail
with their trap and started forward. Ten more men, following in twos, at
a run, lifted the two rails clear of the car and dropped them in place on
the ties. The foreman instantly gauged them, the horse moved ahead, and
thirty spikers armed with heavy mauls drove the spikes furiously and
regularly, three strokes to the spike, into the new-laid ties. The
bolters followed with the fish-plates, and while Bucks looked the
railroad was made before his eyes.

The excitement of the scene was unforgettable. In less than sixty
seconds four rails had gone down. The moment a horse-car was emptied
it was dumped off one side of the track, and a loaded car with its
horse galloping to the front had passed it. The next instant the
"empty" was lifted back on the rails, and at the end of a sixty-foot
rope the horse, ridden by a hustling boy, was being urged back to
where the rails were transferred from the regular flat cars. The clang
of the heavy iron, the continuous ring of the spike mauls, the
shouting of the orders, the throwing of each empty horse-car from the
track to make way for a loaded one, these things were all new and
stimulating to Bucks. The chief spiker laughed when the young operator
told him how fine it was. He asked Bucks to look at his watch and time
the work. In half an hour Bucks looked at his watch again. In the
interval the gang had laid eight hundred feet of track.

"I don't see how you can work so fast," declared Bucks.

"Do you know how many times," demanded the spiker, "those sledges have
to swing? There are eighteen ties and thirty-six spikes to every rail,
three hundred and fifty-two rails to every mile, and eighteen hundred
miles from Omaha to San Francisco--those sledges will swing
sixty-eight million times before the rails are full-spiked--they have
to go fast."

The words were hardly out of the chief spiker's mouth when a cry of
alarm rang from the front. Bucks, looking eagerly, saw in the west a
cloud o