stopped in a construction
camp, near the end of the rails, and after a hasty breakfast Bucks
walked with the engineers up the track to the head-quarters of the
rail-laying gang.

The air was frosty. During the night snow had fallen, and as Bucks
followed his party the sun burst over the plain that they had crossed
in the night and lighted the busy camp with a flood of gold. It was a
camp such as few American boys had ever seen and of a type that no boy
will ever see again. Everywhere along the cuts and hillsides and in
sheltered spots the men had made temporary quarters by burrowing into
the clay or soft rock and making dugouts and canvas-roofed huts, with
earthen sides for walls.

But not all were so enterprising as this. Some laborers were camping
in old hogsheads. Even packing-boxes served others for shelter, but
were all so disposed within the cuts and among the ridges of the
railroad grade as to be safe from Indian forays. And along the
completed railroad, all the way from the Missouri River, material and
supply trains were moving to supply this noisy, helter-skelter camp,
which seemed to Bucks all confusion, yet was in reality all energy.

General Jack Casement, in charge, came forward to greet Stanley.

"And they tell me, general," said Stanley, "you are laying a mile a
day."

"If you would give us the ties, colonel," returned Casement,
short-bearded and energetic, "we should be laying two miles a day."

"I have turned the Missouri River country upside down for timber,"
returned Stanley. "The trouble is to get the material forward over a
single track so many hundred miles. However, we shall be getting ties
down the Spider Water within two weeks. I am on my way up there now to
see what the contractors are doing."

It was the first intimation Bucks had had as to the object of the
trip. Casement had a number of subjects to lay before his superior
while within consulting distance, and Bob Scott, an hour later,
announced that Stanley would not move on for two days. This left his
attendants free, and when Scott, low-voiced and good-natured, asked
Bucks if he wanted to go out on the Sweet Grass Plains with him after
an antelope, Bucks accepted eagerly. The two saddled horses and Bucks,
with a rifle borrowed from Sublette, followed Scott across a low-lying
range of hills broken by huge stone crags and studded with wind-blown
and stunted cedars, out upon the far-reaching expanse of an open
plain. The scene was i