tested Neale.

"Pard, I reckon I'm fur enough back east right heah," said Larry,
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
Larry, with a grin.

"Red, you aren't afraid," asserted Neale, positively.

The cowboy flushed and looked insulted. "If any one but you said thet to
me he'd hev to eat it."

"I beg your pardon, old man. But I'm surprised. It doesn't seem like
you.... And then--Lord! I'll miss you."

"No more 'n I'll miss you, pard," replied Larry.

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'd ambush you like an Injun when you come back!"

"You wouldn't," rejoined Neale. He wanted to laugh but had no mirth.

Larry 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 some day."

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, representing two 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, together with 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 box-cars 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 unutterably proud. He had helped survey the line along which the
train was n