filled with hideous clamor. The men began to shoot at
gliding shadows, grayer than the gloom. And every shot brought a volley
in return. Smoke mingled with the gloom. In the slight intervals between
rifleshots there were swift, rustling sounds and sharp thuds from
arrows. Then the shrill strife of sound became continuous; it came from
all around and closed in upon the doomed caravan. It swelled and rolled
away and again there was silence.

4

In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the
Wyoming hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical. They had
charge of the laying out of the Union Pacific Railroad.

This party, escorted by a company of United States troops under Colonel
Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable. And now,
having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of the Rockies
they were halted by a seemingly impassable barrier--a gorge 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