; and your only hope of getting food, materials, and sometimes
water. Ah, you would have had excitement enough to satisfy you had you
been one of that company of workmen! On improvised trucks they put up
bunks and here they took turns in sleeping while some of their party
stood guard to warn them of night raids from Indians and wild beasts.
Even in the daytime outposts had to be stationed; and more than once, in
spite of every precaution, savages descended on the little groups of
builders, overpowered them, and slaughtered many of the number or
carried away their provisions and left them to starve. Sometimes
marauders tore up the tracks, thereby breaking the connection with the
camps in the rear from which aid could be summoned; and in early
railroad literature we find many a tale of heroic engineers who ran
their locomotives back through almost certain destruction in order to
procure help for their comrades. Supply trains were held up and swept
clean of their stores; paymasters were robbed, and sometimes murdered,
so no money reached the employees; every sort of calamity befell the
men. Hundreds of the ten thousand Chinese imported to work at a
microscopic wage died of sickness or exposure to the extreme heat or
cold."

"Gee!" gasped Stephen, "I'd no idea it was so bad as all that!"

"Most persons have but a faint conception of the price paid for our
railways--paid not alone in money but in human life," answered Mr.
Tolman. "The route of the western railroads, you see, did not lie solely
through flat, thickly wooded country. Our great land, you must remember,
is made up of a variety of natural formations, and in crossing from the
Atlantic coast to that of the Pacific we get them one after another. In
contrast to the forests of mighty trees, with their tangled undergrowth,
there were stretches of prairie where no hills broke the level ground;
another region contained miles and miles of alkali desert, dry and
scorching, where the sun blazed so fiercely down on the steel rails that
they became too hot to touch. Here men died of sunstroke and of fever;
and some died for want of water. Then directly in the railroad's path
arose the towering peaks of the Sierras and Rockies whose snowy crests
must be crossed, and whose cold, storms and gales must be endured.
Battling with these hardships the workmen were forced to drill holes in
the rocky summits and bolt their rough huts down to the earth to
prevent them from being blown a