nervous, and that he coughed a great deal. He watched the old fellow,
and found that he was not eating well, and that he slept very little.
Heney asked Foy to rest, but the latter shook his head. Hawkins and
Hislop and Heney talked the matter over in Hislop's tent, called Foy in,
and demanded that he go down and out. Foy was coughing constantly, but
he choked it back long enough to tell the three men what he thought of
them. He had worked hard and faithfully to complete the job, and now
that only one level mile remained to be railed, would they send the old
man down the hill? "I will not budge," said Foy, facing his friends;
"an' when you gentlemen ar-re silibratin' th' vict'ry at the top o' the
hill ahn Chuesday nixt, Hugh Foy'll be wood ye. Do you moind that,
now?"

Foy steadied himself by a tent-pole and coughed violently. His eyes were
glassy, and his face flushed with the purplish flush that fever gives.

"Enough of this!" said the chief engineer, trying to look severe. "Take
this message, sign it, and send it at once."

Foy caught the bit of white clip and read:--

"CAPTAIN O'BRIEN,

SKAGWAY.

"Save a berth for me on the 'Rosalie.'"

They thought, as they watched him, that the old road-maker was about to
crush the paper in his rough right hand; but suddenly his face
brightened, he reached for a pencil, saying, "I'll do it," and when he
had added "next trip" to the message, he signed it, folded it, and took
it over to the operator.

So it happened that, when the last spike was driven at the summit, on
February 20, 1899, the old foreman, who had driven the first, drove the
last, and it was _his_ last spike as well. Doctor Whiting guessed it was
pneumonia.

When the road had been completed to Lake Bennett, the owners came over
to see it; and when they saw what had been done, despite the prediction
that Dawson was dead and that the Cape Nome boom would equal that of the
Klondike, they authorized the construction of another hundred miles of
road which would connect with the Yukon below the dreaded White Horse
Rapids. Jack and Foy and Hislop are gone; and when John Hislop passed
away, the West lost one of the most modest and unpretentious, yet one of
the best and bravest, one of the purest minded men that ever saw the sun
go down behind a snowy range.

NUMBER THREE

One winter night, as the west-bound express was pulling out of Omaha, a
drunken man climbed aboard. The young Sup