The Lincoln car was being kept busy chasing the construction, and accepting the track in sections of twenty to forty miles at a time, for the Government.
End o’ track traveled too rapidly for it. Far westward, in western Nevada the Central was putting in its best licks, too. One day its track-gang laid five miles of rails, and wired the news to New York, as a record. Pat was told, and grunted; and that same week the U. P. gang laid six miles in a day. The Central heard, and retorted by laying seven miles at one rush.
“An’ what o’ that?” growled Pat. “Sivin, you say? Wait till we get our toes set in a likely place, an’ we’ll hand ’em eight, as sugar for their tay.”
In the middle of September another supply base had been planted—Green River, 150 miles from Benton, and 845 miles from Omaha.
Three hundred miles of track, counting sidings, laid in five months of mainly “bad weather an’ worse wather,” as Paddy said. Average, sixty miles a month. The news was flashed to New York.
When the pay-car pulled in once more, Terry and George celebrated again in the Home Cooking restaurant. Pat himself was well pleased. So were General Dodge and General Casement. That had been a hard stint, in the desert, but the desert was conquered.
Only a thousand people gathered at Green River. End o’ track was traveling too fast also for some of the toughs who sought to make “roaring” towns—and some of them had been killed on this westward trail. But the Home Cooking restaurant bravely kept up the march.
It was a great institution—this Home Cooking restaurant. The two women were being called the “Heroines of the U. P.” Everybody respected them, and they still did a splendid business in good coffee and pies and doughnuts—“like your mother used to make.” But Terry and George hid the suspicion that they stuck it out on purpose to make a home for their men-folk.
George, because he was attached to the pay-car, which had its headquarters in the terminals, drew the big end of the bargain. He might eat and sleep “at home” almost every night. His father, though, out on survey, didn’t get in at all.
As for Terry, he and his father came in every night, as long as they might, between terminals. Old 119 and its crew—Engineer Richards and Fireman Sweeny—had been transferred from the boarding-train to the leading construction-train; and this was great, because while they were within twenty miles of the terminal they could scoot back, for supper and breakfast and a visit.