Virgie was having the time of her life, riding up and down track in the engine—bent upon being the “first passenger across,” she insisted.
Green River did not last long. It was the best built of any of the roaring towns; quite a number of its buildings were adobe, or dried clay, put up to stay and to be warm winter quarters; but the railroad decided to locate its division point farther on, and staked out another town, Bryan, fourteen miles.
The bridge over the Green River was waiting; the Red Desert and the Bitter Creek Desert had been crossed at last; the Wasatch Mountains ahead were already whitened by the first snows; and presently Green River town was left behind, deserted. Everybody—including the Home Cooking restaurant—moved on to Bryan, and Bryan “roared.”
“I’ll go to end o’ track tomorrow with you, Terry. I want to see,” repeated Virgie.
“I’ll be there, as usual,” Terry’s father laughed, grinning. “You can’t lose Virgie and me and 119.”
“It’s pay-day. So I’ll be there with the pay-car, you can bet,” George asserted.
“Well, you want to start mighty early, then, or we’ll be out of sight,” bragged Terry. “They’ll begin at seven sharp and work right through to five-thirty with only half an hour nooning. That’s ten hours. Can’t you come, ma; you and Mrs. Stanton?”
“Oh, dear, no! We’ve got people to feed.”
“Maybe we can slip away once, between times,” promised George’s mother.
“I can take you up, on one trip of the construction-train,” Engineer Richards proposed. “By the way they talk, they’ll keep me busy hauling iron. Eight miles of track calls for something over 300 car-loads of material, and they haven’t near enough iron on their dumps.”