“The first I ever saw,” quoth Pat, while he and the other men eyed them askance. “A quare lot, I must say.”
A queer lot indeed, where in noon camp, wearing enormously brimmed wicker hats like flat over-turned bowls, and quilted blouses with large sleeves, and flappy blue-cotton trousers, and stubby shoes, they squatted around huge bowls of steaming rice and fished out the grains with their chop-sticks.
“I hear tell they work for a dollar a day an’ find themselves wid rice an’ pork,” pursued Pat. “Well, they look it. Sure ’twould be shame to insult a shillaly wid breakin’ it on the crown o’ such pore craturs—an’ all I ask is that they kape out o’ me way.”
The Chinamen scarcely tilted their heads, under their bowl-shaped hats, to gaze at their rivals; and the rails went on.
“’Tis a fairish grade they’re buildin’,” Pat sized up, cocking his eye. “But who cares? The rails are what’ll count, an’ we’re out o’ the mountains an’ more’n a few o’ them Chinks are naded to stop a U. Pay. gang.”
Out of the mountains! Date, last of February. Mileage in the two months, sixty, not including the sidings: but a tough sixty, battling the snows and frozen earth and the many curves.
Beautiful lay the Salt Lake Valley, under a bright sun; its thrifty Mormon ranches showing green, its towns clearly blocked, and the Great Salt Lake shimmering like silver, in the middle, with the desert ranges bluish beyond.
“Where’s Ogden, now?”
“How fur to Ogden?”
And——