Jimmie uttered an Irish whoop.
“I’ve ridden a horse around the world,” he shouted. “But wance is enough. A reg’lar cin-taur I be!”
George had leave to spend the rest of the day here. That was good. It insured his being on hand bright and early, for the great event, tomorrow.
The track-layers knocked off work. With many of them, the long job was finished. Only a few were to be needed, now, and the rest only waited for their pay, or for the joining of the tracks.
They lay around, smoking their pipes, or celebrated in the Promontory camp, or proceeded down to Blue Creek, where there was more amusement. A crew of the track ballasters proceeded to settle the ties. The boarding-train stood at ease, and the construction-train, having unloaded, pulled out for Blue Creek, itself. Jimmie Muldoon and his brother turned their rail-truck horses out to grass.
The grade stretched on, across the flat summit, westward still, and out of sight. Its ties had all been placed; it needed only the Central Pacific rails. A few Chinamen were working on it.
The summit of Promontory Point was a sort of pass over the end of Promontory Range. It was a plateau, covered with grass and sage-brush—a basin held between a high ridge north and a high ridge south. Only a glimpse of the shining Salt Lake might be seen. But by climbing the south ridge, a fellow got a fine view.
From here, all the mighty lake lay outspread, below, fringed by its mountains and broken by its islands—one could see the smoke of Ogden, thirty or so miles in air-line although fifty-two by track, and even of Salt Lake City, farther southeastward. And where the grade westward dipped down from the plateau, into the sagy desert, could be sighted the construction camp of the Central Pacific people, fourteen miles away.
“There’s a big crowd of ’em, all right,” Terry remarked.
“It’ll take a big crowd to bring up the stuff for ten miles of track at once, and have iron and everything ready.”