Sure enough. The middle of June, when old Julesburg itself was in sight, two or three miles before, on the south side of the river there appeared a long procession of wagons, buggies, horses, mules, men, women and children.
“B’ gorry! Here they come, an’ there they go. Ain’t they kind, though, to be all waitin’ for us?”
The wagons were loaded high with canvas, lumber, and goods; men and women were perched atop, or riding in buggies, or upon saddle-animals. The procession looked like a procession of refugees from a war—there must have been over two hundred people. They certainly raised a great cloud of dust.
The track-gang paused to cheer and wave; the women and the men waved back. The graders on ahead waved and cheered, as the procession passed them, to ford the river again at old Julesburg and wait for end o’ track.
But Paddy Miles, the rugged Irishman, growled indignant.
“Bad cess to the likes of ’em. ’Tis hell on wheels, ag’in, movin’ on to ruin many a man amongst us. Sure, if the Injuns’d only sweep the whole lot from the face o’ the trail, I’d sing ‘Glory be! There’s a use for the red nagurs, after all.’”
The way these new towns sprang up was wonderful. The railroad sort of sowed them—and they grew over night like Jonah’s gourd or the bean-stalk of Jack-the-Giant-Killer. There was North Platte. Before the rails touched it, it had been nothing except a prairie-dog village. But in three weeks it had blossomed into a regular town.
Now part of its people were moving along, to tag the pay-car. These were the saloon keepers, gamblers, and speculators, in haste to fleece the railroad workers. The track men and the graders got three dollars a day, which meant rich picking for people bent upon selling nothing for something.
The land agents of the railroad company had selected the site for the next terminus town. Evidently it was across from old Julesburg, for this evening lights beamed out, in a great cluster, up the grade, where the “Hell on Wheels,” as the wrathful Pat Miles had dubbed it, was settling down like a fat spider weaving a web.
In the morning there was revealed the tents set up, and the board shanties going up—a mass of whity-brown and dingy dun, squatted upon the gravelly landscape on the railroad side of the river.