“Yes, sir. I’ll be there,” Terry exclaimed, rejoicing.
“How about this other lad?” pursued the general, a twinkle in his eye as he scanned the red-headed Jimmie Muldoon. “Does he want to go out into the Indian country?”
“No, sorr; plaze, sorr,” Jimmie apologized. “Sure, we have plinty Injuns where we be, an’ I’ll stay wid the Irish. Me father’s chief spiker, sorr, an’ me mother washes clothes, an’ me brother’s water carrier an’ I’ve another brother who’s like to have Terry’s job; so it’s the Muldoon family that’ll see the end o’ track through to Salt Lake.”
“All right,” the general laughed. “Stay ‘wid the Irish.’ You’ve a loyal corps, Casement. But both you boys go back to your train and keep out of trouble.”
With Jimmie, Terry was glad enough to beat a retreat to the boarding-train, set out a little way in the cleaner brush and sand, where the air was pure and the night was peaceful. A number of the men, also, soon had enough of “town,” and were already turning in, to sleep. But there was no sleep in new Julesburg. All night the hubbub and hurly-burly continued, in spite of the police stationed by General Casement.
However, tomorrow this would be left behind. Many a mile yet into the north of west stretched the grade, waiting for the rails; and beyond the grade itself stretched the surveyors’ location stakes; and beyond the line of location stakes stretched widely the desert and the mountains, where other stakes were being driven—and where Terry Richards was about to explore, in company with Scout Sol Judy and no less a personage than the bold General Dodge, chief engineer of the whole road.
George Stanton, somewhere out there, having fun while he chopped stakes and maybe even held the end of a surveyor’s chain, was likely to get the surprise of his life.
CHAPTER VII
OUT INTO THE SURVEY COUNTRY
It was a tremendous large party. In fact, it looked like a regular military excursion, instead of a survey trip, when in the early morning it moved out from new Julesburg (the “roaring town” was dead tired at this hour) and headed northwest up Lodge Pole Creek by the old Overland Stage road on the Oregon Trail.
There were two companies, B and M, of the Second Cavalry, from Fort McPherson, commanded by Captain (or Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel) J. K. Mizner and First Lieutenant James N. Wheelan, to ride the country and guard the long train of supply wagons. There was Surgeon Henry B. Terry, of the army medical corps—a slender, black-moustached, active man in major’s shoulder-straps. There were the teamsters and farriers and wagoners and cooks and what-not.