The general smiled.
“No. The grades are too sharp and there are too many ravines and gulches, too many streams, too many detours. A railroad always seeks the path of least resistance; and we’re limited by the Government to the grade of 116 feet to the mile, at the maximum. The Union Pacific will keep to the open country, and do away with curves as much as possible. Sharp tangents cut down speed. Lack of water doesn’t bother a railroad, if wells for tanks can be drilled, at intervals. In fact, the fewer streams to cross, the better.”
A month had gone by since from Sherman Summit they had descended a thousand feet into the Laramie Plains. It had been a continuous hunting and camping trip with the Indians at safe distance. The general had traveled by easy stints, to favor the health of General Rawlins, and let Geologist Van Lennep make his investigation for coal and ballast. A courier from Sanders had brought a dispatch saying that Mr. Evans’ wife was ill, in the East, and he had turned back.
The Laramie Plains had proved to be a great basin or park, watered by trout streams, tinted with red soil and rocks, and green brush and trees, broken by strange buttes and spires, and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. It stretched fifty miles wide, and 100 miles long, in northwesterly direction. The railroad line was to follow it and take advantage of such an open way.
Several times they had signs of other parties—the Browne surveying crews, General Dodge pronounced them. Now and again an abandoned surveyor’s flag fluttered from bush or pole.
“Who’d ’a thought when Jim Bridger and I trapped our beaver and fought for our meat in here, that the iron hoss’d be rampaging through before ever we lost our scalps,” Sol Judy mused. “That is, if we don’t lose those same scalps in the meantime.”
They followed down a stream which emptied into the Platte, and camped this night on the banks of the North Platte itself, which flowing north from Colorado turned for the east and joined the South Platte 300 miles away, at North Platte Station on the railroad, in Nebraska.
“And next year at this time the railroad will be here, I guess,” Terry ventured. “Wonder if the river knows.”
“It doesn’t seem possible,” Mr. Corwith mused.
“And in another year the rails will be climbing those mountains that look like cloud banks,” added young Mr. Duff.