“Fellars, my pard heah is hurt deep,” said Larry. “The girl you spoke of was his sweetheart.”
“Young man, we only know what Al told us,” replied the trapper. “He
said the only time he ever left the lass alone was the very day she was
taken. Al come home to find the cabin red-hot ashes. Everythin’ gone. No
sign of the lass. No sign of murder. She was jest carried off. There was
tracks—hoss tracks an’ boot tracks, to the number of three or four men
an’ hosses. Al trailed ‘em. But thet very night he had to hold up to
keep from bein’ drowned, as we had to hyar. Wal, next day he couldn’t
find any tracks. But he kept on huntin’ fer a few days, an’ then give
up. He said she’d be dead by then—said she wasn’t the kind thet could
have lived more ‘n a day with men like them. Some hard customers are
driftin’ by from the gold-fields. An’ Bill an’ I, hyar, ain’t in love
with this railroad idee. It ‘ll ruin the country fer trappin’ an’
livin’.”
Some weeks later a gaunt and ragged cowboy limped into North
Platte, walking beside a broken horse, upon the back of which swayed and
reeled a rider tied in the saddle.
It was not a sight to interest any except the lazy or the curious, for in that day such things were common in North Platte. The horse had bullet creases on his neck; the rider wore a bloody shirt; the gaunt pedestrian had a bandaged arm.
Neale lay ill of a deeper wound while the bullet-hole healed in his side. Day and night Larry tended him or sat by him or slept near him in a shack on the outskirts of the camp. Shock, grief, starvation, exhaustion, loss of blood and sleep—all these brought Warren Neale close to death. He did not care to live. It was the patient, loyal friend who fought fever and heartbreak and the ebbing tide of life.
Baxter and Henney visited North Platte and called to see him, and later the chief came and ordered Larry to take Neale to the tents of the corps. Every one was kind, solicitous, earnest. He had been missed. The members of his corps knew the strange story of Allie Lee; they guessed the romance and grieved over the tragedy. They did all they could do, and the troop doctor added his attention; but it was the nursing, the presence, and the spirit of Larry King that saved Neale.
He got well and went back to work with the cowboy for his helper.
In that camp of toil and disorder none but the few with whom Neale was brought in close touch noted anything singular about him. The engineers, however, observed that he did not work so well, nor so energetically, nor so accurately. His enthusiasm was lacking. The cowboy, always with him, was the one who saw the sudden spells of somber abstraction and the poignant, hopeless, sleepless pain, the eternal regret. And as Neale slackened in his duty Larry King grew more faithful.
Neale began to drink and gamble. For long the cowboy fought, argued, appealed against this order of things, and then, failing to change or persuade Neale, he went to gambling and drinking with him. But then it was noted that Neale never got under the influence of liquor or lost materially at cards. The cowboy spilled the contents of Neale’s glass and played the game into his hands.
Both of them shrank instinctively from the women of the camp. The sight
of anything feminine hurt.
North Platte stirred with the quickening stimulus of the approach
of the rails and the trains, and the army of soldiers whose duty was to
protect the horde of toilers, and the army of tradesmen and parasites
who lived off them.
The construction camp of the graders moved on westward, keeping ahead of the camps of the layers.