small foundry could have been kept busy beating out V.C.'s. They could
not know, these silent heroes fighting far out in the wilderness, what a
glorious country they were conquering--what an empire they were opening
for all the people of the land. Occasionally there came to the men at
the front old, worn newspapers, telling wild stories of the failure of
the enterprise. At other times they heard of changes in the Board of
Directors, the election of a new President, tales of jobs and looting,
but they concerned themselves only with the work in hand. No breath of
scandal ever reached these pioneer trail-makers, or, if it did, it
failed to find a lodging-place, but blew by. Ample opportunity they had
to plunder, to sell supplies to the Indians or the Mormons, but no one
of the men who did the actual work of bridging the continent has ever
been accused of a selfish or dishonest act.

During his second winter of service Bradford slept away out in the
Rockies, studying the snowslides and drifts. For three winters they did
this, and in summer they set stakes, keeping one eye out for Indians and
the other for wash-outs, and when, after untold hardships, privation,
and youth-destroying labor, they had located a piece of road, out of the
path of the slide and the washout, a well-groomed son of a politician
would come up from the Capital, and, in the capacity of Government
expert, condemn it all. Then strong men would eat their whiskers and the
weaker ones would grow blasphemous and curse the country that afforded
no facilities for sorrow-drowning.

Once, at the end of a long, hard winter, when spring and the Sioux came,
they found Bradford and a handful of helpers just breaking camp in a
sheltered hollow in the hills. Hiding in the crags, the warriors waited
until Bradford went out alone to try to shoot a deer, and incidentally
to sound a drift, and then they surrounded him. He fought until his gun