the wrong color. I want a green flag."

Baxter waved the Irishman to his errand, but General Lodge looked up
from the maps and plans before him with a faint smile. He had a
dark, stern face and the bearing of a soldier.

"Casey, you can have any color you like," he said. "Maybe green
would change our luck."

"Gineral, we'll niver git no railroad built, an' if we do it'll be
the Irish thot builds it," responded Casey, and went his way.

Truly only one hope remained--that the agile and daring Neale, with
his eye of a mountaineer and his genius for estimating distance and
grade, might run a line around the gorge.

While waiting for Neale the engineers went over the maps and
drawings again and again, with the earnestness of men who could not
be beaten.

Lodge had been a major-general in the Civil War just ended, and
before that he had traveled through this part of the West many
times, and always with the mighty project of a railroad looming in
his mind. It had taken years to evolve the plan of a continental
railroad, and it came to fruition at last through many men and
devious ways, through plots and counterplots. The wonderful idea of
uniting East and West by a railroad originated in one man's brain;
he lived for it, and finally he died for it. But the seeds he had
sown were fruitful. One by one other men divined and believed,
despite doubt and fear, until the day arrived when Congress put the