"Grey, Zane - The U.P. Trail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grey Zane)

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In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the
Wyoming hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical. They
had charge of the laying out of the Union Pacific Railroad.

This party, escorted by a company of United States troops under
Colonel Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable.
And now, having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of
the Rockies they were halted by a seemingly impassable barrier--a
gorge too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.

General Lodge, chief engineer of the corps, gave an order to one of
his assistants. "Put young Neale on the job. If we ever survey a
line through this awful place we'll owe it to him."

The assistant, Baxter, told an Irishman standing by and smoking a
short, black pipe to find Neale and give him the chief's orders. The
Irishman, Casey by name, was raw-boned, red-faced, and hard-
featured, a man inured to exposure and rough life. His expression
was one of extreme and fixed good humor, as if his face had been
set, mask-like, during a grin. He removed the pipe from his lips.

"Gineral, the flag I've been holdin' fer thot dom' young surveyor is
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