Twenty years earlier our predecessors, who laid the line and who used the same tool-house, took with them each a rifle every day in readiness for attacks of Indians. The worn sockets and rests were still to be seen, where the rifles had stood at night against an inner wall. Giving the car a start in the direction of Kearney we jumped aboard, and each taking a handle of the crank, we were soon flying over the rails. The sun was obscured, the early morning air was cool, and the rapid movement exhilarating, so that the first impression of the job was a jolly one. But pumping a hand-car is not the whole of a navvy’s work. Soon we reached the western end of our section, where there met us on their car the gang of the section next our own. Osborn had some talk with the other boss about certain details of the work, then lifting the car from the line, we settled to the day’s task. Osborn and Tyler worked together and Sullivan and I. Sullivan seemed not to mind having a green hand to break in, for he set about it with energy and not a little skill. There were sunken sleepers that had to be raised and tamped, and new coupling bars put in to replace those that had split, and spikes to be driven where the old ones were loose, and nuts to be tightened that were working free of their bolts. Five hours on end of this were fatiguing; it was the drill, drill of rough manual labor, but with the difference of some variety, and there could not have been a better partner than Sullivan. He taught me how to tamp about the sleepers and put the new bars in place and tighten the nuts, but the noon signal was welcome as we heard it sounded by the steam whistles in Kearney. We joined Osborn and Tyler then, and taking our dinner-pails from the hand-car, we all sat down in the prairie grass, settling ourselves to an hour of keen enjoyment. Slices of bread and cold meat and a bit of sausage and a piece of pie and cheese with cold tea, made up each man’s ration and laid the foundation for a smoke. Rough hand labor is always hard, however trained to it one’s muscles may have been, and ten hours of it daily are apt to have a deadening effect upon the mind, and time drags heavily to the end. Yet, when the nooning is reached, or the day’s work is done, there come with meat and drink a feeling of renewal that others cannot know as workingmen know it, and a solace in tobacco that is the very lap of ease. As we lay there in the prairie grass, our eyes following, dreamily, the smoke as it curled in the warm sunlight, the talk drifting aimlessly, eddying now and then about a topic that held it for a moment, then flowing free again. Once it came my way. “When you was living East, did you ever go to New York?” asked the boss. “Yes, quite often,” I said. “Was you ever in Wall Street?” “Many times.” “Well, that’s where them” (I omit the intervening qualifying terms) “bloated bond-holders lives that we poor devils out here has to work for.”