Free The Bold Frontier by John Jakes

them. He smiled, not broadly, because he wasn’t a man to smile at death, but with a smile of peace. Neither one spoke.
    Tracy made the first overt gesture. He put his thickly clad arm around her and held her for a minute, their cold raw cheeks touching. Then they returned to the horses.
    Two days later, they rode down out of the mountains on the trail that led to California.

Hell on the High Iron
    T HE LAND HAD A familiar rolling quality about it. Rome rode westward in the early dawn, a big, stocky man in his early thirties. He followed the movements of his horse easily, his clear gray eyes sweeping over the vast prairies. Those eyes suggested a quick mind, and his whole bearing said that he knew his mind could often help him just as much as the pistol strapped to his right hip.
    It was a sort of homecoming. He followed the tracks, two bands of iron stretching ahead of him. The business was well taken care of, the morning air had a cool crispness, and he was in high spirits. The sun glinting from the rails seemed to symbolize the future, alive with pleasant prospects.
    His mood changed abruptly around noon when he rode into the end-of-track of the Kansas & Western. The place had an air of idleness. Here and there, groups of section hands sat near piles of ties, drinking coffee and playing cards. He heard no clang of hammers on spikes, no curses of men sweating under the sun. Work had stopped. The rails no longer crept inevitably toward the Rockies.
    As troubleshooter it would be his job to iron out whatever was slowing up the work. His mind moved rapidly over the possible causes as he dismounted and tied his horse to the platform rail of the office car. He took the steps two at a time and slammed the door behind him.
    Ben Hamilton, the wiry, white-haired head of the Kansas & Western, sat behind his desk, staring at Rome over the top of a coffeepot. His eyes were red with sleeplessness. Rome waited for him to speak, sensing defeat in the slump of Hamilton’s shoulders.
    At last the older man sighed. He switched his gaze to the coffeepot and poured himself another cup. “Hello, Mark. You want some coffee? It’s cold …”
    “No, thanks,” Rome answered. He swung his leg across a chair before the desk, resting his arms on the back.
    “You don’t look very good, Ben.”
    Hamilton laughed in a cracked tone and gulped some of the coffee. “I guess not, Mark. How’s things in Saint Louis?”
    Rome gestured. “All cleared up. The hitch was coming from back East. We’ll be getting rails and spikes to spare in a couple of days.”
    “Don’t know as it’ll do us much good,” Hamilton commented sourly.
    “Ben, you might as well spill it. It’s my job.”
    The older man sighed again. “All right, dammit. It’s simple enough. We’re stopped. Turns out we don’t have the right of way we need through three of the spreads. The owners refuse to sell. So we can’t meet our contract. It’ll mean an extra week if it turns out that we have to bypass Warknife.”
    Rome sat up abruptly. “Warknife!” He hadn’t realized they were that close.
    “Yeah. You know the town?”
    Rome nodded. “I was born there. Lived there until I was eighteen, before I went East.”
    “Fine.” Hamilton’s tone was sarcastic. “You must have a lot of friends there. One hell of a lot of good that’ll do us.”
    Friends. The word stung Rome. More than friends. Cathy Thompson. He remembered her, painfully. Remembered how much he’d been in love with her, how many times they had ridden together, hunted together—and laughed at the antics of the young calves together.
    Rome knew then it wouldn’t work. The cattle were in her blood. They were her life and her heritage. She could only see cattlemen, and no one else. For him there had been another call, from the East, from the world where the iron horse was beginning to move and bellow as it cut the continent in half. Since that morning, years ago, when he saw locomotives standing on the