They were wanderers and vagabonds, but they were also men who had faced the stinging frost on the ranges and the blinding snow.
They had held their lives lightly as they flung the tall wooden bridges over thundering canons, or hewed room for the steel track out of their black recesses with toil incredible.

Flood and frost, falling trees, and giant-powder that exploded prematurely, had as yet failed to crush the life out of them, and, after all, it is, perhaps, men of their kind who have set the deepest mark upon the wilderness..