He heard the ring of the riveters' hammers and the clang of flung-down rails.

The whistle of a gravel train came faintly across the grass, and he knew that for a long distance gangs of men were smoothing the roughly graded track.
In front, everything was quiet.

The pale-green sky was streaked along the horizon by a band of smoky red, and the gray prairie rolled into the foreground, checkered by clumps of birches and patches of melting snow.
In one place, the figures of a man and horses moved slowly across the fading light; but except for this, the wide landscape was without life and desolate.

Festing, however, knew it would not long remain a silent waste.

A change was coming with the railroad; in a few years, the wilderness would be covered with wheat; and noisy gasoline tractors would displace the plowman's teams.