Collis waited for a moment, and then said hoarsely, ‘How’s Sarah?’
‘Sarah? Oh, she’s quite well. She’s gone to stay with friends in Calistoga. She’s gotten over her … difficulties.’
‘Do you still blame me for what happened to her?’
‘Partly, I suppose,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘It was my fault, too, of course. I tried to keep her captive in her own home. I never allowed her to go to the parties she wanted to attend, or walk out with the boys she liked. But then I expected her to behave like a well-bred girl from Virginia, instead of a tomboy from Northern California with a mind of her own. I educated her one way and expected her to behave in another, and there isn’t any wonder she got confused. But you weren’t much of a friend to her, either, were you? You and your calotypes.’
Collis looked at him for a long time. ‘You know it was me?’
‘Who else could it have been? Who else has your particular brand of ruthless ingenuity? But Sarah told her mother everything about it, in the end, and how she volunteered to pose as a model. It was that confession of hers more than anything else that helped me to understand what was happening to California, and what was happening to me.’
Collis said nothing. Laurence Melford walked around his chair and stood over him, his hand up to his face, and smiled.
‘I suppose you’re wondering how I feel about the fifty thousand dollars I gave you. Well –I just want to reassure you that it can stay where it is –invested in the Sierra Pacific Railroad. After your little bit of chiselling in Washington, and the way you’ve gotten this railroad started, I do believe that the money might be as safe there as any place else. But I would like my stock certificates, in case you try to pull another one of your stunts on me.’
Collis smiled back at Laurence Melford and nodded his head. ‘Very well. I’ll have our attorneys draw them up in the morning.’
He got up to go, and Laurence Melford saw him to the door. As he put on his hat and turned to say goodbye, Laurence Melford said, ‘I hope you won’t take this conversation the wrong way.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Collis.
‘I hope you won’t take it to mean that I approve of you, or of what you have done. I don’t –not for one moment. All I am telling you is that I have learned to accept the inevitability of your destiny, and the history of this state; and the inevitability of the fact that if I try to stand against you, I will most certainly be broken.’
Collis thought about that, then pulled a face. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he said. ‘History can’t be helped.’
He walked off, and Laurence Melford stood by the open front door of his house watching him go. Collis turned back twice, but didn’t wave. The third time he turned back, Laurence Melford had gone inside and closed his door behind him.
He stood at last on the track beyond Newcastle, watching the Irish and Chinese labourers levelling the roadbed with their picks and shovels, and looking around at the impossible clutter of makeshift huts, sagging tents, smoking cooking fires, and rows of flatcars with their loads of iron rails. He wore riding boots and a thick plaid coat, for it was September now, and the railroad was gradually making its way up the lower slopes of the Sierra foothills.
A few yards up ahead of him was the City of Sacramento, the largest and most powerful locomotive they owned. It was a ten-wheeler, especially built for them in Philadelphia. They had needed it so desperately that Collis had ordered it taken to pieces on the East Coast, shipped to Panama, unloaded at Aspinwall and carried on flatcars as far as Panama City, then loaded on to a Pacific steamer and shipped as far as San Francisco before it was eventually loaded on to lighters and brought up the Sacramento River. It had arrived quickly. It had taken only thirty-five days from the works at Philadelphia to the railhead in the Sierra foothills, but it had cost the S.P. more than $37,000.
Collis had another severe cost problem. The federal loans were coming through at a steady rate, but they were being paid in paper dollars. In California, the only trusted currency was gold, and he was having to exchange the paper money for bullion before he could pay his wages, his expenses, or even the price of railroad ties. The exchange rate was right down to fifty-seven cents for the dollar, and that meant that more than forty per cent of their precious $48,000 a mile was being wasted.
He had done his best to make up for losses. The S.P. graders had prepared a supply road as far as Dutch Flat, and since 1 July Collis had been charging wagon teams a heavy toll to carry their loads along it on their way to Washoe, Humboldt, and Reese River. But the company was still broke, and every morning Leland and Collis and Charles would sit around the table at 54K Street over coffee and decide whether they were going to continue or not.
That Thursday morning, the accounts had shown that business was picking up a little; the thirty-one mile route they had opened between Sacramento and Newcastle was beginning to show a profit. And that was one of the reasons why Collis had taken the 6.15 train from Sacramento to the Sierra Pacific terminus, and then ridden out on horseback to see how work was progressing further along the track. He also wanted to talk to Charles about Chinese labourers.
The air was crisp, although Collis suspected it would grow hot during the afternoon. The dull clanging of rails being dropped from their flatcars was immediately followed by the furious metallic clatter of hammers on railroad spikes. The men who were lifting and placing the rails in position hardly spoke.
Charles came out of the dusty tent marked ‘Construction Chief’ and walked across the track to where Collis was standing. His red face was beetroot-coloured from a summer spent outdoors on the tracks, but his mood was confident and cheerful. There was nothing he liked better than to spend his time in the company of men, eating, drinking, swearing, and smoking; and although women were in short supply in the mining camps of the Sierra foothills, an occasional visit from a dogged and devoted Wappo woman was enough, as he put it, ‘to keep my juices in good condition.’
Best of all, he was away from Mary on legitimate business, and for what could turn out to be years.
‘Well,’ said Collis, as Charles approached him up the railroad embankment. ‘How’s it going?’
‘That cut up ahead is slowing us down,’ said Charles. ‘We’ve got eight hundred feet of aggregate to excavate there, at an average of sixty-three feet deep. I’ve tried digging, but that stuff’s almost as hard as granite, so I’ve started blasting with black powder. Trouble is, black powder’s damned short.’
Collis shaded his eyes and looked up ahead. The wooded Sierra foothills rose sharply here, and to maintain the level grade of the railroad they were going to have to blast out a sharp V-shape. He remembered the place from the time they had ridden out here to survey the mountains with Doc Kates. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time that the trail they had followed with their wagon would be impassable for a locomotive.
‘How much powder do you need?’ Collis asked Charles, with his eyes half closed against the bright sunlight.
‘Four, five thousand kegs. There’s going to be more blasting up ahead.’
‘All right,’ said Collis, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Collis spent the rest of the day inspecting the railroad camp’s facilities, and watching the labourers at work to see how efficient they were. He ate a rough lunch of pork and biscuits out of a tin bowl, washed down with whisky out of a coffee mug, so that the labourers wouldn’t realise he was drinking. Before he left to catch the five o’clock No. 3 Freight Passenger train from Newcastle back to Sacramento, he took Charles aside.
‘You’ve got a hundred Chinese now,’ he said. ‘You haven’t told me how they’re making out.’
Charles tugged at his nose. ‘I’m not sure that I like them too much,’ he said.
‘Don’t they work hard?’
‘They work very well,’ said Charles. ‘When the whistle goes, they’re up and ready, which is more than I can say for the Irish. But they keep themselves to themselves. They cook their own fo
od, drink their own drinks, and about the worst I’ve ever seen them do is smoke a pipe of opium ash.’
‘Charles,’ Collis reminded him, ‘we’re trying to get ourselves a railroad built here. This isn’t a travelling circus, for your own personal entertainment. This railroad has to be built, and in my opinion the Chinese are the best men to do it. Now, I’m sending a hundred more up by the middle of next week, and I want to hear that you’ve treated them well.’
Charles said nothing, but rubbed his hand around the back of his sunburned neck, and turned towards the railhead, where yet another rail was being slid off a flatcar on to the ties. Again, there was that deep, clanging sound, that sound you can only ever hear around a railroad construction camp; one of the sounds of America. ‘I’m going back to Sacramento on the five o’clock train,’ Collis said. ‘I’ll get your powder as soon as I can.’
Charles raised his hand in silent salute, and Collis turned immediately and walked away.
It took Collis five weeks to secure all the kegs of gunpowder that Charles was going to need for Bloomer Cut. At first, his telegraphed request to the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, was turned down. Stanton thought that railroad contractors were ‘profiteers, and adventurers’, and said so.
Collis was left with only one option. Without Stanton’s knowledge, he wrote to President Lincoln, asking for the gunpowder. Lincoln, who knew nothing of Stanton’s feelings about railroaders, signed the requisition order at once, declaring it ‘very proper’.
As late summer faded into early fall, Charles and his workmen blasted their way through the cut, and continued their slow progress up towards Dutch Flat and the distant peaks of the High Sierras. It was a cold winter, and again and again they had to dig away snowdrifts just to get down to the roadbed.
Charles sent a testy note to Collis: ‘It is cold, and the going is very difficult. What’s more, my Wappo lady has ceased her visits, on account of the weather and the distance. Incidentally, I shall need more Chinese. At least a hundred more, as soon as you can.’
As the Sierra Pacific pushed ahead, Charles’s need for Chinese labourers grew increasingly more urgent. The deep ravine of Sailor’s Spur was filled in entirely by hand-quarried loads of granite and shale, excavated from the ridges ahead by the blue-pyjama’d Chinese and carried back to the ravine by horse wagons. Collis went to San Francisco in March 1865 and arranged with Mr Kwang for labour contractors to visit farms and villages in Canton, in China, and to recruit young men and boys for immediate shipment to California.
The contractors would lend the recruits their steamship fare – forty dollars – and recover it, with interest, from the wages on the railroad.
Charles, grudgingly, had to admit that Collis had been right about the Chinese. ‘They refuse nothing,’ he wrote. ‘When we were filling in Sailor’s Spur, I had them working twenty-four hours a day, and there were no complaints at all.’
Collis, on his next visit to San Francisco, went to the Kong Chow temple on Pine Street and lit incense for Wang-Pu. He told nobody, and nobody ever knew, except those deities in whom Wang-Pu had believed. Later, he ate alone at the International, and for the first time in his life he was conscious that diners at other tables were whispering about him. He heard the murmur of ‘railroad millionaire’ and ‘Sierra Pacific’; and somehow it was only then that he realised just how extraordinary the task that he had set himself was.
Even now, with the tracks laid as far as Dutch Flat, there were still many serious politicians who didn’t believe that the railroad could ever be completed. A Democratic adversary of Leland’s in the California senate had declared that he wouldn’t risk his money on a ticket for the Sierra Pacific Railroad, even for his grandchildren. It was all a fantasy, and the directors of the railroad company were either fools or swindlers.
Collis knew about the accusations of swindling, but he kept his temper. He had a grave marker to go back to, in the cemetery of Sacramento’s Roman Catholic Church, and he knew how binding his commitment to that grave marker was always going to be.
During the fall of 1864 and the spring of 1865, the war news which reached Sacramento from Washington began to show signs of a Confederate collapse. The weeks after Collis visited Charles at Bloomer Cut, William Tecumseh Sherman, whom Collis had first seen worrying a pork chop in San Francisco, captured Atlanta, and burned it. The following month, Sheridan swept through the Shenandoah Valley. This sudden turn in the Union’s fortunes on the battlefield guaranteed President Lincoln’s re-election in November, and also an administration that would still be sympathetic towards the speedy completion of the Pacific railroad.
Throughout the winter, Collis heard reports that Sherman was savaging his way through the Confederate heartland, burning houses and farms and wrecking factories in an all-out attempt to break both the economy and the spirit of the South. On 3 April, a hot, idle day in Sacramento, a telegraph message came through that Grant had at last captured the secessionists’ capital of Richmond; and six days later, the news arrived that Lee had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox.
The most stunning message of all, though, came five days after that – on Good Friday, 14 April. President Lincoln had been shot and killed at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, while watching an undistinguished play called Our American Cousin. His assassin, John Wilkes Booth, had declared that the killing was an act of vengeance for the fall of Virginia.
And so it was that on Easter Sunday, 16 April, when the people of Sacramento gathered in silent crowds outside the fundamentalist church to bow their heads in respectful memory of their dead President, Collis saw Delphine again.
They had both arrived late for the service. Collis had been working on accounts for the railroad until late at night; Delphine had spent the evening entertaining two staunch Republicans who had wanted to forget their sorrow at the death of Lincoln in drink, cigars, and a double act of fornication. These two gentlemen were now sitting in the front pews of the church with their wives and their families, models of respectability and Christian humility.
The church was so crowded that Collis had to stand outside in the porch. Delphine stood a little way back, by the fence, her head bowed in prayer. She was dressed in an expensive black coat and a black bonnet, with a veil. She carried in her hand a black prayer book, and all her ornaments were jet.
It was almost impossible to hear what the preacher was saying inside the church, so at last Collis crossed the dusty churchyard and stood next to Delphine, his hands still held together, his head still bowed. The sky above them was whipped with tails of light cloud, and a faint breeze ruffled the black feathers on Delphine’s bonnet.
‘Delphine,’ he said.
She raised her head. Her face remained veiled behind dark traceries of lace, embroidered with tiny black moths. He could see the serious beauty of her eyes, though, and the childishly pink softness of her lips.
‘I came to pay my respects to Abraham Lincoln …’ she said, in an unfinished sentence that sounded as if it should have continued, ‘… I certainly didn’t come to pay any respects to you.’
Collis gave her a brief, lopsided smile. ‘It’s a great tragedy. He won’t even live to see the society he fought for.’
‘Does that matter, do you think?’ asked Delphine.
Inside the church, the congregation began to sing Psalm 24. ‘Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place?’ A few of the latecomers in the churchyard began to sing, too.
‘Why are you staying in Sacramento so long?’ Collis said to Delphine. ‘I thought you would have moved on to San Francisco by now.’
‘I’m staying because I feel like staying,’ Delphine told him. ‘Do I have to give you any other reason?’
‘You’re not staying because of me?’
‘What on earth gave you that idea? Why should I stay anywhere in the whole world because of you?’
Collis looked away across the street, where men and women were gathered under the flickering shade of the
trees, the men in their Sunday frock coats and the women in their bonnets and churchgoing dresses.
‘I had the idea that you loved me once,’ he told Delphine. ‘The same way that I loved you. I thought maybe that had something to do with your staying.’
‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘The revival of a childhood romance, just like the two-bit storybooks.’
‘Do I have to remind you that I came after you once, in Washington?’ asked Collis. ‘And do I have to remind you what you said to me then?’
Delphine looked down at her clasped hands. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to remind me. Any more than I have to remind you that you dismissed me then as a human being, because you couldn’t have me; and that you carelessly destroyed what little self-respect I had left, for the sake of your railroad.’
Collis gripped her arm. ‘If you dislike me so much, then why do you stay in Sacramento?’
‘I told you – because I want to.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Collis insisted.
She looked up at him. He couldn’t understand the expression on her face at all. ‘You can believe what you like,’ she said. ‘But this is scarcely the place to talk about it. Why don’t you call by to see me tomorrow evening, at Mrs Pangborn’s?’
‘I can’t be seen at Mrs Pangborn’s.’
‘Then why shouldn’t I call on you? I know where you live.’
Collis hesitated. He could see that several of the more inquisitive members of the congregation were turning their heads and whispering about him now. Delphine was well known in town as one of Mrs Pangborn’s fancy girls, and it wasn’t socially healthy for Collis to be seen in her company.
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