Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Yes, you could say so,’ said Collis.

  Doc Kates sat down. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what brings you back to the old drugstore? You didn’t just come here to chew the fat, did you?’

  Collis shook his head. ‘It’s the tunnel we’re digging through to the summit. We made very slow headway during the winter, because all we had was black powder. Then Leland McCormick brought us some nitroglycerin. Blasting oil, they call it, and that cuts through the mountain like cheese.’

  Doc Kates nodded. ‘I see your problem. They’ve banned it now, haven’t they, after that big bang in San Francisco? So how are you going to blow your way through to the pass?’

  Collis sat back in his chair. Through the window, he could see Doc Kates’s vegetable garden growing, just as it had last year and the year before, and always would do, until he died. ‘As far as I understand it, nitroglycerin’s made out of sulphuric acid, and nitric acid, and glycerine.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Doc Kates, looking at Collis warily.

  Collis looked right back at him. ‘Supposing someone was to bring these three ingredients – which aren’t illegal when they’re brought into the state of California separately – supposing someone was to bring them up the mountain, just as they are, and then supposing someone was to mix them together right up by the tunnel we’re blasting out and give us a ready supply of the stuff?’

  Doc Kates took off his spectacles. His eyes were watery and pale, faded by years of Sierra sun and years of Sierra snow.

  ‘You’re asking me to do it?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Only if you’re willing.’

  ‘It’s pretty volatile stuff. One mistake and you’re a damned sight higher in the air than Summit Pass.’

  ‘You’re a careful man.’

  ‘Yes, I guess you could say that I am.’

  ‘Then you’ll do it?’

  ‘Let’s have ourselves a cup of coffee first,’ Doc Kates said. ‘Do you fancy a ginger cookie? I’ve a fresh-baked batch in from Mrs Elias.’

  Collis stood up, pushing back his chair. ‘I don’t have much time, Doc. That tunnel has to be bored, and bored quick.’

  Doc Kates frowned at him. ‘All right,’ he said, slowly bringing the cups to the table and setting them down. ‘All right, I’ll do it. Do you have time for a cup of coffee now?’

  All during the long summer of 1867, the tree-lined mountains below Summit Pass shook and echoed with the sound of explosions. Inside the solid granite tunnel, it was stifling and dusty and intolerably hot, but the Chinese blasters drilled incessantly into the rock face, laid their charges of freshly-brewed nitroglycerin, and gradually blew the inside of the mountains out.

  Collis had to return to Sacramento in late July to tidy up months of neglected business; but in mid-August he came back to the Sierras again in a rather rudimentary private passenger car pulled by the City of Sacramento. He climbed down a few hundred feet away from the entrance to the west portal of the Summit Tunnel, and Charles came across to greet him.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Collis asked. ‘Have we licked this goddam mountain range yet?’

  ‘You came just in time,’ said Charles. ‘We’re drilling the last of the charge holes right now, and we reckon the two headings should meet up this afternoon. I sent a couple of Chinese foremen back to bring some champagne.’

  He followed Charles into the tunnel, and together they walked uphill through the gritty dust of drilled-out granite and the deafening clamour of sledgehammers. Collis took off his hat to wipe the grimy sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief, and coughed.

  They arrived at last at the face of the west heading, where thirty or forty blue-pyjama’d Chinese workers were drilling at the granite with hand drills. The white foreman, with his tall cowboy-style hat and drooping moustache, came across and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Edmonds. We should be ready for blasting in a half hour or so. Then you’ll be able to see daylight all the way up to the summit.’

  Collis looked around him. ‘You know something?’ he said hoarsely. ‘They said it couldn’t be done. When I first swore that I’d take a railroad over the Sierras, they said it couldn’t be done. Well now, dammit, we’re right on the edge of showing them just how backward and blind they were. We’re almost there, Charles. Can you understand what that means? These mountains I used to look at from my back veranda in Sacramento, we’ve licked them and we’ve licked them good.’

  Charles took his arm. ‘Come on, Collis. Let’s go find ourselves a drink. You look like this heat and this dust aren’t doing you any good at all.’

  Collis wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His face was glistening with sweat, and he looked appallingly haggard.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘you’re right. But you just make sure I’m the first to see this hole blasted right through. You hear me? I don’t want any blasting without my knowledge.’

  ‘Okay, Mr Edmonds,’ promised the foreman.

  Together, Collis and Charles walked back down the tunnel until they were out in the daylight again. They crossed the tracks to Charles’s hut, and Charles unlocked the door and ushered Collis inside. There was a rough-and-ready living-room, with a carpet, and a chaise longue, and an ugly mahogany cabinet, and even a lithograph of San Francisco Bay; through a curtained doorway, Collis could see a brass bed and a set of framed daguerreotypes of nude French models.

  Charles went to the cabinet, produced another bunch of keys, unlocked it, and brought out a bottle of bourbon. ‘You know, Collis,’ he said, filling up two glasses, ‘you really ought to take it easier. You don’t look well.’

  ‘I’m not sick,’ said Collis.

  ‘Maybe you’re not now, but if you go on pushing yourself this way, you soon will be. You mark my words, if you keep working as hard as you are now, without a let-up, then you’re going to be lying in your grave by the time you’re forty.’

  Collis sat down and took his drink. ‘Do you really think that matters?’ he asked Charles.

  Charles sat down beside him. ‘Of course it matters. You’re the inspiration behind the whole of this railroad. You’ve changed the history of this nation in a matter of a few years, almost single-handed. How can you say it doesn’t matter?’

  ‘Hannah should have been here today, Charles. Hannah and two young children of mine.’

  Charles looked uncomfortable. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s the way life is.’

  Collis put down his glass and rested his head in his hands. When he spoke, his voice was graver and more measured than Charles had ever heard it.

  ‘I want to finish this railroad, Charles, because I can’t go back. But if there was any way in which I could trade this railroad, and all its locomotives, and all its ties and its spikes and its rails – if there was any way in which I could trade this railroad for one day with Hannah, one more day with Hannah, then I would do it gladly.’

  He lifted his head, and when he did so, Charles was shocked to see that he was crying.

  ‘I was prepared to see people die for the sake of this railroad. I was prepared to ruin people’s reputations, their happiness, their whole lives. That was the price of progress, I thought. You can’t make omelettes without cracking eggs. Well, it’s true, you can’t. But of course I wasn’t bright enough to understand that it wasn’t I who was in charge of cracking the eggs. It was God, or the destiny of America, or whatever you like to call it, and I was just as vulnerable to the twists and turns of this destiny as everybody else.’

  He took out his handkerchief again and blew his nose. ‘I’ve lost everything, Charles. I’ve lost more than a man can reasonably be expected to bear. And this railroad is nothing more nor less than a monument to my vanity and my pride and my human foolishness.’

  ‘Collis – you’re tired,’ Charles said softly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Collis, ‘I’m tired. But I’m not mad.’

  At twenty minutes of noon, the foreman in the cowboy hat knocked at the door of the hut and announced that the Chinese crews wer
e at last ready for the final blasting. When Collis and Charles stepped outside, there was a festive atmosphere around, and the workers who were assembled around the mouth of the tunnel were laughing and joking and talking excitedly. Boring the Summit Tunnel had been one of the hardest and most dangerous feats of civil engineering in American history, and they all knew how well they had done. Collis saw Doc Kates in the crowd, in shirtsleeves and a wide-brimmed hat, and he gave him a friendly salute.

  ‘How would you like to fire the charges, Mr Edmonds?’ asked the foreman. ‘The box is right over here, if you’d like to do it yourself.’

  Collis shook his head. ‘I think Mr Tucker ought to have that pleasure. He’s the chief of the construction.’

  A loud whistle blew in the tunnel to warn any workers who were still left inside to clear out, and then the foreman raised his arm. A hush fell over the crowd, and a photographer with a black cape over his head took a picture of them all, with their dusty britches and their muscular arms and their hands raised against the glare of the sun. Then the foreman dropped his arm, and Charles gave a grunt of satisfaction and pressed the plunger.

  There was a whirr, and then silence. Somebody laughed out loud.

  ‘Misfire!’ called the foreman. ‘Yo Huang – you wanna get back in there and see what the hell’s gone wrong?’

  A tall Chinese began to make his way across the railroad ties towards the tunnel. But Collis held the foreman’s arm and said, ‘Isn’t that kind of dangerous? Couldn’t those charges go off at any time at all?’

  ‘Well, sure it’s dangerous,’ said the foreman. ‘But then blasting oil always is.’

  ‘Then I’ll go,’ said Collis.

  The foreman shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Edmonds, I can’t take that responsibility. That’s nitroglycerin in there, not brandy and cigars.’

  ‘You don’t have to take the responsibility,’ snapped Collis. ‘This is my railroad and I’ll do whatever I damned well choose.’

  ‘Collis – don’t be absurd,’ Charles said. ‘What do you know about blasting? You can’t go in there. It’s dangerous and it’s out of the question.’

  ‘I’m going,’ said Collis, pulling off his linen coat and handing his hat to the foreman. ‘I know enough about blasting to know that there’s probably a loose connection. A child could fix it.’

  ‘Collis,’ warned Charles, ‘if you attempt to go into that tunnel, I’ll have you forcibly stopped.’

  Collis smiled at him. ‘No you won’t, Charles. I’m going, and that’s all there is to it.’

  There was a disturbed murmur from the blasters and graders as the foreman beckoned to the puzzled Yo Huang. Then Collis walked along the roadbed as far as the tunnel entrance and went inside without looking back once.

  Now that all the drilling had stopped, the tunnel was almost completely silent. His footsteps made a brittle echo on the solid granite, and he could hear himself breathing as if he were someone else altogether. Well, he thought, perhaps I am. Perhaps I’ve turned out to be someone very different from the boy who woke up alongside an Irish whore in the Monument Hotel, all those years ago. Perhaps I’ve come of age.

  He followed the shining line of the detonator wire out of the corner of his eye. He was two hundred feet into the tunnel now, and it was still unbroken. He coughed and cleared his throat. He didn’t once wonder why he had elected to do this. It had just seemed natural that he should. Fitting.

  He was sweating, and so he pulled out his handkerchief to mop his face. There was a decorative CE on the edge of the handkerchief, and he had an odd momentary vision of the very day when Hannah had embroidered that for him, sitting on the veranda of their house in Sacramento, on a warm evening in May. She must have been pregnant then, he thought, with a painful feeling of loss. At that very moment, she must have been carrying my child.

  He heard a whistling sound and so he raised his head and peered back along the sloping tunnel. It was at that instant that one of the priming charges went off with a loud, smart blast, and Collis felt as if his head had been smacked between two planks. Then a hailstorm of fragmented granite knocked him off his feet and half-buried him in dust and showering grit.

  Epilogue

  The band was playing ‘Clear the Way’, but all that Collis could hear from inside his private parlour car was the monotonous thumping of the drum – his right ear had been deaf since the accident. His back had also been injured and he still walked with a cane. He had arrived at last in this dry desert basin, surrounded on three sides by heat-hazed mountains, like a man who keeps a long-standing appointment with a woman he is no longer sure that he loves. Yet he knew that he had to be here. The destiny he had talked about with Hannah and Knickerbocker Jane had been fulfilled.

  The iron cowcatcher of the Jupiter, the locomotive which had pulled Collis’s car over the Sierras and across the empty wastelands of the Humboldt Sink, was now only fifty feet apart from the cowcatcher of the Union Pacific’s Engine 119. Here, at Promontory Point, Utah, the two railroads had at last joined, spanning the continent.

  Collis had been exuberant on the way from Sacramento, inviting newspaper reporters and giggling young girls to share iced champagne in his parlour car. But now he was more subdued. Every now and then he would part the blinds and stare out into the bright Utah morning, squinting as if he had a migraine. From the window he could see the two locomotives, buffed-up and shining in the sunlight and steaming softly. A line of more than a hundred soldiers of the 21st Infantry, in blue dress uniforms and dazzling white gloves, waited beside the track. A crowd of reporters and photographers shuffled impatiently in the sand and the sagebrush, their wooden tripods all set up for the track-joining ceremony, sharing cigarettes and warm bottled beer.

  It was 10 May 1869, a glaring Monday, two years after Collis’s men had blasted a pass through the High Sierras. After that, the speed of track-laying had been furious. With the Union Pacific frenziedly putting down rails from the east, Charles had driven their Chinese and Irish graders to the limit, trying to beat the U.P. into the heart of Utah, and as far as the rich commercial prize of Salt Lake City. Each mile of track they laid brought them more federal loans and more land grants, and Collis needed every dollar and every acre of land he could get.

  Charles had boasted that it was almost impossible for visiting spectators from California to catch up with his track-laying gang at the railhead; and a San Francisco newspaper reporter wrote with awe that he had seen a half mile of rails laid in under twenty-eight minutes.

  On 27 April, as the rival railroads neared Promontory Station, Collis had shared a picnic lunch with Thomas Durant, of the Union Pacific, under a flapping tent. With a flash of his old challenging spirit, he had bet Durant ten thousand dollars that his gangs could lay ten miles of track in a single day. Durant, with his mouth full of game pie, had accepted.

  The following day, in a dreamlike ripple of heat and a blur of desert dust, a handpicked crew of gaugers, rail carriers, bolters, and spikers, with Charles Tucker urging them on, had beaded down 25,800 ties, spiked 3250 rails, and between them laid over 250,000 pounds of iron. As dusk fell, they had passed the ten-mile mark, and they laid fifty-six feet more for good luck. Ten Mile Day, they called it afterwards, and put up a sign to commemorate their achievement.

  Even when the Sierra Pacific’s graders had met up with the Union Pacific’s graders approaching in the opposite direction, Collis had ordered his men to continue preparing a parallel track – at least until it was officially decided where the two railroads should join. As they passed each other, the Sierra Pacific and Union Pacific gangs had showered each other with dug-up clods of earth, and almost blown each other up with nitroglycerin.

  Collis had spent five days arguing and wrangling with Durant and federal officials before both of them had grudgingly accepted Promontory Station as the point where the railroads should be linked. And at last, at eleven-thirty on this hot morning in May, the last few feet of roadbed were graded, and a polished laurel-woo
d tie was put down to carry the last rails.

  The door of Collis’s parlour car was opened, and Leland stepped in, wearing a severe Sunday coat and a tall shiny black hat. He looked hot and agitated.

  ‘We’re ready at last,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had the most ridiculous argument with Grenville Dodge, about hammering in the last spike. He wanted to do it, of all people. A common-or-garden engineer. Where was he when we were lobbying for land grants, I wonder, and scratching around for funds?’

  ‘Have you finally settled it?’ asked Collis, in a flat, disinterested tone.

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ puffed Leland. ‘I brought the ceremonial spikes, and I shall drive the first one in. Two golden spikes, a silver spike, and a spike made of iron, silver and gold, that’s what I brought. And the laurel-wood tie, with the silver plaque. All Dodge wanted to do was bang in any old iron spike, as if the last rail were any old rail.’

  ‘The last rail is no different from the first,’ said Collis. He looked up at Leland with a faint smile.

  Leland fussily brushed at his lapels. ‘Half the trouble with you these days, Collis, is that you don’t seem to understand the importance of what we’ve achieved. We’ve spanned the continent! We’ve changed the life of this nation forever.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Collis, standing up. The band outside was playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ for the fifth time. ‘I suppose we’d better go. I wouldn’t want you to miss your ceremony.’

  They stepped down from the train to the dusty roadbed. There was a crowd of six or seven hundred people gathered around now, and a good deal of laughing and jostling. Two or three whisky tents had been set up, and most of the spectators were drunk. Thomas Durant, waiting by the last gap in the rails in his finest black velvet jacket, looked extremely pale in the sunlight.

  It was just after noon. The two railroad engines had been uncoupled from the trains they had brought with them, and eased closer to each other, sighing and hissing as they came. A Union flag fluttered loudly from a nearby telegraph pole, and an extra wire had been brought down from one of the pole’s insulators to connect up with a telegraph key, which was set up on a wooden table not ten feet away from the last rail. At the table, a young telegraph operator with shiny hair was tapping out the news to both sides of the continent that the last spike would be driven in less than twenty minutes.