Daddy Love liked to sell short. If he sensed that the market was going down, or better yet, if he had private information that a stock was going to be in trouble, then he’d offer to sell you a parcel of shares, at a future date, for well under their present price. Like a fool, you’d suppose you had a bargain. And sure as fate, when the day arrived, the price of those shares would have dropped far further than you would have dreamed, and he’d buy them cheap himself, and you’d be obliged to take them off his hands at the higher price you’d agreed, leaving him with a handsome profit and yourself with a massive loss. And all he’d needed to do was make the bet—or, more precisely, stack the odds, since he’d certainly known something about those shares that you didn’t.

Only this time, Gabriel Love was going to do the opposite.

In any game there are winners and losers. In this game, the loser would be one Cyrus MacDuff.

“Cyrus MacDuff hates me,” Mr. Love had explained to Sean. “That’s his problem. He’s hated me for twenty years.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I once cheated him out of a boatload of money. But that’s no excuse. If Mr. MacDuff exercised Christian charity, if he knew how to forgive, then the awful fate that is about to befall him might be avoided. It will be his evil nature, I believe, that will blind him to reality, and which the Lord will punish.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Sean. “How is God’s will to be done?”

“Through the Hudson Ohio Railroad,” said Mr. Love.

There was only one thing, in the year 1888, that you could say with certainty about the railroad business. It was dirty.

With the opening of the great American West, the opportunity for carrying goods by rail was expanding hugely. Great fortunes were being made. And wherever there is money, there is competition. While the British developed their far-flung empire, and the powers of Europe rushed to colonize Africa, so the bold entrepreneurs of the East Coast scrambled to build railroads across the huge tracts of the American West.

Sometimes there would be a fight for control of a certain route, or of a company that already had a route sewn up. Two groups could be building railroads almost side by side to see who got there first. Trainloads of armed men from rival companies might even shoot it out—the West wasn’t called wild for nothing. Sometimes, however, the battles were subtler.