‘And quite apart from that, you don’t like the way we’re talking about your pet railroad scheme, do you?’ asked Arthur Teach. He kept his eyes on Collis as he lit a small thin cigar, pinched out the match between finger and thumb, and blew smoke from his hairy nostrils.

Collis sighed. ‘Mr Teach, Arthur, I’m not a railroad fanatic. I don’t know a footplate from a funnel. But I do understand simple sense, and simple sense tells me it is well over five thousand miles from New York to San Francisco by sea, including an awkward crossing of the isthmus, while it is only three thousand miles from New York to San Francisco by land. Simple sense tells me many other things, too — such as the certain fact that every sod farmer and miner and cattle owner from Nebraska to California would go down on his knees and welcome a railroad across the breadth of this country as a godsend. A head of kale picked in Utah on Monday could be served up with butter in a New York restaurant by Friday; just as a plough blade cold-cast in Pennsylvania on Friday could be delivered to a Wyoming farmer within the week. You could move soldiers, too, and horses, and they would arrive fresh for battle in half the time. It’s all simple sense, Mr Teach, whether the technical details have been worked out or not.’

Teach tugged at his moustache and then cleared his throat. But he didn’t answer. ‘You still don’t think that it’s feasible?’ asked Collis.

Collis glanced over at Charles, but Charles was wearing a distinctly vacant face. From that, Collis surmised that Teach and Wintle were probably quite typical of San Francisco financiers, and that they were not entranced, as a rule, by daydreams. Too many innovators and too many eccentrics came to San Francisco with too many grandiose schemes, and too many thousands of dollars had already been lost in the financing of gas mantles that would never burn out, and automatic buttonhooks, and cargoes of unusual cheese. Until someone could show with surveys and graphs that a railroad could be laid through the Sierras, at least as far as Nevada, and that, once built, it would return some kind of sensible profit to its shareholders, finding support among San Francisco’s business community was going to be more than sticky. Collis understood their reticence. He was a gambling man himself. And despite his idyllic mental picture of a shiny railroad locomotive puffing and whistling its way through seas of waving wheat, bringing the cheers and huzzahs and tossed-up hats of settlers and farmers and factory builders, despite his vision of American plains that would soon be ploughed and harrowed and bustling with broccoli, and American hills that would be crowded as poppy fields with red-roofed farmhouses and Dutch barns, he wasn’t at all sure himself that a train could really make its way up and over the Sierras, up gradients as steep as slated church roofs, through snowdrifts that could bury a pioneers’ parade, trumpets, hats, bunting, pioneers, and all, without a trace, and he wasn’t at all sure that such a railroad could really make money, not instinctively sure. He didn’t yet have the experience or the skill to judge profitability by eye.