From the side of the auditorium, the orchestra began to troop in with their instruments. They sat in their pit, and shuffled their scores, and kept knocking over their music stands, and even when they were ready they took out a variety of handkerchiefs and blew their noses loudly as if they were retaliating against the audience. When they were quite finished, the conductor strutted in, a small Italian with curled-up whiskers and a shock of silver hair, and he stood in the limelight that illuminated his rostrum while everyone clapped, and a few of the less couth elements actually cheered. The next five minutes were spent in doleful tuning up.

Sam Lewis said to Collis, ‘Charles tells me you’re going out to Sacramento to work for him and Leland McCormick. Get yourself some business knowhow.’

‘I was thinking of it,’ said Collis.

‘Well, you couldn’t learn business under anybody tougher than Leland,’ remarked Sam. He took out a black snakeskin cigar case and offered it around, but both Charles and Collis declined. He stuck one in his own mouth, and patted the pockets of his evening suit for matches, but nobody offered him a light. ‘Charles tells me you’re interested in railroads.’

‘Railroads had crossed my mind.’

‘Well, if I were you, son, I’d let them cross your mind and keep on going. Railroads are poison. And the reason they’re poison is because you’re investing your money in something that, once you’ve laid it, can’t be moved. Look at that Theodore Jones fellow, the one out in Sacramento. Colonel Wilson brought him in to lay a line from Sacramento to Folsom, twenty-two miles of track, because Folsom was rich with gold. But what happened? The dangdratted gold mines gave out, and three-quarters of Folsom’s population drifted away, and what was he left with? Twenty-two miles of roadbed and rails going absolutely no place at all. And besides, no train could ever get over the Sierra Nevada unless you took it off its rails and hauled it over by mule.’

‘I’ll lay you a bet,’ said Collis.

Charles raised a gingery eyebrow and tried to signal to Collis to behave more cautiously, but Collis felt determined. The more he heard from men like Teach and Wintle and Lewis that a transcontinental railroad was out of the question, the more certain he was that someone could build it. It must be possible. He couldn’t believe that God could create a country so wealthy and free and fertile and leave it permanently divided by a range of impassable mountains; nor that He could allow so many people to suffer and die on their way through Panama without their lives at least having inspired others to find a way through the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. It didn’t make sense, to man or God. It had to be done, even if it couldn’t be done.

‘What will you bet, Mr Edmonds?’ asked Sam Lewis. ‘Will you bet you can drive a railroad locomotive right through the Sierra Nevada?’