‘That’s Jimmy Flood there, behind the bar,’ said Charles. ‘Billy O’Brien stands at the door, inviting folks in, and Jimmy mixes the drinks and cuts the bacon. They were friends from way back. They met in Poor Man’s Gulch, and they both made up their minds to open shops here in San Francisco. Jimmy opened a livery store, and Billy opened a marine supply shop — or was it the other way about? But anyway, they both got wiped out by fire in ’55. So they opened the Auction Lunch in the financial district here, and if you ask me they’re going to make themselves rich one day, though not from selling lunches. But they keep their ears open to all the financial gossip, and they buy whatever stock their customers recommend, and that’s how.’

Arthur Teach swallowed beer, leaving white foam clinging to his moustache, and he asked Collis, ‘Do you think you’ve got that kind of a mind? The kind of a mind that can turn hard luck into hard cash?’

Jimmy Flood brought Collis’s drink and set it on the battered and glass-ringed mahogany counter. Collis picked it up and then raised it as if to imply that he was drinking to Teach’s health, and to Wintle’s continuing good fortune, and to Charles’s friendship. But he said nothing, and kept his face expressionless, and he could see that Wintle and Teach were more than a little unsettled. That was the way Collis preferred his new acquaintances to be, for the time being. He was a stranger around here, a tenderfoot, and he didn’t know the fandango halls from the fish docks, and the only possible chance of keeping an edge was to act tight, and short on humour.

‘Mr Wintle and me, we’re always looking for investments, day and night,’ explained Teach. ‘Good sound mining projects. Commodities. Shipping. All that kind of thing. But the way we see it, any project needs two essential factors if it’s going to work. It needs vision. You understand what I mean by vision? And it needs solid hard workability. Both those two. Because one won’t get off its ass without the other, and the other won’t pay back dividends without the one. You got me?’

Collis sipped his drink. He still didn’t answer. Charles gave his friends a restless, jesting grin, as if to suggest that Collis wasn’t always this way.

‘That’s why,’ Teach added, ‘I was impertinent enough to question you about your idea for a railroad. This dream that Charles tells me you have for spanning the continent. It’s a pretty fancy dream. A big vision. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s going to need some pretty damned hard workability, too. You got me?’