‘I don’t think that kind of remark is really very constructive,’ said John Frémont. ‘You’re well aware that I’m a Republican, but really …’

‘But really what?’ asked Collis. ‘But really, we shouldn’t mind turning a blind eye to slavery?’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Frémont sharply. ‘I meant that if some kind of political compromise could be worked out between the North and the South, the railroad could then be laid along a sensible mean. To my mind, the Thirty-eighth Parallel was such a mean.’

‘Perhaps it might have been,’ said Collis. ‘But to my mind, the South will be marooned because she will never compromise. And more sadly than that, she will be marooned because of where she is. She can’t make any compromises about her geographical location, no matter how much Secretary Davis and Senator Benton try to persuade us that the best routes run west out of St Louis, or Fort Smith, or Preston, Texas.’

Both John Frémont and Laurence Melford were silent. Laurence Melford clipped his cigar with a gold cutter, decorated with diamonds, but he was listening, and it was plain that he didn’t like what he heard.

Collis continued. ‘The man who can take the real credit for planning this railroad, my engineer, says there’s only one obvious route. He knows Nebraska Territory, and the Rockies, and the Great Basin, and most of all he knows the Sierra Nevada, and in his opinion, the very first pioneers found the easiest trail, because they damned well had to. It lies, roughly, along the Forty-first Parallel, and Mr Frémont knows that as well as I do. What I’m saying is that no matter how much the South gripes at the North, the bitter facts are that God so created the geography of this nation that the natural highway from coast to coast, when we finally open it up, will leave the South and her slave economy beached, high and dry, and left to the fate that most of us Northerners think she deserves.’

Laurence Melford was silent. It was the same kind of silence that hangs in the air between a flash of lightning and the first heavy collision of thunder. When he spoke, his voice was a low, threatening grumble. ‘I’m glad you believe you have God on your side, Mr Edmonds. You may well need Him, if you continue to press ahead with this foolhardy business.’

But John Frémont was more thoughtful. ‘Who’s this railroad expert of yours?’ he asked Collis. ‘It isn’t Jack Dellman, is it? Or Theodore Jones?’

‘It must be Jones,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘Dellman went to Europe to study engineering in London.’

John Frémont gave Collis a sympathetic smile. ‘If your surveyor is Jones, Mr Edmonds, then I should take care, if I were you. He’s a little fanatical, to say the least. You don’t want to spend a great deal of money and invest a great deal of time, only to find that you’re stuck up some snowbound mountain where even a goat couldn’t go, let alone a ten-wheel locomotive.’