Frémont looked at Collis with eyes as hard as pebbles. Collis, in return, gave him a friendly and guileless grin, and even turned to Andy and asked, ‘Don’t you agree with that, Andy? What remarkably good chance that was?’

‘I hope you’re not suggesting that Senator Benton and I were acting in self-interested collusion,’ said John Frémont. ‘Because if you are, I must demand that you withdraw that implication at once.’

Collis blinked in surprise. ‘My dear Mr Frémont, why should I ever suggest anything as low-minded as that?’

‘I’m damned if I’m sure,’ said Frémont.

‘It wasn’t a criticism,’ said Collis. ‘Far from it. It was a tribute to your surveying skill. Who else could have found a passable route along the Thirty-eighth Parallel but you? My railroad expert tells me that he’d no more think of surveying a track over the Sangre de Cristo mountains than he would up the side of City Hall. Yet you did it. You confounded everybody who didn’t believe that a railroad route could be determined in advance by a politician and then confirmed by a surveyor, instead of the way these things are usually done, which is the other way about.’

‘I hope you’re not giving us another example of your rank impertinence, Mr Edmonds,’ Laurence Melford said darkly.

‘I don’t think so, Mr Melford,’ said Collis. ‘I would rather be your friend, a hundred times more, than I would wish to be your enemy.’

‘I have quite enough friends already, thank you,’ said Melford. ‘But if you wish at the very least to ensure my neutrality, I suggest you put any thoughts of a Pacific railroad well aside, and devote yourself to the hardware trade. I suggest, too that some kind of apology to Mr Frémont might well be in order.’

Collis stared at Melford and then at Frémont. Andy held his champagne glass in both hands and looked extremely uncomfortable.

‘An apology?’ Collis asked in a soft voice. ‘An apology for what?’

‘Your impertinence, whether it was intentional or not,’ said Laurence Melford.

Collis looked at Laurence Melford steadily. ‘If there’s any impertinence here, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I sound too serious, it comes from those who support the inhumane demands of the Southern slave economy, and all those who dance to its tune. They are the ones who ought to say that they’re sorry, because they’ve put their own profits and political power before the pressing needs of the whole nation.’