‘My God,’ Dan McReady said suddenly and climbed over the charred boards which were all that remained of the building’s south wall. He began to stumble across the black ruins, slipping twice and tearing the cuff of his pants. ‘Dan — what the hell’s the matter?’ Collis asked. But then he glimpsed between the boots of the gathered firemen to what Dan McReady had already seen, and he hesitated for only a moment before he cautiously climbed over the boards after him, and walked towards the firemen with a feeling of unreality and fright. The firemen didn’t even glance at him as he joined their circle and looked down at what they had found.

It was Gordon Jarvis. Collis knew it was Jarvis because of his three-fingered hand, and because it couldn’t really have been anyone else. But there weren’t any other ways of telling.

Maybe the cask of whale oil had flared up before he meant it to. Maybe he’d stumbled, or suffered a heart seizure, or twisted his ankle. Nobody would ever know what physical hell he had suffered, and Gordon Jarvis himself would never say.

Collis was almost back to the sidewalk before he realised he had turned away. The smell of burned wool now seemed like the ghastly fragrance of flesh. He stood there for two or three minutes, looking up California Street towards the Chinese quarter, where distant lanterns swung red and green in the early wind. He didn’t know what to do or say. In less than four hours, the same ambition which had brought Gordon Jarvis to these ashes on Davis Street was going to take Collis to the north shore of Lake Merced. Collis couldn’t deny that he was scared. Maybe Laurence Melford and John Frémont were right about the Pacific railroad, and he was all wrong. Maybe the dream of spanning America by rail was too grand, too arrogant, like building a tower of Babel on its side. Hadn’t John Frémont lost ten men, frozen in the mountains that were named for the blood of Christ?

Dan McReady came up at last and touched him on the arm. He was very white, and he had taken his hat off.

‘I knew that fellow for years,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘A strange man, you know, and very violent. But he would have helped anyone who needed help, and set fire to anything at all if you’d asked him to.’

Collis didn’t answer, but rubbed his smutty cheek with his fingertips.

Dan McReady said, ‘It’s not making you scared, is it? What happened to Jarvis?’