Johnson brushed his whiskers. ‘It isn’t just the Pacific Mail Steamship Company that’s going to stand in your way, Mr Edmonds. Nor is it just the California Steam Navigation Company, nor any one of the ferry lines, nor Wells Fargo. It’s the whole of the San Francisco business community, which is already alert to what you and your little band of Sacramento storekeepers is up to. If you were to terminate a transcontinental road in San Francisco, on the waterfront, then you would effectively control all the shipping that goes in and out of here, and through the shipping, you would effectively control the city itself.’

‘I know that,’ said Collis. ‘But how can you stand in the way of progress? The Sierras will be crossed by rail one day, and what are you going to do? Lay your belly across the tracks and refuse to let the locomotives pass?’

‘I’m going to say one thing only,’ Horace Johnson growled. ‘Any attempt by you or your cronies to bring the railroad into San Francisco will be resisted by the full strength of my steamship company, and by all of those companies that make up the business life of this city. You’ll fail, I warn you, so don’t think you’ll ever collect on any of those bets you made with Arthur Teach and Laurence Melford and all those other fellows.’

‘You know about those?’

Horace Johnson nodded, as if to say, ‘Who doesn’t?’ Then he said, ‘I’ll lay you a bet myself. For every yard of waterfront you ever gain for your railroad, I’ll buy you a bottle of brandy.’

Collis put his hat back on his head and tapped it. ‘Mr Johnson,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I am about to embark on a very drunken decade.’

Afterwards, closeted with Hannah in the darkness of her hotel room, he tried to think who to blame. Was it Horace Johnson’s fault, for keeping him so long at the steamship office? Was it his own fault, for talking so freely to Mr Kwang? Or was it the fault of the railroad itself, that glittering and apocalyptic vision which demanded so much human life and so much human suffering?

The railroad seemed rapacious. Collis could understand why men like Horace Johnson were afraid of it. He was afraid of it himself. He felt as if he and his partners in the Sierra Pacific were custodians of some dark steel sword, as magical and mythical as Excalibur, which, unsheathed, could cut America’s ties with the traditions of her past in one slice. It depressed him, this thought, but it also excited him. He knew that they were going to wield it one day, and that life in America would never be the same again.

He had left Horace Johnson’s office at a quarter after three. The afternoon had been growing snappish, and he had buttoned up his gloves. He had stopped at a cigar store to replenish his cheroot case, and then walked on to Walter West’s notions emporium. His heart had been beating steadily but distinctly. In his long grey coat he had felt like an apprentice mortician, attending on the decease of a marriage.