‘I’ve just been down on the Embarcadero,’ Andy told him. ‘There’s news from the East, just come in on the Sonora. John Brown attacked Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, with a band of twenty men, and held the United States armoury for a while, trying to set off a rebellion of slaves.’

‘What happened?’ Collis wanted to know. ‘Did any of them rise up?’

Andy shook his head. ‘Brown was surrounded by marines, and captured, and two of his sons killed. Looks like they’ll hang him, too. Just a case of trying to take the whole slavery issue into his own hands, and not having the wherewithal to carry it off. But the way it’s set the South afire, it looks as though we might have secession at last.’

Hannah was waiting for Collis a few yards away, on the arm of a tall homely woman called Freda McPherson. Collis put his hand on Andy’s shoulder to calm his excitement. ‘I’ll talk to you later. Right now, I have a funeral breakfast to attend.’

‘But you know what this means,’ hissed Andy. ‘If the South secedes, and there’s a war, then they’ll have to build the railroad, and build it on our route, too!’

‘You’re very pepped up about the railroad all of a sudden,’ said Collis. ‘The last time we spoke, you were all shrimp camps and imported lumber.’

‘Collis,’ said Andy, grinning, ‘never let it be said that Andrew Jackson Hunt, with a name like Andrew Jackson Hunt, is too blind to read the writing on the wall.’

‘You know what the writing on the wall actually said,’ put in Collis. ‘It said, “Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.” Which means, “You have been weighed in the scales and found to be wanting.”’

Andy’s grin only widened. ‘There’s only one thing I’m wanting, Collis, my friend, and that’s the profit we’re going to reap from this railroad.’

Collis hesitated for a second. Then he saw how impatient Hannah was growing, and he simply shook Andy’s hand in a formal way, as if Andy had been doing nothing more than offering his sympathies. He walked over to Hannah and held out his arm to her. There were tears in her eyes which may have been caused by nothing more than the cold wind.

Hannah’s arrival in Sacramento, white-faced and dressed in black, was the final indignity for Jane McCormick. True, Hannah was discreet enough to rent rooms at the Wallis House on H Street, a quiet and respectable hotel run by a one-time Baptist preacher who had been thrown down a flume out at Rich Bar by miners who had taken exception to his sermons, and broken his back. And true, Hannah hardly saw Collis at all, apart from their taking lunch together from time to time, and spent most of her days reading, or pushing her landlord in his wicker wheelchair. But it seemed clear enough to Jane that she had been superseded in Collis’s affections by this pretty, demure blonde in black, and that Collis had been toying with her feelings from the very start.