Leland, who had never been particularly fond of Collis in any case, soon sensed his wife’s freshened hostility and took it as tacit permission to be as awkward and objectionable to Collis as he knew how.

Only Charles Tucker’s enthusiasm for the railroad kept Collis’s spirits up. Charles had been increasingly difficult and morose over the last year. Mary had kept him at home in Sacramento, and he was missing Knickerbocker Jane ‘like a bagful of fleas’. But with the news of John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, and with the mounting expectations that the South was going to secede, Charles began to believe that the railroad might actually be started, and that even if they drove it no farther than the silver mines of Nevada Territory, it would bring him prestige, profit and better still, a means of putting Mary in her place.

Railroads weren’t hardware stores, and railroad camps weren’t ladies’ front parlours. Railroads were men’s business. Railroads were Milholland locomotives with seven-foot drive wheels, grease, steam, and anthracite. Railroads were blasting and cursing and digging and laying track.

With a railroad to build, Charles would be free to express his appetite for bluster, hard work, whisky, oyster loaves, and girls with fat bottoms. Not just on occasional trips to San Francisco, either, but all the time. Whenever they talked of railroads, Charles would wink at Collis, and Collis, secretly amused, would wink back, and between the two of them they’d know what Charles had in mind. Their friendship improved with every political bulletin from the East — the more alarming the better.

Theodore kept in touch with Washington by letter, writing almost every week to the allies they’d made among Republican Congressmen — the men they’d fed, or paid, or actually befriended. The news was that the Democrats were severely split between ‘hard-shell’ pro-slavery supporters, led by John Breckinridge of Kentucky, and ‘soft-shell’ moderates, led by Stephen Douglas. On the other hand, the Republicans were still being treated warily by the Northern business establishment. They were, after all, outrageously radical. Yet Northern workers were gathering around to support the Republicans in encouraging numbers, and something else had happened, too.

The Dred Scott decision had roused into political action a young attorney and ex-Congressman named Abraham Lincoln. Infuriated by Chief Justice Taney’s opinion that the black people had no rights to speak of, Lincoln had taken up the leadership of the Illinois Republicans, and was campaigning hard for the Presidential nomination for 1860.

Theodore had been involved in a brief flurry of correspondence with Lincoln in 1857, after one of Lincoln’s most-publicised hearings. The owners of the Mississippi paddle-steamer Effie Afton had been taken to court for ramming the bridge which carried the Rock Island railroad over the river at Davenport, and Lincoln had appeared for the railroad. The deeper implications of the case hadn’t been lost on those who had heard it. It had been the first naked struggle between the economy of the South, whose prosperity depended on river traffic bringing down the Mississippi to St Louis and Memphis and New Orleans all the food and timber and livestock of the Midwest, and the economy of the North, whose expansion depended on railroads running goods across the continent through Chicago and New York.