There was a second in which he wondered if he hadn’t played her along too far. She stared at him, her eyes glistening, and he couldn’t read her expression at all. But then she swallowed back her tears, and gave him a nod, and he knew that everything was fine. He suddenly found that his own eyes were ridiculously watery.

‘That’s it, then,’ he said. ‘That’s that business concluded. Now, what do you say we go deliver these gutters?’

There were many times, before they were married, when he sat and wondered about the mystery of his relationship with Hannah. He would sit on the porch of Theodore’s house, while Theodore pored over his charts and his logs and drew endless maps of the Sierra foothills, and he would smoke a cigar and think to himself: Why?

Why had they been brought together, and why had destiny turned itself inside out to accommodate their selfish desires? Their love for each other had been oblique from the beginning, a love that was felt in sympathetic nuance rather than open and hungry passions. Yet because of that it was all the stronger, and all the more disturbing.

He even asked Theodore one evening what he thought about them, but Theodore had simply unwound his wire-rimmed spectacles from his ears, laid down his compasses, and given Collis nothing but a friendly and baffled smile.

Collis and Hannah had announced their engagement a week after their ride out to the Vallejo farm, and they had set their wedding date for mid-March, 1860. As far as Theodore was concerned, they were going to be man and wife because they’d taken a liking to each other and that was all there was to it. He didn’t share Collis’s feelings of fate and destiny. Man made his own destiny, as far as Theodore was concerned, by hours of hard work and by bribing as many Congressmen as possible.

In the first week of March, Theodore called around at the hardware store and laid a roll of charts out on the counter. Leland and Charles were both there, and Collis, too, and they gathered around the drawings like men who have paid out good money for oil paintings, sight unseen, and now were going to get the chance to see what their investment had brought them.

‘There isn’t any doubt that the trace is gradual enough, and straight enough, and sufficiently workable to take a railroad,’ Theodore told them. ‘There will be very little bridge-building, although I suspect I might have to span the Little Bear River, and there will be very little tunnelling, too. The most difficult tunnel will have to be at the summit of the mountains, just below the Donner Pass, where the road will have to be cut through fifteen hundred feet of solid rock.’

‘Fifteen hundred feet doesn’t sound like too much of an obstacle,’ Leland remarked.