Collis showed the letter to Leland and Charles. Leland was not so sure about the prospect of civil war; and in any case he was too preoccupied these days with his Republican candidacy for the governorship of California to worry about very much else except his long-winded political speeches, which he practised nightly in front of his cheval-glass, his hand thrust into his coat in unconscious imitation of Daniel Webster. Charles, on the other hand, firmly believed that there would be war, that there must be war, since he saw no other way of getting a few months’ respite from Mary. Whatever any of them felt about it, however, there was little doubt in their minds that the events of the winter had given the Sierra Pacific the best chance it had ever had of going ahead. Jefferson Davis and most of the fiercest supporters of a southern railroad route had now abandoned Washington for Richmond, and that left the Sierra Pacific and the Union Pacific with what Collis believed to be the only feasible route for the federal government to adopt. Theodore’s surveys of the Dutch Flat-Donner Pass-Truckee River trace were at last on the verge of acceptance. They had been so generously financed by Senator Stride’s ‘conscience money’ that Theodore had even been able to take Annie along with him on several of his expeditions, and she had illustrated his statistics with pages of alluring watercolours of California flowers.

Laurence Melford, too, had been as good as his word, and had delivered fifty-thousand dollars for the return of Collis’s calotypes of Sarah. Collis had already used the money to place an order for the Sierra Pacific’s first lengths of rail, at fifty-five dollars a ton, and for their first locomotive, a small tank engine from Zerah Colburn’s works at Paterson, New Jersey. Collis had told Leland that he would christen the locomotive Jane McCormick, and although Leland had been unimpressed, Jane had softened considerably towards Collis, and had even sent Hannah a basket of preserves.

Collis himself had been quiet, and industrious, but Hannah had sensed that he was unsettled. Several times during the winter she had walked into his study on the second floor of their handsome, comfortable house and found him standing by the window, staring sightlessly down at the street below, with his hands in his pockets and his forehead pressed against the glass.

He was looking older. There were wisps of grey hair on the right side of his head, and his cheeks were becoming angular, and lined. He found that he was increasingly forgetful. He would leave a half-finished drink on a table and go pour himself a fresh one. He forgot Hannah’s birthday, and had to make up for it by buying her a diamond-and-sapphire ring which cost him nearly two thousand dollars.