Senator Stride lay where he had fallen. His bloody face was pressed against the baseboard, and he was not quite dead. His breath came in long, quivering sighs. A woman brought him a piece of torn sheet soaked in brandy, and pushed it carefully into his mouth. It was impossible to tell if it brought him any relief or not, for in two or three minutes, he died.

Collis closed the door of the hotel room and looked across at the photographer, who was hastily packing up his camera and his plates. The photographer gave him a nervous, unhappy glance, and then went on fastening up his polished oak boxes.

Collis went to the window and shielded his eyes against the sunlight as he looked down into the street. He felt exhausted, as if he had been running hard for hours.

‘I’ll be going now, Mr Edmonds,’ the photographer said. ‘I’ll send you the prints in the morning.’

‘Very well,’ replied Collis. Then, more softly, ‘Very well.’

Theodore, when he discovered what had happened, was furious. He met Collis at the bar of the Emmett House Hotel, on Pennsylvania Avenue between Seventh and Eighth, and he appeared more harassed than ever, with his necktie hanging loose, and his lapel inside out.

‘Theo,’ said Collis, with exaggerated concern, ‘you’re allowing this railroad to get you down. Have a drink. You’ll feel much better.’

‘I don’t want your drinks and I don’t want your sympathy,’ hissed Theo. ‘I want to disassociate myself from you and all the rest of this company’s motley collection of directors as soon as I can. You’re nothing but a gang of small-minded thieves and twisters.’

Collis raised his hand to attract the barman’s attention. Then he turned to look at Theo; and, as he did so, the sun waxed strong and bright through the yellow glass of the hotel windows, and the curls of tobacco smoke around Collis’s head shone like a Satanic wreath.

‘I’ve heard a lot of talk about honour and moral rectitude since I first got involved in the Sierra Pacific,’ Collis said gently. ‘But without pushing, without pressuring, without using whatever means we have at our disposal, this fabulous railroad of ours will never be built. Just you remember that.’

The barman set a whisky down on the counter in front of Theodore. Theodore looked at it, tossed a dollar down beside it, and then walked stiffly out of the bar.

Through the weeks of bargaining that followed, Collis and Theodore were seldom apart. In committee rooms, in hotel suites, in restaurants, and even on board a naval ship moored on the Potomac, they sat side by side and argued for their railroad with compelling accord. It was only when the day’s business was over — when the cigars were crushed out in the smoke-filled rooms and the papers were gathered up from the tables — that Theodore would coldly and immediately leave for his hotel, while Collis went off to have dinner with one Congressman or another, or off to his rooms on Connecticut Avenue.