When Collis read these words, his mouth shuddered with grief, and his eyes filled with tears.

‘Hannah,’ he said, out loud. ‘Oh, God, Hannah.’

On a wet January afternoon the following year, 1863, they gathered on the outskirts of Sacramento to dedicate the beginning of the Sierra Pacific Railroad. Leland, who had been elected the first Republican governor of California after eleven years of Democratic administration, was even windier than the weather, and full of his own importance to the point of explosion. He stood on a raised wooden platform in his tall black silk hat, his whiskers beaded with rain, and directed everybody to his place.

Even Leland was upstaged by the locomotive, however. It was a wood-burning 4-4-0, with a huge megaphone-shaped smokestack, and a bell that was suspended in curlicues of polished brass. It had been burnished up for the ground-breaking ceremony, but the wet cold weather had given its boiler a silvery metallic bloom, and its driveshafts and couplings sparkled with greasy droplets. The engineer and the fireman worked busily and importantly in the red-painted cab, and every now and then they would let out a little toot of steam from the whistle.

It was around the magnificently splayed cowcatcher and the huge wheels of the locomotive that the crowd had gathered, with their umbrellas shining as black as a colony of beetles, and their shoes smothered in mud. It was the locomotive which embodied the wild and breathtaking idea of the Sierra Pacific Railroad, not Leland McCormick, for all his oratory. And this was in spite of the fact that the locomotive had nowhere to go, for Collis had been able to lay enough track only to accommodate the steam engine itself, its tender, and one passenger carriage which still hadn’t arrived from New York.

Collis himself stood at the back of the platform, bareheaded, his hat in his hands. He was looking thin and drawn, and his sidewhiskers were now smudged with grey. Theodore was standing beside him with Annie, and after years of travelling to Washington and back, after endless hours of struggling for his dream of a transcontinental railroad, Theodore’s appearance was startling. He was bowed, and unhealthily plump, and his beard seemed ragged and unkempt, making him look like a mangy dog.

Andy Hunt was there, in an unexpectedly sober suit; and Charles, with Mary on his arm, smiling at everybody who passed. There were also several uncomfortable-looking gentlemen in the crowd who had obviously been sent from various banks and transportation companies in San Francisco, to report back on the opening ceremony to the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, and to Wells Fargo, and to interested parties like Laurence Melford and Arthur Teach. Later, Collis sent Kwang Lee around to each of these men to give them a good cigar and fifty dollars in gold.