‘Then I’ll go,’ said Collis.

The foreman shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Edmonds, I can’t take that responsibility. That’s nitroglycerin in there, not brandy and cigars.’

‘You don’t have to take the responsibility,’ snapped Collis. ‘This is my railroad and I’ll do whatever I damned well choose.’

‘Collis — don’t be absurd,’ Charles said. ‘What do you know about blasting? You can’t go in there. It’s dangerous and it’s out of the question.’

‘I’m going,’ said Collis, pulling off his linen coat and handing his hat to the foreman. ‘I know enough about blasting to know that there’s probably a loose connection. A child could fix it.’

‘Collis,’ warned Charles, ‘if you attempt to go into that tunnel, I’ll have you forcibly stopped.’

Collis smiled at him. ‘No you won’t, Charles. I’m going, and that’s all there is to it.’

There was a disturbed murmur from the blasters and graders as the foreman beckoned to the puzzled Yo Huang. Then Collis walked along the roadbed as far as the tunnel entrance and went inside without looking back once.

Now that all the drilling had stopped, the tunnel was almost completely silent. His footsteps made a brittle echo on the solid granite, and he could hear himself breathing as if he were someone else altogether. Well, he thought, perhaps I am. Perhaps I’ve turned out to be someone very different from the boy who woke up alongside an Irish whore in the Monument Hotel, all those years ago. Perhaps I’ve come of age.

He followed the shining line of the detonator wire out of the corner of his eye. He was two hundred feet into the tunnel now, and it was still unbroken. He coughed and cleared his throat. He didn’t once wonder why he had elected to do this. It had just seemed natural that he should. Fitting.

He was sweating, and so he pulled out his handkerchief to mop his face. There was a decorative CE on the edge of the handkerchief, and he had an odd momentary vision of the very day when Hannah had embroidered that for him, sitting on the veranda of their house in Sacramento, on a warm evening in May. She must have been pregnant then, he thought, with a painful feeling of loss. At that very moment, she must have been carrying my child.

He heard a whistling sound and so he raised his head and peered back along the sloping tunnel. It was at that instant that one of the priming charges went off with a loud, smart blast, and Collis felt as if his head had been smacked between two planks. Then a hailstorm of fragmented granite knocked him off his feet and half-buried him in dust and showering grit.