He hesitated, and then he said, ‘You grow to learn too that sometimes those old friends or old enemies are better left alone, especially when life hasn’t been particularly kind to either of you.’

Delphine didn’t answer. Collis stayed a moment longer, and then put on his hat, nodded to Mrs Pangborn, and left.

Chapter Fourteen

The crucial stipulation of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 had been that forty consecutive miles of track must be laid by the company on any part of the railroad route before the government would start paying subsidies and handing over land titles. Collis hadn’t worried too much about it at the time, but now it was proving an impossible sticking point. The Sierra Pacific owned a locomotive, a tender, one passenger carriage, and about two miles of rusting track — which took it just out to the city limits.

The roadbed had been graded for about a mile further on, but they simply couldn’t afford to go on. With only four rails to the ton, and a ton of rails costing $115, it cost $11,500 to buy the 400 rails that each mile of track consumed, and that didn’t include timber, or spikes, or wages, or anything else at all.

Leland began to talk of taking the road no further than Nevada, and possibly laying no tracks on it at all, but simply grading it as a wagon road, and charging a toll for each loaded wagon that wanted an easy route over the Sierra. Theodore argued hotly for a few weeks and then became silent and morose again. In October of 1863, he came to Collis’s house and announced that he was going East again, and taking Annie with him.

It was evening, and Collis had been working all day in his library. Although he had kept on the servants after Hannah’s death, he rarely used any part of the house except the library, the dining-room, and the small back bedroom. He wasn’t keeping the house as a shrine. There were no pictures of Hannah anywhere. It was just that he was concentrating all his attention on the railroad these days, and all he needed was a room to work in, a room to eat in, and a room to sleep in.

Charles would often pass his house after a late lodge meeting and see his lamp still burning after midnight. ‘If the Sierra Pacific could be built with sheer dedication, and nothing else, then we would have crossed the Sierras by now,’ he used to say. But it couldn’t, and they hadn’t.