‘You and I?’ Collis smiled. ‘You and I have always been enemies. We always shall be. Take good care of Annie for me.’

Theodore went to the door, opened it, and raised his hand in a last awkward salute. Collis said nothing; but when Theodore had gone, he sat for a long time in the gloom of his library, wondering what would become of him.

A month later, he found out. A telegram reached Andy Hunt’s office from Washington, on the new transcontinental telegraph line, which had only been opened the previous November. Andy Hunt sent it on the next day’s Sacramento steamer, and it was delivered to 54 K Street just as Collis was leaving to ride to Roseville, to talk to the citizens there about the railroad.

The telegraph read: ‘Theodore Jones died today from yellow fever contracted in Panama. Please inform all concerned. Annie Jones.’

Collis read the telegraph twice, and then walked back into the store. Charles was there, helping Kwang Lee to make out an order for black powder. He saw the expression on Collis’s face at once, and came towards him with his hands raised as if he was expecting Collis to fall.

‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

Collis showed him the telegraph. Charles read it, and then puffed loudly, and leaned on the counter, and put his hand on his hip.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said.

‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ said Collis. ‘He died of the lack of a transcontinental railroad. He died because his own vision hasn’t yet been fulfilled.’

‘Is there anything we can do?’ asked Charles.

Collis thought, and then nodded. ‘Sure there is. We can build the Sierra Pacific Railroad for him.’

‘Us and whose millions?’ Charles wanted to know.

By the spring of 1864, the Sierra Pacific had reached the end of its credit. Collis was personally in debt by nearly five million dollars, more than he had ever owned or earned in the whole of his life — all in interest guarantees and bank notes. Although the roadbed was prepared almost as far as Newcastle, thirty-one miles away, there were only eighteen and a half miles of track laid, far from the token forty miles which the federal government required; and Leland, who had been talking in the fall of limiting the line to Nevada Territory and no further, was now talking of going into liquidation, and saving whatever they could.

But Collis was determined. Not for the sake of Theodore’s memory, because he realised now that Theodore had gone that the workings of the company were no longer trammelled by the moral scruples of a religious and engineering visionary. Nor yet for the sake of Hannah’s memory, nor his own vision of crossing the High Sierras by rail.