Leland looked at him huffily. ‘Only a decent one,’ he said. ‘And only from somebody I liked already.’

Collis saw Delphine twice in the next few weeks. He didn’t get close enough to talk to her, and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to. But from the way she was riding with Mrs Pangborn and two or three of Mrs Pangborn’s prettier and more favoured parlour girls, all decorated and frilled in a shiny green landau, he guessed that she had made up her mind to stay for a while in Sacramento before moving on.

He found it difficult to believe that she was the same pretty and provocative girl he had known in New York; but then she had always been sexually uninhibited, and he supposed that once her father had gone bankrupt and her family life had collapsed, the parlour circuit was all she had left. It was a pretty rough and degrading way to go, though. All the myths about college-educated girls and famous French dancers going on the parlour circuit to amuse themselves during their vacations were based on nothing more than male fantasy. The kind of men that a girl had to entertain in Nevada City and Alder Gulch were demanding and crude, and even a high-spirited girl like the notorious Martha Jane Canary was soon worn down. Miss Canary had won herself the nickname Calamity Jane. Collis wondered what they would be calling Delphine in years to come.

The second time he saw her, on K Street near the post office, she turned towards him, nodded her head, and smiled. He gave her only the briefest smile in return, but he found when he thought about her afterwards that his feelings had softened towards her, and that he was quite inclined to see her again. He decided to look her up again when he returned from Washington.

The journey to Washington in the spring of 1864 was tiresome and uncomfortable. In Panama, it rained for days, and the railroad was delayed by mudslides. There was Confederate shipping action off the coast of Georgia, too, and the steamer had to heave to for eight hours in a heavy swell.

In Washington, Collis had to stay at the second-rate Capitol Hotel, although he spent most of his time lobbying for votes for a fresh and improved Railroad Act, and saw his room only when he needed sleep, or a shave, or a change of clothes. In the hotel opposite was Thomas Durant, the vice-president of the Union Pacific Railroad — a thin, energetic man with a dark goatee beard — and he was in Washington for the same purpose and with just as much money for buying Congressional votes.