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.

Epilogue

The band was playing ‘Clear the Way’, but all that Collis could hear from inside his private parlour car was the monotonous thumping of the drum — his right ear had been deaf since the accident. His back had also been injured and he still walked with a cane. He had arrived at last in this dry desert basin, surrounded on three sides by heat-hazed mountains, like a man who keeps a long-standing appointment with a woman he is no longer sure that he loves. Yet he knew that he had to be here. The destiny he had talked about with Hannah and Knickerbocker Jane had been fulfilled.

The iron cowcatcher of the Jupiter, the locomotive which had pulled Collis’s car over the Sierras and across the empty wastelands of the Humboldt Sink, was now only fifty feet apart from the cowcatcher of the Union Pacific’s Engine 119. Here, at Promontory Point, Utah, the two railroads had at last joined, spanning the continent.