Certainly not I, I said to myself, staring down at the picture. Certainly not I.

On this trip, the Mogul carried supplies for the building of the Great Northern extension. So here’s not only the illusion of freedom, power, control, and friendship, but the illusion of sex, too – sex allegorical, sex theatrical – one railroad, one man-made miracle, in the very process of generating another with rhythmic, heavy clack of metal on metal and relentless surge forward toward the twin illusions of future and progress. For a day and a half the track looped and twisted up into the wall of the mountains, past craggy rock, through forests of pines, by niches of wild flowers. Jonathan leapt from car to car, setting brakes for every change in grade and every sag in the roadbed. High in the mountains the climb leveled off. Granite outcroppings appeared and erupted sideways into layers of color. The pine forests thinned. The stone became a rocky plain. Lakes glinted in the distance. The sky opened up.

Two days later they hit California.

As soon as the train berthed, Jonathan ran to the harbor. There were ships everywhere. He hadn’t reckoned on ships. There was no wind; the scene was entirely still. But as he watched, the slender, elegant masts picked up the motion of a tramp ship that wove its way through the moorings. The masts swung and banked, crisscrossing, but gently, while the battered tramp almost bounced across the harbor (no doubts there at all) and entranced Jonathan every foot of its way.

‘What kind is that one?’ he asked an old man standing nearby.

‘Hermaphrodite schooner,’ the old man answered at once. ‘See how she’s rigged? Square on the foremast, fore and aft on the main? Not so good as she used to be, I can tell you that. Where you from?’

Jonathan gestured that he had just come across the mountains.

‘Mountains ain’t nothing,’ the old man said. ‘It’s the sea that counts. She used to be a clipper, a real clipper. Refitted her, they did.’ The old man snorted. ‘Don’t take more than twenty to work her. Lost her looks, poor bitch – used to be a beauty once.’

A gust of wind caught the ship’s sails.

‘Lost her speed, too.’

They stared after her, and through the swath she left behind her Jonathan caught his first unimpeded view of the Pacific. ‘Where would you go to look for a man?’ he said suddenly.

‘I wouldn’t.’

Jonathan bridled. ‘I would,’ he said, voice cold.

‘Would you now? What’s a boy like you—’

‘I didn’t ask your advice on that.’

The old man sighed. ‘How old a man?’ he said.

‘Forty. Maybe forty-five.’ All Jonathan remembered of the man he thought of as his father was a beard, a pair of tattered army boots and the callused feel of one hand. ‘Gone west, I suspect,’ Benbow Wikin had said. ‘California probably.’

‘Boarding houses. Mining camps. Farm directories,’ the old man said. ‘People move around a lot.’