Hennessy's train was painted a glossy vermilion red, and hauled by a powerful Baldwin Pacific 4-6-2 locomotive black as the coal in its tender. His private cars, named Nancy No. 1 and Nancy No. 2 for his long-dead wife, measured eighty feet long by ten feet wide. They had been built of steel, to his specifications, by the Pullman Company and outfitted by European cabinetmakers.

Nancy No. 1 contained Hennessy's office, parlor, and state rooms, including marble tubs, brass beds, and a telephone that could be connected to the telephone system of any city he rolled into. Nancy No. 2 carried a modern kitchen, storerooms that could hold a month's provisions, a dining room, and servants' quarters. The baggage car had room reserved for his daughter Lillian's Packard Gray Wolf automobile. A dining car and luxurious Pullman sleepers accommodated the engineers, bankers, and lawyers engaged in building the Cascades Cutoff.

Once on the main line, Hennessy's special could rocket him to San Francisco in half a day, Chicago in three, and New York in four, switching engine types to maximize road conditions. When that wasn't fast enough to serve his lifelong ambition to control every railroad in the country, his special employed "grasshopper telegraphy," an electromagnetic induction system patented by Thomas Edison that jumped telegraphic messages between the speeding train and the telegraph wires running parallel to the tracks.

Hennessy himself was a wisp of an old man, short, bald, and deceptively frail looking. He had a ferret's alert black eyes, a cold gaze that discouraged lying and extinguished false hope, and the heart, his fleeced rivals swore, of a hungry Gila monster. Hours after the tunnel collapse, he was still in shirtsleeves, dictating a mile a minute to a telegrapher, when the first of his dinner guests was ushered in.

The smooth and polished United States senator Charles Kincaid arrived impeccably dressed in evening clothes. He was tall and strikingly handsome. His hair was slick, his mustache trim. No hint of whatever he was thinking--or if he was thinking at all--escaped from his brown eyes. But his sugary smile was at the ready.

Hennessy greeted the politician with barely veiled contempt.

"In case you haven't heard, Kincaid, there's been another accident. And, by God, this one is sabotage."

"Good Lord! Are you sure?"

"So damned sure, I've wired the Van Dorn Detective Agency."

"Excellent choice, sir! Sabotage will be beyond the local sheriffs, if I may say so, even if you could find one up here in the middle of nowhere. Even a bit much for your railway police." Thugs in dirty uniforms, Kincaid could have added, but the senator was a servant of the railroad and careful how he spoke to the man who had made him and could as easily break him. "What's the Van Dorn motto?" he asked ingratiatingly. "'We never give up, never!' Sir, as I am qualified, I feel it's my duty to direct your crews in clearing the tunnel."

Hennessy's face wrinkled with disdain. The popinjay had worked overseas building bridges for the Ottoman Empire's Baghdad Railway until the newspapers started calling him the "Hero Engineer" for supposedly rescuing American Red Cross nurses and missionaries from Turkish capture. Hennessy took the reported heroics with many grains of salt. But Kincaid had somehow parlayed bogus fame into an appointment by a corrupt state legislature to represent "the interests" of the railroads in the "Millionaires' Club" United States Senate. And no one knew better than Hennessy that Kincaid was growing wealthy on railroad-stock bribes.