Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘No,’ said Collis. He wished to God that Walter West would confine his remarks to the goods in hand, and stop making him feel so infernally guilty. The poor man seemed so vulnerably upright and well-meaning that to take Hannah away from him would be like shooting a wide-eyed, flop-eared rabbit from point-blank range.

  ‘It’s been two years,’ said Walter West. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve ever been deprived of the company of the woman you love for two years, sir, but I can tell you that it’s days of sadness and nights of real despair. I used to sit up in my bed some nights and look at the moon, and think to myself that same moon was shining over my Hannah even then, and that used to break my heart.’

  ‘I’m sure both of you have borne it with tremendous fortitude,’ Collis said.

  ‘Thank you, sir. I think we did our best. It’s been a trial right to the end, though. My wife got sick of the fever crossing the Panama isthmus, and she had to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks. The captain of the California sent me a note yesterday afternoon that she was recovering, though, and I thank God for that.’

  ‘She’s lucky,’ whispered Collis.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said, she’s lucky.’

  ‘Yes, I guess she is. But I’m luckier still. I’ll have her here in a week, if all goes well, and then you can bet a gold mine to a hole in the ground that I’m going to be the happiest and the proudest man in the whole of this city.’

  Walter West finished packing up the workbox and set it square on the top of the counter.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘I guess that’ll make your young niece’s day for her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Collis. He shook two silver dollars out of his purse and laid them on the counter next to the parcel. Two sharp clicks of metal on glass. ‘You won’t think I’m impertinent if I ask you a question?’ he said.

  ‘I guess not. I guess it depends what the question is.’

  ‘Well, it’s this. When you said about your wife … well, being away so long …’

  ‘Yes?’

  Collis looked at him carefully. If there was any flinching, no matter how slight, he wanted to catch it. ‘Did you ever, during those two years that you were without her, did you ever feel that perhaps you didn’t love her any more?’

  Walter West frowned. The sun was on his hand, and his wedding band, scored with thousands of scratches from hundreds of days of lonely work, gave off a dull, solid gleam.

  ‘I’m not sure I get your drift,’ he said, obviously a little upset. ‘I’ve loved my wife from the day I met her, and if anything at all, I’m fonder of her now than I was when I had to leave her behind.’

  Collis listened to this without changing his expression. It was all exactly as he feared it would be. Hannah would arrive in San Francisco, and this bearded haberdasher’s dogged lonesomeness and patent need would make it impossible for her to break free from him. After all the strange conversations in Panama, after all the veiled promises and protestations of profane love, his affair with Hannah amounted to no more than this store, with its silks and its threads, and this dull man behind the glass counter. It all weighed too much, in the scales of Christianity and guilt, and all that Collis had to counterbalance it with was gossamer.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Collis said suddenly.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Walter West asked him. ‘What about?’

  ‘About the workbox. I don’t think my niece will really like it after all.’

  ‘Well …’ said Walter West, hesitantly.

  ‘I have a marvellous idea,’ put in Collis, before he could start objecting. ‘Why don’t you give it to your wife, when she arrives here?’

  ‘My wife? Why should you want to give a workbox to my wife?’

  ‘I don’t, but now I’ve put you to all this trouble, gift-wrapping and so on, I don’t like to walk out without buying the box. Let me buy it, and you can give it your wife.’

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ said Walter West, completely foxed. ‘But who shall I say gave it? She’ll know it wasn’t me.’

  Collis thought for a moment. Then he said, ‘I know. Tell her it came from an anonymous but adoring admirer.’

  Walter West gazed down at the workbox in its pink tissue paper, and then at Collis, and his face didn’t look happy at all.

  ‘Go on,’ Collis said, ‘it’s just a joke. You can tell her what really happened later.’

  Walter West, still frowning, opened up his cash register and counted out Collis’s change. Collis slipped the coins into his purse, raised his hat, and walked back out into the street without another word. He turned once he was on the boardwalk and squinted back into the shadowy doorway. There, on the counter, was the pink-wrapped box, and there, standing behind it, his eyebrows dense with thought, was the husband of the woman he thought he loved.

  He walked on to the post office on Washington Street. Since the California had come in yesterday with sacks of mail from the East, the street outside was crowded with lines of men waiting to collect their letters. Here there was a mixture of men of all kinds, miners and drifters shuffling in line with banker’s clerks and auctioneers and servants from the big houses. Some of them talked and argued, and shook hands with acquaintances they may not have seen since the last mail steamer came in; others waited with their heads bowed, moving forward a step at a time to the pillared porch of the post office. A newsboy in a dirty shirt and bare feet walked along the lines selling copies of the Tribune. Collis joined the end of the line because he had nobody to wait for him.

  It took him twenty minutes to get inside the post office, and it was a chaotic, disorganised, noisy scramble to reach the counter to collect his mail. The clerk, a blue pencil behind each prominent ear, quickly sorted through the E’s and found two letters addressed to Collis.

  He pushed his way back outside. For no reason that he could think of, he found that he was trembling. He walked next door, to a grocery store called Garret House, and found a spare wooden chair on the boardwalk, where he sat down. A man in faded blue dungarees leaned against the open door of the store smoking a pipe and watching him with unabashed interest.

  One letter was from his mother. He recognised the spiky handwriting. The other handwriting he didn’t know at all. It was loopy, slanting, and lean, and from all appearances, it was that of a woman. He tore open the letter from his mother first.

  Collis,

  It is with great sadness that I have to write to tell you that your dear father has passed away. He died of his heart ailment only three days after you set sail from New York, despite the best efforts of his doctors to save him. The strain of his business problems and the many personal difficulties he was having to face were all too much for him.

  I suppose you will expect me to say that his passing was inevitable, and that I will forgive your conduct towards him in the last few days of his life. But I would not be true to my feelings if I said that. There was much that you did that was selfish and senseless, and which only served to aggravate your father’s burden of ill health. It is possible that I will forgive you in time, but while I am in mourning I would prefer not to hear from you, or of you.

  Your sister Maude and I are as well as might be expected. We are going to stay with friends in Sherman, Connecticut, who have a small cottage in their grounds. Your father’s old friend Neiman Bennett is acting as executor, and he is being most generous with his time in settling the complications of your father’s estate.

  I am sure that you will join me in my prayers for the eternal rest of your dear father’s soul; and I know that you will reflect for many years to come on how thoughtlessness towards others brings only sorrow, pain, and grief.

  I am,

  Your Mother

  Collis read the letter twice, and then folded it up. He raised his eyes to the lines of men waiting outside the post office, and saw two or three men like himself, standing with torn-open letters in their hands, their faces saddened and numbed. He couldn’t hold back a deep sob
in his throat, and the man in the dungarees shifted his position and regarded him with even more obvious curiosity. He could hardly believe that his father was gone; his argumentative father with his broad black-vested abdomen that had always seemed to Collis like some permanent and enduring edifice, as solid and invincible as the bow of a man-of-war, or the buttresses of a church. He tried to imagine what his father had looked like, tried to picture the erratic eye and the grey moustache, but somehow he could only recall that childhood image of his father’s vest, with its long gold watch chain.

  So, Makepeace Edmonds was gone, and already interred, no doubt watched over by a white marble angel.

  Collis opened the second letter. It was written on thin, flimsy paper, and he had to spread it across his knee with the side of his hand. On the head of the letter was written ‘Orangeburg, South Carolina’. It was from Alice Stride.

  My dear Collis,

  You may be wondering why you are hearing from me, and not from Delphine. Well, the news may not have reached you yet, or you would understand. The Ohio Life and Mutual Trust Company, of which Mr Spooner is a vice-president and also a stockholder, has gone spectacularly bankrupt! It happened on 24 August, and many other Wall Street banks and brokers have been dragged to ruin. There is talk of specie payments being suspended at the banks, and thousands of men are out of work and roaming the streets. My father says that it is one of the worst crises of our age, but that it is the inevitable result of worthless speculation in mining and railroad bonds.

  ‘He should know,’ Collis said to himself, under his breath. Then he went on to read:

  The Spooners will probably have to leave their house and sell most of their valuables to pay their debts. Delphine, of course, is stricken and she begged me not to tell you, but I thought it only fair for you to know, rather than to wait for months in vain for the letter she will not send you. I know she loves you still. She talks of you all the time. But she will not hear of your marrying a pauper bride, and she knows she must give you up.

  Please write if you have news of yourself. For myself, I am very well, and would much appreciate some correspondence.

  I remain your affectionate friend,

  Alice Stride

  As if by coincidence, the barefooted newsboy came past waving copies of the Tribune and calling, ‘New York banks suspend specie payment! New York banks suspend specie payment! Latest news by the Concord stage!’

  Collis stood up and walked across the square. It was almost lunchtime, and he knew that he had to go back to Knickerbocker Jane’s to meet Charles. But somehow he felt that he wanted just a moment or two to reflect, on his own, on the morning’s losses. He began to walk up Sansome Street, past the shacks and the shanties and the cooking fires, watched by miners and loafers and gamblers, until eventually he came out on the sandy summit of Telegraph Hill, under the arms of the semaphore which signalled the arrival of incoming ships, with the wind whipping his hair, and the glittering bay spread beneath him.

  He did not weep. But he stood there, with his hands in his pockets, his shoulders a little hunched, while across the rooftops of the business district a clock sonorously struck twelve, and seagulls turned and called above his head.

  Chapter 6

  Charles was already waiting for him at the Auction Lunch when he arrived, and waved to him over the crowd of stovepipe hats, which dipped and bobbed like the black funnels of a harbourful of steamships. The saloon was packed to the door, and almost deafeningly noisy with laughter and shouting and the earnest midday conversation of San Francisco’s businessmen. A broad-faced whiskered man in a high silk hat and a formal suit gave Collis a nod of welcome as he came in; and as Collis elbowed his way towards the counter where Charles and his friends were waiting, he was surprised to see that another man in a high silk hat was serving the drinks and slicing up the corned beef and pickles behind the bar.

  ‘Very nobby waiters they have here,’ he remarked to Charles, as he shook his hand.

  ‘Aha,’ said Charles, ‘there’s a story behind that. But first meet my friends. This is Lloyd Wintle, the president of the Western Bank; and this is Arthur Teach, of Pacific Securities. Arthur claims he’s a full-blooded descendant of Blackbeard the Pirate, which may or may not be.’

  Collis extended his hand, first to Lloyd Wintle and then to Arthur Teach. Wintle was willowy and tall, with a nose that overhung his face like a flag overhanging a parade ground on a sultry day. His eyes were pale, and emphatically underlined with bags, and his hat appeared to lean at an unusual angle. But Collis had the impression from his handshake that he was determined, and competent to a degree, and rich, whereas Teach, who was far broader, and more whiskery, and who looked as if he could ravish somebody else’s wife and chop logs at the same time, was poorer, and hungrier, and politically more radical.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Edmonds,’ Lloyd Wintle said, with a noticeable Michigan accent, that particular articulation of flattened vowels from the back of the throat. ‘Charles has been saying you’re interested in railroads, and in cards. Understand you shot a dealer’s hat to pieces last night, at the Eagle Saloon.’

  Collis shrugged. ‘I’m more interested in railroads than I am in shooting hats to pieces.’

  ‘You sure you’re not still suffering from isthmusitis?’ said Arthur Teach. ‘Most of the railroad fanatics we meet around here are trying to redress a bad experience at Panama.’

  The silk-hatted man behind the bar raised an eyebrow to Collis, as if to ask him what he wanted, and Collis asked, ‘Can you mix a stone fence?’

  The man nodded, and reached behind him to the shelves of liquor to bring down a bottle of bourbon and a jug of sweet cider.

  ‘That’s Jimmy Flood there, behind the bar,’ said Charles. ‘Billy O’Brien stands at the door, inviting folks in, and Jimmy mixes the drinks and cuts the bacon. They were friends from way back. They met in Poor Man’s Gulch, and they both made up their minds to open shops here in San Francisco. Jimmy opened a livery store, and Billy opened a marine supply shop – or was it the other way about? But anyway, they both got wiped out by fire in ’55. So they opened the Auction Lunch in the financial district here, and if you ask me they’re going to make themselves rich one day, though not from selling lunches. But they keep their ears open to all the financial gossip, and they buy whatever stock their customers recommend, and that’s how.’

  Arthur Teach swallowed beer, leaving white foam clinging to his moustache, and he asked Collis, ‘Do you think you’ve got that kind of a mind? The kind of a mind that can turn hard luck into hard cash?’

  Jimmy Flood brought Collis’s drink and set it on the battered and glass-ringed mahogany counter. Collis picked it up and then raised it as if to imply that he was drinking to Teach’s health, and to Wintle’s continuing good fortune, and to Charles’s friendship. But he said nothing, and kept his face expressionless, and he could see that Wintle and Teach were more than a little unsettled. That was the way Collis preferred his new acquaintances to be, for the time being. He was a stranger around here, a tenderfoot, and he didn’t know the fandango halls from the fish docks, and the only possible chance of keeping an edge was to act tight, and short on humour.

  ‘Mr Wintle and me, we’re always looking for investments, day and night,’ explained Teach. ‘Good sound mining projects. Commodities. Shipping. All that kind of thing. But the way we see it, any project needs two essential factors if it’s going to work. It needs vision. You understand what I mean by vision? And it needs solid hard workability. Both those two. Because one won’t get off its ass without the other, and the other won’t pay back dividends without the one. You got me?’

  Collis sipped his drink. He still didn’t answer. Charles gave his friends a restless, jesting grin, as if to suggest that Collis wasn’t always this way.

  ‘That’s why,’ Teach added, ‘I was impertinent enough to question you about your idea for a railroad. This dream that Charles tells me you have for spanning the continent. It’s a pretty f
ancy dream. A big vision. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s going to need some pretty damned hard workability, too. You got me?’

  Lloyd Wintle said lugubriously, ‘I heard of a scheme for taking railroad locomotives over the High Sierras by hot-air balloon, with platforms hung beneath for the freight. I heard of another scheme for harnessing teams of moles, and digging right under the mountains altogether. Pretty crack-brained, huh? But those are the kind of schemes people come up with, and they come asking us for finance. Five thousand moles, all harnessed up, can you picture it?’

  Collis took out a cheroot and lit it. ‘You want a corned-beef sandwich?’ Charles asked, but Collis shook his head.

  Arthur Teach put down his empty bourbon glass. ‘Charles gave you a pretty high recommendation, Mr Edmonds. I can call you Collis, can’t I? But I just think you ought to know that some of the airy-fairy ideas you Easterners might have about the West, well, they’re not strictly justified. We’ve learned to look after ourselves out here, and if we spend our money wildly on occasions, it’s simply because we choose to, and not because we’ve been cajoled into supporting some hare-brained project or other.’

  Lloyd Wintle nodded sadly. ‘Some fellow came out here and said he’d thought up a way to send the human voice along a telegraph wire. Can you picture that? Thirty-five thousand dollars he wanted, for experiments. The human voice! By wire!’

  Collis dropped his gaze. Beneath his grey frock coat, Lloyd Wintle’s pants hung around his long legs in folds as elaborate and self-conscious as Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of drapery.

  ‘We’re interested in you,’ Arthur Teach said, ‘and whatever you do, because Charles says you’re an interesting fellow. But I believe it’s only fair to warn you that you’re going to need more than dreams to make your fortune out here, and more than a couple of lucky games of faro. You’re going to need substance. You look up on Rincon Hill, at South Park. Now there’s substance. And substance comes from having what the people here really need, and what they’ll pay for. Do you know something? There’s a shipload of blankets coming in on Thursday next, on the Aria. Thousands and thousands of pure wool blankets. And who do you think’s going to be down on the dock, waiting for that ship, and waiting to buy up every single blanket she’s carrying, even though it’s still summer? Me. That’s who. Because in a month it’s going to be fall, and in another month it’s going to be winter, and suddenly the folks of San Francisco are going to start feeling the cold and looking out for blankets. And who do you think is going to be the proud and profitable possessor of every blanket in town? Well, you guessed it, and that’s what I mean by substance. Don’t deal in dreams, Collis. Deal in substance. You got me?’