Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You don’t think a railroad’s substantial?’ Collis said.

  ‘Not the dream of a railroad. No, sir.’

  ‘So you wouldn’t invest in a railroad?’

  ‘Not unless I could see the surveys, and the projections of profit and loss.’

  ‘You think Queen Isabella saw surveys and projections of profit and loss when she financed Columbus?’

  ‘She had the latest information available. That’s all I’m asking for.’

  ‘Even though it’s self-evident that a transcontinental railroad must be the most historic and dramatic project this country has ever known?’

  ‘History and drama aren’t the same as profits and dividends, Mr Edmonds,’ Lloyd Wintle said softly. ‘Not by a long chalk. And what Mr Teach is saying is that, in the end, it all comes down to profits and dividends.’

  ‘Collis is just arrived, you know, Lloyd,’ Charles put in uneasily. ‘He hasn’t even had the opportunity to look around town, and size up the possibilities. This railroad talk, well, it’s only talk. Only a suggestion. For the first few months, Collis is going to come out to Sacramento and work for me.’

  Teach raised a gingery eyebrow. ‘What does Collis have to say about that?’

  Collis smiled. ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Teach. ‘You don’t look like the kind of fellow who’d knuckle down to hardware and dry goods and really enjoy it. Not when your mind is buzzing with railroads.’

  Collis thoughtfully drew smoke from his cheroot. ‘I’m looking forward to working for Charles for a while, as a matter of fact. There are one or two important gaps in my education, particularly when it comes to business. I can play a tolerable game of faro, and ride a horse for sport. But if I’m ever going to lay a railroad line across those mountains, I’m going to require other abilities, too. Like working out the cost of timber, for railroad ties; and buying up spikes and rails. Like buying the right make of locomotive for the right reasons, and knowing how to work it. Like dealing with labourers and surveyors, and understanding how to lead them, and how to give them the same sense of purpose that I’m going to need.’

  ‘You don’t know any of that already?’ asked Arthur Teach, gently gibing him. ‘You make yourself sound uniquely unqualified, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

  ‘You can’t be too hard there, Arthur,’ Charles said. ‘Nobody’s ever done this before, right? It’s not like asking a man if he’s qualified to fix a barn.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Teach, throwing back a straight shot of whisky and coughing loudly. ‘I’m not so sure that a cross-country railroad isn’t anything more than a dream, and that it isn’t going to stay that way, given the present state of railroad engineering. Maybe in twenty, thirty years’ time. But who can afford to tie up good investment capital for twenty or thirty years?’

  ‘I suppose you’re making some sense,’ said Wintle sadly.

  Collis finished his drink and banged his glass on the bar. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I must be leaving you.’

  ‘Collis – you can’t go yet,’ said Charles.

  ‘I have to. I’m sorry. I need a new pair of evening shoes, and my white tie went missing last night. I wouldn’t normally trouble, but I’m supposed to go out with Knickerbocker Jane tonight to see Rodney Mulgrave.’

  ‘And quite apart from that, you don’t like the way we’re talking about your pet railroad scheme, do you?’ asked Arthur Teach. He kept his eyes on Collis as he lit a small thin cigar, pinched out the match between finger and thumb, and blew smoke from his hairy nostrils.

  Collis sighed. ‘Mr Teach, Arthur, I’m not a railroad fanatic. I don’t know a footplate from a funnel. But I do understand simple sense, and simple sense tells me it is well over five thousand miles from New York to San Francisco by sea, including an awkward crossing of the isthmus, while it is only three thousand miles from New York to San Francisco by land. Simple sense tells me many other things, too – such as the certain fact that every sod farmer and miner and cattle owner from Nebraska to California would go down on his knees and welcome a railroad across the breadth of this country as a godsend. A head of kale picked in Utah on Monday could be served up with butter in a New York restaurant by Friday; just as a plough blade cold-cast in Pennsylvania on Friday could be delivered to a Wyoming farmer within the week. You could move soldiers, too, and horses, and they would arrive fresh for battle in half the time. It’s all simple sense, Mr Teach, whether the technical details have been worked out or not.’

  Teach tugged at his moustache and then cleared his throat. But he didn’t answer. ‘You still don’t think that it’s feasible?’ asked Collis.

  Collis glanced over at Charles, but Charles was wearing a distinctly vacant face. From that, Collis surmised that Teach and Wintle were probably quite typical of San Francisco financiers, and that they were not entranced, as a rule, by daydreams. Too many innovators and too many eccentrics came to San Francisco with too many grandiose schemes, and too many thousands of dollars had already been lost in the financing of gas mantles that would never burn out, and automatic buttonhooks, and cargoes of unusual cheese. Until someone could show with surveys and graphs that a railroad could be laid through the Sierras, at least as far as Nevada, and that, once built, it would return some kind of sensible profit to its shareholders, finding support among San Francisco’s business community was going to be more than sticky. Collis understood their reticence. He was a gambling man himself. And despite his idyllic mental picture of a shiny railroad locomotive puffing and whistling its way through seas of waving wheat, bringing the cheers and huzzahs and tossed-up hats of settlers and farmers and factory builders, despite his vision of American plains that would soon be ploughed and harrowed and bustling with broccoli, and American hills that would be crowded as poppy fields with red-roofed farmhouses and Dutch barns, he wasn’t at all sure himself that a train could really make its way up and over the Sierras, up gradients as steep as slated church roofs, through snowdrifts that could bury a pioneers’ parade, trumpets, hats, bunting, pioneers, and all, without a trace, and he wasn’t at all sure that such a railroad could really make money, not instinctively sure. He didn’t yet have the experience or the skill to judge profitability by eye.

  ‘Do either of you gentlemen play cards?’ he asked, in a tone of voice that made it sound as if he hadn’t changed the subject at all.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Wintle. ‘My family’s never held with gambling. We’re plain church people, if you can picture it.’

  ‘I’m not averse to a little gambling,’ said Teach. He tapped the counter for another drink.

  Collis smiled. ‘That’s good. Maybe I can make you a bet.’

  Charles grinned uncomfortably. ‘Collis has kind of a penchant for making wagers, don’t you, Collis? He bet Andy Hunt last night that the first fellow to walk into the Eagle would be wearing a checkered vest, and by heck the fellow was.’

  Teach watched Collis suspiciously. His eyes were bulbous and hooded, like a frog’s. ‘Name your wager,’ he said in a quiet voice.

  ‘All right,’ said Collis. ‘I bet you that I can have the Sierras surveyed for a railroad route by the spring, financed out of my own pocket, and that I can lay a line through to Nevada by the time five years is up. And if I win the bet, you’ll have to buy me lunch at the International, and invest fifty per cent of whatever liquid assets you have in my railroad.’

  Teach paused for a moment. Then he extended his hand, hard and short-fingered, with a single gold signet ring. ‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘And if you lose, I’ll take fifty per cent of whatever liquid assets you might own at the time. But I’ll forgo the lunch. This,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘is all I usually take at midday.’

  There was a sudden lull in the saloon’s laughter and conversation, and Collis had the disturbing feeling that the floor had moved under his feet.

  ‘Earthquake,’ Charles said, unconcerned.

  Collis spent
a long time dressing that evening. Out of his winnings from the Eagle Saloon, he had been down to Wills the tailor’s and bought himself a new dress shirt, a new necktie, and a silk hat. He had also found a very reasonable shoemaker on Sacramento Street and had spent twenty dollars on a new pair of black kid pumps.

  He had considered going into mourning for his father for a week or two, but after three stone fences he had decided it was really not worth it. His father was 3000 miles away, and buried, and they’d never been warm friends in any case. A prayer for his soul would have to be enough, and perhaps a very small private wish for forgiveness. Not that he’d ever tell his mother.

  Outside his bedroom window, as he tied his tie, the sky was a pale grey-blue, and the lights in the houses opposite were smudged with fog. It was eight o’clock, dusk, and downstairs he could hear the bustling of full-flounced dresses and an occasional screech of annoyance as Knickerbocker Jane finished her gaudy and elaborate toilette. He leaned close to his mirror and snipped his sidewhiskers with a small pair of scissors.

  At eight-fifteen, the doorbell rang downstairs and there was a commotion in the hall as the rest of the theatre party arrived. Knickerbocker Jane was fussing around them in a tiered dress of plum-coloured silk, a tiara of yellow ostrich plumes bobbing on top of her coiffure. Collis, as he came downstairs, thought she looked like an exotic bird. Apart from Collis and Knickerbocker Jane, the party included Charles Tucker, who was dressed in an old-fashioned evening coat with immensely wide sateen lapels, and who carried on his arm, almost as if she were a decorative umbrella, a short, angelic-faced girl with a ridiculously overdecorated bonnet and a gown of bottle-green silk; and there was Samuel Lewis, a Brobdingnagian man with wavy white hair and a crimson weather-corroded face that hung over every gathering of his more diminutive friends like a bloated harvest moon, portending things but never quite coming out with them. Sam Lewis was the president of the Bullion & Marine Bank, and the most influential member of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, but his aging bachelorhood and his habit of smoking particularly foul cigars had never endeared him to the South Park Chivalry. He was going to escort Knickerbocker Jane, and he stooped over to kiss her when he arrived as if he were bending over a plate of Italian noodles.

  Collis was to go with the Brazilian girl, Ursula, who was dressed like the fifth prize in a South American church lottery, in shiny orange silk, her black frizzy hair covered by a cowl-shaped bonnet with ruffled white ribbons woven through the crown and a large floppy white bow at the neck. She bobbed a curtsy as she took Collis’s arm, and afforded him a waft of thick patchouli perfume.

  The girl on Charles Tucker’s arm, Collis found out, was called Elsie, and she was the daughter of a joiner and carpenter called Billings, whose premises were on Market Street, and whose greatest claim to professional fame was that he had boarded over the ship Niantic after she had been dragged ashore from the Bay, so that her owners could open her up as one of San Francisco’s first hotels. Elsie had a simpering, irritating voice, and Collis couldn’t listen to her for very long, but Charles assured him that she knew a great deal about knurled prick punches, and adjustable spokeshaves, and ball-bearing breast drills, and anything and everything to do with a joiner’s trade.

  ‘It’s not often you meet a girl who can tickle your fancy one day and build you a combination bookcase the next,’ Charles told Collis, as they went outside on to the boardwalk to meet their carriages.

  Charles Tucker’s down-at-heel phaeton was waiting at the curbside, with Billy on the box in a heavy brown overcoat of marled tweed. Charles helped Elsie aboard and then climbed aboard himself. Billy tipped his tall silk hat and inquired, ‘The Empire, Mr Tucker?’

  ‘That’s right, Billy.’

  Next, Sam Lewis’s cabriolet pulled up, with an excessive amount of jingling and bridle-shaking. It was a very nobby job indeed, this carriage, with shining brasses, a black leather hood, and body panels finished in shining Brewster green paint. The coachman wore a grey brass-buttoned coat, and a black beaver hat, and sported one of the reddest noses that Collis could ever remember, and he could remember a few. He climbed down and assisted Knickerbocker Jane and Ursula to mount up, and then he helped Collis and Sam Lewis aboard.

  Outside the white-porticoed theatre, with its flaring lamps, the plaza was an impossible confusion of surreys and coaches and shouting people. Collis, looking around, could see the black-and-carmine carriages of the very rich, the South Park millionaires, and the light yellow-and-beige runabouts of the young and debonair. There was a smell of excitement and fog in the evening air, and everywhere around there were men in evening dress with white ties and curved white shirt fronts and silver-topped canes, and women with velvet evening cloaks and sparkling jewellery. Perfume and cigar smoke rose into the fog, and from the alley beside the theatre came the spicy aroma of shrimp chop suey, stirred over a makeshift charcoal fire by a pigtailed Chinese. It was impossible for Collis to decide which of the handsome couples who were alighting from their carriages and making their way through the wide-open doors of the theatre were respectable, and socially elevated, and which were not. After all, in a city where desk clerks wore diamonds and prostitutes were dressed in the latest French fashions, it was often the respectable who followed the styles of the sleazy, instead of the other way about. Collis pointed to one gorgeous creature who wore a glittering tiara and was arrayed in ostrich feathers dyed dark blue, and was told by Knickerbocker Jane that this was Harriet DeLancey, the most expensive prostitute in the whole city. But she also pointed out the Thomas Selbys, looking absurdly pleased with themselves as they were helped from their coach; and the fat little Milton Lathams; and Senator William Gwin, dignified as a sailing yacht, with his wife Mary Bell. Someone let off some Chinese firecrackers, rattling and popping, and there was a good deal of laughter and shouting, and loud abuse from a coachman whose horses had been frightened.

  ‘Can you see the Melfords here?’ Collis asked in Knickerbocker Jane’s ear.

  She shook her head. ‘They usually arrive late, so that everybody will notice them. They have a reserved box in the front.’

  ‘Then I shan’t miss seeing them?’

  ‘Oh, no. You won’t miss seeing the Melfords.’

  Their cabriolet was able to push its way to the front of the theatre at last, and they were assisted on to the crowded boardwalk by Sam Lewis’s coachman. Sam Lewis, head and shoulders above the throng of people, announced, ‘We’re going to walk to the Oriental for dinner when all this dangdratted thespianism is over. So meet us there at twelve, precise.’

  The coachman touched his beaver hat, climbed up on to his seat again, and snapped his whip. Collis was left on the boardwalk with Ursula, trying desperately to push his way through the crowds of theatregoers and curious by-standers, and to follow Sam Lewis’s enormous white head through the glass-and-pearwood doors of the Empire.

  Inside, the foyer was more like the saloon of a sinking ship than a place of entertainment. The enthusiasm of the theatregoers verged on panic. Above them, a large chandelier sparkled, and there were red drapes hung all around, but they did very little to alter the impression that the Empire was simply a box into which a ridiculously large number of very excited people had jammed themselves. Collis kept his arm around Ursula’s shoulder as they forced their way to the doors of the auditorium itself, and it took five minutes of struggling and jostling before, ruffled and slightly glassy-eyed, they finally found themselves in Sam Lewis’s box.

  Collis took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. Although it was chilly outside, the temperature inside the Empire was fierce. It was a theatre designed in the traditional manner, with a gilded proscenium over which two cherubs blew hunting horns, and with heavy red drapes; but there was nothing traditional about the way in which the audience behaved. They didn’t arrive calmly and take their seats, the way an audience would have done in New York, and await the performance in a murmur of polite conversation. Instead, they seemed determined
to jump up and down, and argue, and shout to each other at the top of their voices, and wave, so that the main body of the stalls had the appearance of a squabbling flock of black-and-white gulls, all black evening coats and white shirts, bobbling and jostling, and the heat that was generated was enough to make Collis feel like fighting his way out into the plaza again and pressing his forehead against a cold store window.

  Knickerbocker Jane opened her silver-link evening purse and took out a small engraved flask. ‘Will this help?’ she whispered to Collis. ‘You look as if you’re just about to shake off this mortal shackle.’

  Collis gratefully took the flask, wrapped it in his handkerchief, and quickly tipped his head back to take a shot. It was cognac, VSOP, and it sank down inside him with a warmth and smoothness that slowed his pulse rate and brightened his eyes.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, passing the flask back.

  ‘I’d rather be in hell than here, how about you, Collis?’ said Sam Lewis.

  Collis coughed. ‘I don’t know. At least when you’re here, you can leave when it’s over.’