Railroad

by Graham Masterton

Then they were out in the open again. They were making their way downwards, they knew that much. But any other sense of direction was smothered by snow, and a wind that shrieked across the slopes was as cold and overwhelming as a torrential wave of seawater. Collis slid and fell, and rolled for twenty feet down a steep embankment, choked with snow. But he was unhurt, and he managed to pick himself up again and wait for Theodore to come staggering slowly down the slope and catch up.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Collis shouted at Theodore.

  Theodore shook his head. ‘I can’t go on much longer.’

  ‘We’re going down the mountain all the time,’ Collis told him, pointing with his gloved hand so that Theodore understood. ‘We should get out of this snowstorm soon.’

  Theodore didn’t answer, but stared at him with reddened eyes.

  ‘Let’s go!’ yelled Collis, pushing him forward.

  Collis remembered afterwards how the tiredness in his legs and the stupefying cold had almost brought him down. He remembered stumbling across stinging slopes of wind-whipped drifts, ready to collapse, and yet kept upright by the drifts themselves, two and three feet deep. He remembered heaving Theodore out of the snow again and again, getting him on his feet, shoving him bodily forward, even when he had hardly any strength to carry on himself. He remembered cursing Theodore with every curse he could think of, just to get him moving; and he remembered cursing God, and the snow, and Doc Kates, and life itself.

  But the snow eased as they lost altitude, and in an hour or two they found themselves making their way through the forests in nothing worse than a heavy sleet. It was still cold, but the blizzard was behind them, and they barged through the darkness with the jerky, uncontrolled energy of exhausted men who know that they have made it through the worst. They didn’t speak now, not even to swear at each other. They were utterly tired, and quaking with cold.

  Theodore reached out and held Collis’s shoulder to slow him down.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ he asked him thickly.

  Collis took out a handkerchief that was already soaked through and wiped the rain from his face. ‘I haven’t a clue. But we can’t be far off the trail. We haven’t crossed the American River, or the South Yuba, so we must be going west.’

  ‘I hope to God you’re right. I think I could have crossed the Rio Grande in that snow, and not even noticed.’

  They kept on until they were deep among the trees. There was a fragrance of wet pine needles, and their footsteps were muffled. It was so dark that Theodore kept bumping into tree-trunks, and swearing under his breath. They let gravity guide them; let their own tiredness draw them downhill. They lost their footing on loose rocks from time to time, and Collis wrenched his ankle on a tangled pine root. But they could listen to that devouring wind blowing high above them, and the way the rain rattled through the branches, and know that they were safe.

  The fire at Bradley Hay camp only had to wink at them once through the swaying lodgepole pines. Collis stopped, resting against the rough bark of the trees. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked Theodore.

  ‘It’s Bradley Hay Camp. It must be,’ Theodore said.

  ‘Thank Christ.’

  It took them another five minutes to climb down the steep, sodden slope that enclosed the camp on the south side. But then they were crossing the trail, and there were the cabins, and outside them was a high fire of dry pine logs, stacked like a tepee, flaring and spitting in the rain. Collis supported Theodore with his shoulder for the final few yards, but they reached the cabin door at last, and inside was Doc Kates, sitting by a woodburning stove, with his coffee-pot boiling, and his mountain-climbing boots set out to dry.

  The old man stood up. There were holes in his socks and his toes showed through. His eyes brimmed with tears. ‘Thank merciful God you’ve made it. Thank merciful God. I believed I’d lost you.’

  He helped Theodore to sit by the stove. Collis sat down beside him, unlacing his boots. Doc Kates brought out mugs and poured them both coffee.

  ‘Did Wang-Pu get here yet?’ asked Collis. ‘We thought he might have passed us in the snow.’

  Doc Kates frowned. ‘I kind of guessed you three would all be together.’

  Collis looked at Theodore. It hadn’t occurred to him that Wang-Pu might have been left behind in the blizzard. He’d assumed that the Chinaman’s natural wit and instinct for survival would have brought him safely down from the Sierras without any need for help from the stumbling white devils. He thought of the quiet, sarcastic man from the Great Wall of China and bit at his lip in anxiety.

  ‘Maybe we should go back and try finding him,’ he said, without conviction. He knew he was too tired to stand, let alone walk for miles up the mountains in the dark.

  ‘It won’t do any good,’ Doc Kates said. ‘You’d never find him now, not unless he was heading dead this way. Let’s just hope he had enough sense to keep on going downhill, and didn’t slip and break his leg.’

  Theodore stared at his steaming mug of coffee. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

  They sat in silence for a while. The wind whistled over the moss-covered cabin roof. ‘We can go first thing in the morning, if the snow’s died down,’ Doc Kates said. ‘You should have your strength back then.’

  ‘Can a man survive out there, in that snow?’ asked Collis. ‘Have you ever known it to happen?’

  Doc Kates rubbed at his beard. ‘Not in walking-clothes, as he was. He wouldn’t stand a chance. He’d get tired, and he’d lie down, and that would be the end of it.’

  ‘We can only pray that he managed to get down below the snowline,’ Theodore said.

  ‘Yes,’ answered Doc Kates. ‘I’m afraid that’s all we can do.’

  The next morning was bright, and the sky was so blue it was almost violet. They ate sausages and beans on the stoop outside the cabin, and then they packed up their knapsacks to go look for Wang-Pu. Collis felt as if he’d been pummelled all over by playful bears, and his legs were stiff and patched with bruises. But the wind was fresh and mild, and the smell of the pine forests was curiously refreshing, and after he’d eaten he was ready to go back up the mountains and face the snow.

  They climbed for an hour, skirting the woods, because Doc Kates reckoned that Wang-Pu’s likeliest descent would have been close to the way that Theodore and Collis had come down. They hardly talked at all. Theodore coughed now and again, and blew his nose, and it looked to Collis as if he was coming down with the grippe. The day was very warm and serene, and the only sounds were the trickling of melting snow and the chirping of kinglets. Above the forests, whenever they came out on bare granite escarpments, they could see the peaks of the Sierra Nevada stretching majestically for fifty miles. The mountains were still surrounded with clouds, still as forbidding, but the wind had changed again during the night, and Doc Kates guessed that any threat of a snowstorm was well past.

  They crossed and recrossed the trail seven or eight times. They scrambled down rocky gullies and trudged up long drifts of soft snow. The sun passed over their heads at noon and they were still looking, their eyes crinkled against the glare, their shadows on the snow around their knees.

  Collis never forgot the moment when they found him. It was past five o’clock, and the sun was low, but still hot. The deeper violet skies of the morning and early afternoon had faded into a silvery lilac, and the snow was tinged with the same delicate colour. They passed an outcropping of black rocks and came to a triangular field of snow, smooth and unmarked with footprints. Theodore was coughing.

  Doc Kates shaded his eyes with his hand. ‘What’s that?’ he said.

  Collis looked. He couldn’t see anything at all. But Doc Kates pointed. ‘There. Just to the left of those rocks.’

  Collis screwed up his eyes. He was almost blinded by the sunlight. By the side of a small angular boulder, perched on the snow as if someone had just dropped it there, was Wang-Pu’s tall silk hat.

  They didn’t have the strength to run. They
crossed the triangular slope doggedly, churning up the snow as they went. They reached the hat, and Theodore picked it up. The label read, ‘Weingott & Son, Hatters, San Francisco,’ and Theodore said, ‘Yes. This is Wang-Pu’s.’

  They split up, and searched the slope until they had patterned the smooth wind-blown surface like a white maze. It didn’t look as if there was anything there at all, rabbit, bird, or raccoon, let alone a lost Chinaman. But then Collis climbed the rocks to see if he could make out any signs of Wang-Pu from higher up, and he found him.

  The rocks had formed a roughly rectangular depression, and in this depression Wang-Pu rested, on a bed of snow, as if he were lying in state on a bier. His face was grey, and his lips were rimed with frost, where his last breaths had been frozen by the wind. One arm lay crookedly across his chest.

  Collis turned and called, ‘Theodore!’

  Theodore, half-way across the snowy slope, looked up. So did Doc Kates. Collis said, more quietly, ‘He’s here.’

  They shipped Wang-Pu’s body on the paddle-steamer Ulysses back to his Chinese friends in San Francisco. It was a soft, sunny October morning, and they stood on the banks of the Sacramento River watching the steamer turn its wheels and slowly make its way downstream. A few yards away, dressed in white costumes with sleeves that billowed in the wind, stood five or six members of the Yeong Wo family, the Chinese fruit farmers of the Sacramento Valley whom Wang-Pu had befriended.

  Charles put his hat back on his head. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there isn’t anything more to be done.’

  Leland, who was looking hot, said, ‘That’s as may be. But it doesn’t bode well for the railroad, does it, if a man can die of frostbite in the middle of October on the very route which we’re proposing to use for the conveyance of mothers and children?’

  Jane was holding on to Leland’s arm, her face shaded by a primrose parasol, which lent her pale face a bright and bilious hue of yellow. She was making it obvious these days that Collis was no longer her favourite, and that she mistrusted his intentions.

  ‘That blizzard was a freak,’ Collis said. ‘Doc Kates said so, anyway. It doesn’t usually blow as bad as that in October; and even if it does, we can keep the railroad track protected with snowsheds.’

  ‘Don’t you feel any sorrow for Wang-Pu?’ demanded Leland. ‘He was our trusted servant for years. How can you go on with this, after the way he died?’

  Collis took out a cheroot. ‘You may have been acquainted with Wang-Pu for years, Leland, but you never knew him. Not as I did. So don’t talk to me about sorrow, or grieving. I’ve said my own prayers for Wang-Pu, and when we build this railroad he’ll be remembered.’

  Charles cleared his throat. ‘Talking of railroads, Collis, I think it’s time we sat down and had a serious discussion about the Sierra Pacific.’

  ‘You’ve got cold feet? Because of Wang-Pu?’

  ‘It’s not so much Wang-Pu. It’s the whole enterprise. Leland and I have been talking about it a great deal since you’ve been away.’

  They were walking along the riverfront now, towards their carriages. Collis paused to light his cheroot. ‘What have you decided?’ he asked them, puffing smoke. ‘That a railroad can’t really be built, and that the Sierra Pacific Company ought to become the rubber-hose and tallow-candle subsidiary of Tucker & McCormick?’

  ‘It’s a question of profitability,’ growled Leland. ‘There isn’t any evidence to show that a transcontinental railroad will ever be adequately used. The people who live in the East want to stay in the East; and the people who live in the West don’t want the Easterners to-ing and fro-ing through the lands they’ve come to call their own.’

  Collis smiled at Leland indulgently. ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘You’re frightened of financial risk, frightened of the outside world, frightened of competition. Well – all I can say is that a grown man like you should pluck up his courage and face whatever the world has to bring.’

  ‘Your damned insolence never improves, does it?’ said Leland.

  ‘Personal criticisms apart, Collis, are you sure that Theodore knows what he’s doing?’ asked Charles. ‘He’s always been called Pacific-railroad-crazy. Maybe he’s so enthusiastic about taking a train over the Sierras that he’s seen that pass through rosy-tinted glasses.’

  Collis climbed up into the carriage, sat back, and took off his hat. ‘I saw the pass for myself,’ he told his partners. ‘And more than that, I damned nearly died up there, and so did Theodore. But when we run the railroad through the Donner Pass, and the Truckee River, all our passengers are going to be safe and snug, and they’ll be able to look out of the windows at the slopes where Wang-Pu died, and sip their coffee, and not know a damned thing about it. You ought to go talk to Doc Kates sometime, up at Dutch Flat. He says that America was built out of people, and he’s right.’

  Leland tugged at his collar. ‘You may be right,’ he said stiffly. ‘Your pass may be just the trace we’ve been looking for. But Charles and I have decided absolutely that the railroad doesn’t have to go further than Nevada. We can make an excellent annual profit by supplying the towns and mining camps there, and all along the way, and we certainly don’t need to waste money on airy-fairy dreams of going all the way through to Salt Lake City. For God’s sake, man, who wants to travel across the Humboldt Desert?’

  Collis didn’t feel in the mood for pushing Leland any further. When Leland was feeling pontifical, all a reasonable man could do was nod, and say yes, and move anything combustible out of range. What was worse, Leland had his wife’s support today, although it was more out of spite for Collis than love of her husband, and with Jane holding on to his arm and saying ‘That’s right, Leland,’ and ‘Of course, Leland,’ the president of the Sierra Pacific Railroad felt that every word he spoke was of Biblical moment.

  ‘We didn’t build up the hardware business on risk, Collis,’ Charles put in. ‘So there isn’t any reason to start now.’

  Collis nodded. ‘Very well. Let’s talk about it later. Right now, I’m going back to the store to see what’s happened to those cases of fuse that were supposed to come up from San Francisco this morning.’

  Mary Tucker, in a pale print frock and a bonnet that made her face look like the moon, said, ‘We haven’t talked about a replacement for poor Wang-Pu.’

  ‘I’m going to San Francisco in a couple of months,’ Collis told her. ‘I know some of Wang-Pu’s friends. Maybe I can find somebody suitable.’

  Leland raised his chin and pouted. ‘Just make sure you pick somebody honest, with references, and make sure you bring them back here for us to vet.’

  ‘I don’t trust the Chinks,’ said Jane. ‘Not the usual run-of-the-mill Chinks. They burn all their old newspapers and think it’s magic. They steal, too, and sell young girls for slaves.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Collis, ‘they do all of those things. They’re nearly as corrupt and superstitious as we are.’

  Jane looked at Collis with eyes like boot buttons, trying to convey in one plain glare all that she felt about the way he had led her on, and excited her, and then let her down. Collis had what he wanted, and so he simply nodded his head in a gesture that anyone else would have taken for respect.

  Back at 54 K Street, Collis found a portly man in a gravy-stained vest and whiskers waiting for him, sitting on the steps with a rolled-up newspaper tucked in his coat pocket. It was George P. Kemp, of the Sacramento Record, and he’d come to talk about the new railroad pass over the Sierra Nevada. He stood up as Collis climbed down from his carriage and brushed dust from the seat of his pants.

  ‘Are you Collis Edmonds?’ he called.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said George Kemp, extending his hand, ‘allow me to congratulate you. You’re now famous.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Collis. ‘Won’t you come inside? We were about to open a bottle of sherry.’

  Meanwhile, the Ulysses carried Wang-Pu’s body in its plain pine coffin around th
e second wide bend in the Sacramento River, and the city where Wang-Pu had lived and worked disappeared from view.

  That night, late, Collis walked down to the river on his own. The trees whispered among themselves in the evening wind. In his hand, Collis carried an envelope. It contained the ashes of a short letter he had written to Wang-Pu, wishing him peace and happiness, wherever he was going. Collis didn’t know if what he was doing was the right thing, according to Wang-Pu’s religion, but he guessed it didn’t matter too much if Wang-Pu’s spirit got to hear what he had written.

  He stood for a while by the steep riverbank, watching the Sacramento slide by. A black labourer was sitting against a tree not far away, humming an endless sad melody that he was obviously making up as he went along.

  Eventually, Collis lifted the envelope and spun it out over the river. It fell flat on the water, and turned around, and then the current carried it away. Collis, under his breath, said, ‘Goodbye’.

  He waited a little longer, and then he walked back along K Street, and it seemed that night as if the whole of California was warm and silent for the last memory of Wang-Pu.

  As it turned out, it was nearly a year before Collis next took the steamer down to San Francisco. It was a dull year, a year of consolidating the hardware partnership, a year of trying to drum up interest from disinterested investors in the railroad route over the Sierras, a year of smoking too much, drinking too much, and staring out over the Sacramento Valley and thinking of Hannah. Young Frederick Pugh did most of Wang-Pu’s work, and did it smartly and well, although Collis was still anxious to hire a Chinese to help with those wharfside deals that called for subtlety and oriental skill.

  But in the early fall of 1859, tired and tanned from a long Sacramento summer, Collis boarded the Excelsior and sailed for the coast. He knew that there was a strong possibility of buying up a cargo of rope from the Far East. He wanted to talk to Andy Hunt, too, whose interest in the railroad had been slipping, and persuade him that the route they’d discovered over the Sierra Nevada was ideal for a transcontinental line. Andy was determined when he wanted to be, and Collis badly needed his support against Leland’s ponderous doubts and Charles’s impossible bluster.