Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Finally, he spoke. ‘You arranged this, didn’t you, Edmonds? Not some anonymous gang. You had my daughter abducted, you had her female sanctity despoiled, and you had all those calotypes taken. You wrote the threats for money, and didn’t you know, right from the goddam start, that it wasn’t money you were after at all. You bastard.’

  Collis blandly finished his drink and wiped his mouth on the edge of the tablecloth. ‘You can think what you like. But as you said yourself not five minutes ago, how are you going to prove it? I’ve offered you an easy way out of it; a way that doesn’t harm Sarah or impugn your dignity; and it seems to me that you don’t have much alternative but to take it.’

  ‘I should have known what kind of a reptile you were the first day I saw you,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘I should have trusted my nose.’

  Collis said nothing. He didn’t trust himself, right at that moment, to keep Sarah’s collusion a secret. It would have silenced Laurence Melford completely – but at the risk of ruining the plan. The maître d’ came past, giving Collis a slanted glance of disapproval, and Collis lifted his empty glass for another stone fence. The maître d’ paused, but when Laurence Melford gave him a barely perceptible flicker of his eyes, he grudgingly took the glass and went to refill it.

  ‘What you’re asking from me is more than I can reasonably give you,’ Laurence Melford told Collis. ‘My whole livelihood depends on keeping Northern California isolated from the East; and apart from that, I am a Southerner, and I know what a transcontinental railroad route will do to the South’s economy.

  ‘But I will make a bargain with you, Edmonds. You’re looking for investment in your railroad. Well, I’ll make that investment myself, up to fifty thousand dollars, but on the strict condition that it’s kept a secret. And on the condition that I don’t have to write any letters of support to the newspapers.’

  Collis sat back in his chair. ‘Fifty thousand dollars? In negotiable bonds? Or what?’

  ‘Fifty thousand dollars in gold. Payable over six months.’

  ‘That sounds fair. But if you can’t bring yourself to support the railroad in public, why give me money in private?’

  ‘Because I happen to know how much railroads cost,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘I happen to know the price of rail, the price of locomotives, the price of timber, and the price of labour. Fifty thousand dollars, if you’re lucky, might buy you one trestle over one river. It won’t be anything more than a drop in an ocean, and if you’ll return those calotypes for that amount, then you’re welcome to it.

  ‘What I will not do, ever,’ he continued, ‘is endorse your railroad to my friends. For if I do so, I will be publicly denying my most deeply held principles. I will be publicly denying the South, and I will be publicly denying my belief in Northern California as a haven from the machinations of North-eastern industrialists. Even my daughter’s reputation is not worth that much.’

  Collis got to his feet. Carlo, the maître d’, was just arriving with his second drink, but when he saw Collis’s face, he stood a little way off and waited, chewing his lip. Collis looked at Laurence Melford for a moment or two, and then he buttoned up his gloves.

  ‘I admire your integrity, Mr Melford,’ he said. ‘I only wish I could admire those prejudiced and self-serving interests which you so mistakenly believe are “principles” – the subjugation of the Negro against all humanitarian credenda, and the deliberate isolation of a whole people from the benefits of modern progress for the sake of two or three profiteering monopolies.’

  Laurence Melford’s self-control almost broke. He held up his fork in his white-clenched fist, and he bent it as if it were made of the cheapest zinc, instead of steel. The maître d’ turned away, and with one deft tilt of his head, drank Collis’s second stone fence himself.

  ‘Mr Melford,’ Collis said, ‘you can make up the fifty thousand dollars in five ten-thousand-dollar sacks, and have them delivered once a month by messenger to myself at 54 K Street, Sacramento. Do you know how many calotypes there are?’

  ‘The letter said ten,’ said Laurence Melford tightly.

  ‘Very well.’ Collis nodded. ‘When each sack of gold is delivered, two of the calotype negatives will be returned to you in a sealed envelope. I expect you can understand my reasons for delivering them up so parsimoniously.’

  ‘I will have you hanged for this one day,’ Laurence Melford said. ‘You just remember that.’

  ‘And you just remember that I could have blown your son’s head off, and that you thanked me for saving him, in writing; and that your daughter is safe and well, whether it was I who arranged her abduction or not. And one thing more. These fifty thousand dollars will go towards railroad bonds, which will be made up in your name, and sent to you along with the negatives, so that when the railroad eventually prospers, you will prosper too, even though you don’t deserve to.’

  Collis leaned forward and put his head very close to Laurence Melford’s. ‘I have destiny on my side, Mr Melford. It’s sweeping me along, and everybody who comes near me gets swept along too. It’s not your fault if you’ve failed, so why don’t you finish your lunch with Mr Crawford and thank the Lord for small favours.’

  Collis didn’t give Laurence Melford the chance to reply. He nodded to the maître d’, to Andrew Crawford, and walked quickly out.

  Back in Sacramento, a month later, he received a long letter from Theodore. Theodore’s tone was unusually warm and friendly, and he told in detail of his moderate success in stirring up political support from Congressmen and Senators, and how it now looked likely that he was going to be appointed clerk of both House and Senate committees investigating railroad routes to the Pacific.

  ‘I have talked for an hour to Mr Lincoln,’ Theodore wrote.

  He is very enthusiastic about the route we discovered with Doc Kates, and he has privately promised me that, if elected, he will push ahead with a bill for a transcontinental railroad as soon as possible. The only thing that worries me is that if Lincoln believes the railroad to be so urgent, he must seriously be anticipating the secession of the South and even war. The Southern politicians certainly hate him here. They call him an African gorilla and a slang-whanging lawyer.

  There was a long postscript. Collis took the letter to the window and read it by the last light of the sun. Hannah, who was sitting reading a book, looked up at him and saw by his expression that he was both moved and disturbed.

  I met Sen. Stride twice. He said adamantly that he had invested enough in the railroad and that these were difficult times for a hard-shell Southern politician to be putting money into Northern industrial projects. However (spontaneously, and much to my regret) I reminded him of his responsibilities to Miss Delphine Spooner, and what had befallen her. Whereupon he agreed to subscribe twenty thousand dollars more to the railroad, sufficient for a full survey of the Sierras, and I am sorry to say that I accepted. I believe I owe you an extensive apology, and I only hope that I have done nothing to harm Miss Spooner.

  Collis threw the letter down on the white lace tablecloth. He looked down at the scattered pages, his hand over his mouth, and said nothing.

  Hannah stood up. ‘Is there something the matter?’ she asked him.

  ‘What?’ he said distractedly.

  ‘I said, is there anything the matter?’

  ‘Oh. No, there isn’t. Just a letter from Theo.’

  ‘You look upset.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yes, I suppose I am. It’s funny how your own way of working, when other people try it, always seems so tawdry.’

  Hannah didn’t pick up the letter, but came instead to stand beside him and lay a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Go to the back of the house,’ she said. ‘There’s still light enough to see the Sierras.’

  Chapter 13

  What happened during the fall and winter of 1860 and the early spring of the following year – the election of Abraham Lincoln as President and the subsequent breakaway from the Union by South Carolina and six other
cotton states – all of these events seemed peculiarly remote and unreal to the people of San Francisco and Sacramento. They were part of a distant political nightmare which they could only hear about secondhand, either from weeks-old dispatches carried by the Pacific Mail steamers, or from the riders of the Pony Express. Suddenly the self-satisfied isolation of northern California became a source of champing frustration, and in the drawing-rooms of South Park and the lobby of the San Francisco Stock Exchange, rumour and feverish fear were both heightened out of all proportion by the latest news reports from the East.

  David Terry, out loud, called Lincoln ‘a nigger’s lackey’, and John Frémont, at an eggnog party, referred to Jefferson Davis as ‘the lowest form of treacherous pond life’.

  But it was all so far away that it seemed like a theatrical performance, rather than a real political crisis. Even Collis, who was desperately anxious to hear that the nation’s wrangles over slavery had taken a decisive turn one way or the other, so that he could plan ahead for the Sierra Pacific Railroad – even Collis found that the bulletins from Washington had a sense of melodramatic dread that was all heavy piano music and vibrato violins, and it was hard for him to believe that secession had come at last.

  He felt as if he were sitting in the upper balcony of a theatre, peering through the wrong end of his opera glasses while a stage musician ostentatiously sawed a pretty young lady in half. It was all too distant to be able to make out if the pretty young lady was really being dismembered; and even if she were, he was too far away to be able to do anything about it.

  All the same, there was a great deal of what Andy Hunt called ‘secesh madness’ in San Francisco, and a lot of rash talk about war. The Southerners in particular could think of almost nothing else but fighting, and several dinner parties became positively bellicose, with bread rolls being thrown, and even knives. On the night that San Francisco heard that Texas had seceded, the wintry streets were electric with fright, and bristling with joyous aggression. Shots were fired into the sky, and even on Sacramento Street, in Chinatown, there was a ringing of gongs.

  America was on the brink of the grimmest and most glorious military spectacle of the century. More than 2,250,000 men were to fight in the coming war; and more than one out of every four of them were to die. Between them, the secessionist states formed a Confederacy which covered 750,000 square miles, a greater empire than Napoleon had been able to subdue with his armies in fifteen years. What was more, the statesmen and soldiers and ordinary people of that Confederacy shared a love of the South which was fierce, and deep, and enduring; and from the day that it was announced that Abraham Lincoln had carried the electoral college, they knew that their love was on the line. It was time at last to put up, or bow down. It was time for Bull Run, and Shiloh, and Antietam, and Gettysburg. It was also time for the railroads.

  Theodore, freshly excited by Lincoln’s success, had travelled to Washington yet again, and two days after the inauguration, on 4 March 1861, Lincoln had told him at a private meeting that ‘there must be war, no matter how conciliatory I am; the South has the need of it’. Lincoln had repeated to Theodore his support for a transcontinental railroad, and had given him a tortoiseshell pen as a souvenir.

  The very next day, as Theodore packed his steamer trunk to return to California, the news came from Richmond that Jefferson Davis, who had reluctantly agreed to accept the Presidency of the Confederated States the previous month, had already called for 100,000 military volunteers.

  Theodore wrote to Collis; ‘I do not doubt for a moment that we have now arrived at that great crossroads in history for which we have been waiting for so long. It is a tragedy, and there is considerable sorrow and bewilderment here in Washington, both personal and national. But now (at last!) they may “Clear the Way” for the railroad.’

  He enclosed a cutting from the Petersburg Express, which read; ‘The election of Lincoln is truly a national calamity. May God avert the storm which is now impending.’

  Collis showed the letter to Leland and Charles. Leland was not so sure about the prospect of civil war; and in any case he was too preoccupied these days with his Republican candidacy for the governorship of California to worry about very much else except his long-winded political speeches, which he practised nightly in front of his cheval-glass, his hand thrust into his coat in unconscious imitation of Daniel Webster. Charles, on the other hand, firmly believed that there would be war, that there must be war, since he saw no other way of getting a few months’ respite from Mary. Whatever any of them felt about it, however, there was little doubt in their minds that the events of the winter had given the Sierra Pacific the best chance it had ever had of going ahead. Jefferson Davis and most of the fiercest supporters of a southern railroad route had now abandoned Washington for Richmond, and that left the Sierra Pacific and the Union Pacific with what Collis believed to be the only feasible route for the federal government to adopt. Theodore’s surveys of the Dutch Flat-Donner Pass-Truckee River trace were at last on the verge of acceptance. They had been so generously financed by Senator Stride’s ‘conscience money’ that Theodore had even been able to take Annie along with him on several of his expeditions, and she had illustrated his statistics with pages of alluring watercolours of California flowers.

  Laurence Melford, too, had been as good as his word, and had delivered fifty thousand dollars for the return of Collis’s calotypes of Sarah. Collis had already used the money to place an order for the Sierra Pacific’s first lengths of rail, at fifty-five dollars a ton, and for their first locomotive, a small tank engine from Zerah Colburn’s works at Paterson, New Jersey. Collis had told Leland that he would christen the locomotive Jane McCormick, and although Leland had been unimpressed, Jane had softened considerably towards Collis, and had even sent Hannah a basket of preserves.

  Collis himself had been quiet, and industrious, but Hannah had sensed that he was unsettled. Several times during the winter she had walked into his study on the second floor of their handsome, comfortable house and found him standing by the window, staring sightlessly down at the street below, with his hands in his pockets and his forehead pressed against the glass.

  He was looking older. There were wisps of grey hair on the right side of his head, and his cheeks were becoming angular, and lined. He found that he was increasingly forgetful. He would leave a half-finished drink on a table and go pour himself a fresh one. He forgot Hannah’s birthday, and had to make up for it by buying her a diamond-and-sapphire ring which cost him nearly two thousand dollars.

  The truth was that he was beginning to feel that his dream would never happen. And far from exciting him, as they had Theodore, the political events of the year had disappointed and depressed him. Why hadn’t Lincoln called for a railroad right away? Now that the South had gone secesh, what was everyone waiting for? Collis was stretched to the limit on credit, and beyond, and unless the new administration gave them the go-ahead within the next few months, he could see the glorious Sierra Pacific Railroad announcing itself bankrupt without a single inch of track laid.

  One evening in April, when the warm winds of early summer were blowing across the Sacramento Valley, Hannah stepped out on to the back veranda and found Collis sitting in the rocker, his legs straight out, his hands in his pockets, and a cheroot clenched between his teeth. She stood beside him silently for long minutes, her face gentle, her hair drawn back in combs, her pink dress turned lilac by the dusk.

  ‘You’re unhappy, aren’t you?’ she asked him at last.

  He took the cheroot out of his mouth. ‘Unhappy?’

  ‘You’re expecting something from life that life won’t give you. What is it? Is it fame? Or is it just affection?’

  He looked at her. ‘You give me all the affection I could wish for.’

  ‘I can’t give you fame.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I want it. I just want to be fulfilled.’

  ‘You will be,’ Hannah assured him, resting her hand on his shoulder.

&
nbsp; He reached up and laid his hand over hers. ‘I wish I could be as confident as you are. Every letter I get from Theo is full of hope and reassurance, and yet what have we actually done? We’ve found a railroad route over the Sierras, we’ve surveyed it, and we’ve filed the papers. All at our own expense. So now what happens? Do we have to wait for war? Do we have to dig our way through the mountains with our own bare hands?’

  ‘Collis,’ said Hannah, ‘you mustn’t lose faith.’

  ‘I know,’ he told her. ‘But it’s damned difficult not to, sometimes. I used to have visions of that railroad. I could see the rails themselves, stretching all the way towards the horizon. But now, whenever I think about it, the rails just melt away in front of my eyes, as if they were cast out of nothing but ice.’

  ‘Collis …’ said Hannah. ‘God will find a way.’

  ‘God?’ he asked her. ‘Don’t you think you and I have called on God a few too many times already?’

  ‘You don’t think that He would help us again?’

  Collis released her hand, stood up, and walked across to the rail of the veranda. There was a row of apple trees in the small, dusty yard, and their leaves had caught the last of the daylight, so that they flamed like torches against the lavender-coloured sky.

  ‘I don’t want to take His generosity in vain, that’s all,’ Collis said quietly. ‘I prayed that your life should be saved, when you were dying in Panama, and it was. I prayed that we should be able to marry, and we were. But miracles don’t come free. Even if you don’t have to pay for them, someone else does, and that’s what I’m afraid of. This railroad has already cost more than I care to think about. Only God knows what would happen if I asked for divine intervention.’

  ‘There’s no harm in trying, Collis,’ Hannah said intently. ‘There’s no harm in prayer.’