Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Mr Edmonds,’ she said breathlessly, catching him up. ‘Mr Edmonds, I must congratulate you on your wonderful locomotive.’

  ‘Thank you, Mrs Pangborn,’ said Collis. ‘I’m glad that somebody around here has faith in what we’re doing.’

  ‘There was something else,’ said Mrs Pangborn.

  ‘Something else?’

  ‘Yes – rather personal, in a way.’

  Collis looked around at the crowds, but nobody seemed to be showing any interest in them.

  ‘Do you want to tell me now?’ asked Collis.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Pangborn, ‘I was wondering if you wouldn’t rather call by my house this evening. You see, I have a guest staying with me at the moment who knows you, and has expressed an interest in meeting you again.’

  ‘A guest? Who is it?’

  Mrs Pangborn raised her finger to her lips. ‘I’ll see you tonight, Mr Edmonds. Nine o’clock would be ideal.’

  It was a few minutes after nine when Collis knocked at Mrs Pangborn’s door. The door was opened right away, by a silent Chinese girl, and Collis was led through into the perfumed front parlour. Mrs Pangborn was waiting for him, playing with a small white kitten with a pink bow around its neck.

  ‘Ah … Mr Edmonds,’ she said, rising to her feet, and curtseying. ‘I’m delighted you could come.’

  ‘I don’t have a great deal of time,’ said Collis edgily. These days he didn’t like to be seen at Mrs Pangborn’s. There were too many fundamentalists in the Sacramento business community, and too many anti-railroad lobbyists who would seize on the slightest moral misdemeanour as evidence that Collis was not fit to run a railroad on which women and children might travel.

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Pangborn, smiling, ‘I’m sure this won’t take very long. Lin Lee, would you ask the new girl to come down, please.’

  Collis stood in the centre of the room, tall and formal in his dark-blue topcoat, his silk hat in his hand. Mrs Pangborn asked him if he cared for a glass of champagne, but he shook his head. He was too taken up with the day’s railroad business and the problems of finance to be giving this little circus act of Mrs Pangborn’s much serious thought.

  It was only when the door opened and she walked boldly and coquettishly in, dressed in vivid crimson, with crimson ostrich feathers bobbing in her curled-up hair, that Collis forgot about the Governor McCormick, and how he was going to raise twelve million dollars in a month. He saw the pearl necklaces and the diamonds and the large emerald resting in the pale creamy cleavage and he felt as if time had stopped, as if the past six years had closed up like a Chinese lantern.

  ‘Well, Collis?’ said Delphine, dropping him a little curtsey. ‘You seem surprised to see me.’

  ‘Did you expect me to be anything else?’ he asked her. ‘And here, of all places.’

  Delphine looked around. ‘It’s clean, and respectable, and very well spoken of. They say the customers are gentlemen, and that most of them have religion.’

  ‘I can scarcely believe it’s you.’

  Delphine walked slowly around him, smiling to herself. ‘Because that bearded monkey of yours threatened Alice’s father with blackmail? Because he said he would hold me up in public as Senator Carslake’s pet whore? Because you believe that once a young lady’s reputation is sullied, she melts away, like a piece of dirty ice?’

  ‘You’re as forward as ever,’ said Collis. ‘I’ll certainly give you that.’

  ‘And you’re just as self-interested as ever, by the look of you. I saw you today at the ceremony. I don’t believe you even thought once of where you were, or what was going on around you. You live inside your own head, Collis Edmonds, and nowhere else.’

  ‘I believe I’ll change my mind about that glass of champagne,’ Collis said to Mrs Pangborn.

  Delphine came over, took Collis’s arm, and looked up into his eyes. She was older, of course, but still just as pretty; and he could remember what he had felt about her that day she had first lifted her face to him in Taylor’s.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, in a hushed, confidential tone, ‘you and your bearded crony did me a considerable favour. Instead of wallowing in misery and humiliation for the rest of my life with Senator Carslake, I decided that if my reputation was so thoroughly soiled that it could be used to blackmail a member of government, then I might as well not trouble with it any more. I borrowed money from the Senator and rented myself a suite on Pennsylvania Avenue, and did very profitably, thank you. Senators, Congressmen, and then soldiers, when the war broke out.’

  Mrs Pangborn handed Collis a glass of cold champagne, and he swallowed half of it in one gulp. ‘So,’ said Collis, wiping his mouth, ‘you slid down the slippery slope.’

  ‘I didn’t slide,’ said Delphine. ‘I was pushed.’

  ‘And so what are you doing here in Sacramento?’ he asked her.

  ‘The same as Eleanore Dumont, or any other lady who has visited Denver and Nevada City and Kansas. The same as Martha Jane Canary, or Carla Amorata.’

  ‘You’re a parlour-house girl?’ asked Collis, although the flat tone in his voice made it more of a statement than a question.

  ‘Does that upset you?’

  He looked at her and shrugged. ‘It’s your life. Why should it?’

  ‘You don’t feel responsible for my tragic downfall?’

  ‘I don’t think so. The crash of ’fifty-seven was your downfall, wasn’t it? That, and your forward behaviour, and Senator Stride.’

  ‘You, of course, only used the fact of my downfall for your personal benefit,’ said Delphine. ‘You weren’t actually so gross as to contribute to it.’

  Collis finished his champagne and handed the glass back to Mrs Pangborn. ‘Whatever you say,’ he told Delphine sharply.

  ‘Collis,’ said Delphine.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I might as well be frank with you. I don’t think I’ve ever been as restrained, or as moral, as a girl ought to be. It’s always been in my nature, something I’ve been fighting against. Well, you must have noticed it yourself. Degradation – sexual degradation – somehow that’s always held a strange fascination for me.’

  Collis didn’t move. Delphine stood there with her head slightly on one side, her hands up under her breasts as if she were about to sing in opera. Her face was flushed, her eyes bright, and Collis had the feeling that she was intoxicated either with champagne or with opium.

  ‘Well,’ said Collis, ‘I think I have to be going.’

  ‘You’re not going to listen to me?’ Delphine wanted to know. ‘You’re not going to hear me out?’

  ‘Delphine, there isn’t any point. I’m not the same man you met in New York. I have responsibilities now. I have business partners to protect. I’m a widower, still in mourning.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Delphine. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Thank you for your sorrow. If you want my regrets in return – if you want my abject apologies – then you can have them.’

  Collis turned to Mrs Pangborn and said, ‘Thank you for the champagne. And thank you for arranging this reunion. I’m afraid it wasn’t quite what I expected.’

  ‘C’est la vie,’ said Mrs Pangborn, in an appalling French accent.

  Collis went to the door. Delphine stayed where she was, her eyes fixed on the place where Collis had been, or perhaps on the past. At the door, Collis paused, and then said softly, ‘Delphine?’

  She didn’t look at him.

  ‘You grow to learn that the West is a small place,’ Collis went on. ‘You can easily find old friends or old enemies just by asking after them. Everybody knows almost everybody, in spite of the distances, and the wildness of it.’

  He hesitated, and then he said, ‘You grow to learn too that sometimes those old friends or old enemies are better left alone, especially when life hasn’t been particularly kind to either of you.’

  Delphine didn’t answer. Collis stayed a moment longer, and then put on his hat, nodded to Mrs Pangborn, and
left.

  Chapter 14

  The crucial stipulation of the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 had been that forty consecutive miles of track must be laid by the company on any part of the railroad route before the government would start paying subsidies and handing over land titles. Collis hadn’t worried too much about it at the time, but now it was proving an impossible sticking point. The Sierra Pacific owned a locomotive, a tender, one passenger carriage, and about two miles of rusting track – which took it just out to the city limits.

  The roadbed had been graded for about a mile further on, but they simply couldn’t afford to go on. With only four rails to the ton, and a ton of rails costing $115, it cost $11,500 to buy the 400 rails that each mile of track consumed, and that didn’t include timber, or spikes, or wages, or anything else at all.

  Leland began to talk of taking the road no further than Nevada, and possibly laying no tracks on it at all, but simply grading it as a wagon road, and charging a toll for each loaded wagon that wanted an easy route over the Sierra. Theodore argued hotly for a few weeks and then became silent and morose again. In October of 1863, he came to Collis’s house and announced that he was going East again, and taking Annie with him.

  It was evening, and Collis had been working all day in his library. Although he had kept on the servants after Hannah’s death, he rarely used any part of the house except the library, the dining-room, and the small back bedroom. He wasn’t keeping the house as a shrine. There were no pictures of Hannah anywhere. It was just that he was concentrating all his attention on the railroad these days, and all he needed was a room to work in, a room to eat in, and a room to sleep in.

  Charles would often pass his house after a late lodge meeting and see his lamp still burning after midnight. ‘If the Sierra Pacific could be built with sheer dedication, and nothing else, then we would have crossed the Sierras by now,’ he used to say. But it couldn’t, and they hadn’t.

  Theodore sat sheepishly in one of Collis’s large library chairs while Collis finished a column of entries in his accounts books. Then Collis took off the small blue skullcap which he had grown into the habit of wearing while he worked, and smiled at Theodore in a way that made Theodore feel that he was not quite there, that he was only a shade of his real self.

  ‘Well,’ said Collis. ‘Annie tells me it’s eastward ho for you again.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Theodore.

  ‘You’re going to try to do what you’ve always threatened? Buy us mealy-mouthed merchants out?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Theodore.

  ‘It hasn’t occurred to you that we may be the only men on earth who are actually capable of carrying this venture through? That more squeamish men might have backed out years ago?’

  ‘Leland’s talking of ending the road in Nevada. That doesn’t do much to inspire me.’

  Collis opened the humidor on his desk, took out a long cigar, and cut it. ‘You can’t blame Leland for that. He’s simply looking for a practical solution to our present financial problems. A short-term plan to balance the books.’

  ‘The transcontinental railroad was never meant to be a short-term plan, ever,’ Theodore said angrily. ‘It was conceived on the grand scale, and only men of grand vision can ever complete it.’

  Collis lit his cigar slowly. ‘You know something, Theo?’ he said. ‘You and I could still be friends, and working partners.’

  Theodore shook his head. ‘You’re probably right when you say that you and Leland are the only men on earth who could ever build the Sierra Pacific. I hope you’re not, and I’m going to Washington to raise enough money to buy you out, and try to prove that you’re not. But it’s the only course left open to me, Collis. I cannot be party to building a railroad that may or may not be completed, according to the temperament of its owners; or to a railroad whose tracks will be laid on so much bribery, and blackmail, and plain human suffering.’

  Collis thought about that, and then walked around his desk. He extended his hand to Theodore as if he were congratulating him on twenty years’ service with the company, and wishing him a happy retirement. Theodore couldn’t help noticing for the first time the deeply engraved lines around Collis’s eyes, and the way that his hair was beginning to recede from his forehead. He looked like a man of forty, rather than a man in his early thirties.

  The room seemed to be suddenly much darker, as the last diffused light of the sun faded away outside. Theodore gripped Collis’s hand in both of his and said, ‘Goodbye, Collis. I hope we shall never turn out to be enemies.’

  ‘You and I?’ Collis smiled. ‘You and I have always been enemies. We always shall be. Take good care of Annie for me.’

  Theodore went to the door, opened it, and raised his hand in a last awkward salute. Collis said nothing; but when Theodore had gone, he sat for a long time in the gloom of his library, wondering what would become of him.

  A month later, he found out. A telegram reached Andy Hunt’s office from Washington, on the new transcontinental telegraph line, which had only been opened the previous November. Andy Hunt sent it on the next day’s Sacramento steamer, and it was delivered to 54 K Street just as Collis was leaving to ride to Roseville, to talk to the citizens there about the railroad.

  The telegraph read: ‘Theodore Jones died today from yellow fever contracted in Panama. Please inform all concerned. Annie Jones.’

  Collis read the telegraph twice, and then walked back into the store. Charles was there, helping Kwang Lee to make out an order for black powder. He saw the expression on Collis’s face at once, and came towards him with his hands raised as if he was expecting Collis to fall.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  Collis showed him the telegraph. Charles read it, and then puffed loudly, and leaned on the counter, and put his hand on his hip.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ he said.

  ‘It’s ironic, isn’t it?’ said Collis. ‘He died of the lack of a transcontinental railroad. He died because his own vision hasn’t yet been fulfilled.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’ asked Charles.

  Collis thought, and then nodded. ‘Sure there is. We can build the Sierra Pacific Railroad for him.’

  ‘Us and whose millions?’ Charles wanted to know.

  By the spring of 1864, the Sierra Pacific had reached the end of its credit. Collis was personally in debt by nearly five million dollars, more than he had ever owned or earned in the whole of his life – all in interest guarantees and bank notes. Although the roadbed was prepared almost as far as Newcastle, thirty-one miles away, there were only eighteen and a half miles of track laid, far from the token forty miles which the federal government required; and Leland, who had been talking in the fall of limiting the line to Nevada Territory and no further, was now talking of going into liquidation, and saving whatever they could.

  But Collis was determined. Not for the sake of Theodore’s memory, because he realised now that Theodore had gone that the workings of the company were no longer trammelled by the moral scruples of a religious and engineering visionary. Nor yet for the sake of Hannah’s memory, nor his own vision of crossing the High Sierras by rail.

  The battle had become too basic for morals or visions to count for anything. It was now a battle for financial survival. What was more, Abraham Lincoln, who had enthusiastically supported the Pacific railroad from the beginning, was up for re-election in November; and while Collis didn’t doubt that he would win, especially after Gettysburg, he was too cynical to trust the whole of his five-million-dollar debt to whims of the federal electorate. Better to take advantage of Lincoln’s amenable presence in the White House right now than to risk having to deal with a McClellanite or a War Democrat in the new year.

  The partners met in the living-room above 54 K Street on a chilly evening in March. Charles and Collis laid out all the company’s accounts on the floor, and the four of them smoked and argued and drank bourbon until eight o’clock at night.

  Collis, in his shirtsleeves,
said, ‘There’s nothing left to do. I’m going to have to travel to Washington again and see if I can’t have this forty-mile qualification reduced.’

  Andy Hunt pointed to the accounts books. ‘Even if you do that, you still won’t be able to raise enough money to carry on. It’s over thirty miles to the Sierra foothills from Sacramento, and because the land is dead flat, we only get a federal loan of sixteen thousand dollars a mile. That’s hardly going to cover our wages bill.’

  ‘At least we’ll have a chance,’ said Collis. ‘I reckon I can still raise enough personal credit to lay another fifteen or sixteen miles of track.’

  ‘And then what?’ said Andy.

  Leland, deep in his armchair with a large glass of whisky, gave a sage and patronising nod. ‘Andy’s right, Collis. We could build forty miles of track and what possible good could it do us? We’d only get sixteen thousand dollars a mile for the greater part of it, and the way our finances are going, that just doesn’t make economic sense.’

  Collis stood up and walked to the window. Outside, on K Street, a wagon was being loaded with fencing wire from the store downstairs, which was still open. He could see Kwang Lee talking to a tall rangy farmer. The night air was thick with dancing moths.

  Suddenly, he turned around to Leland. ‘Don’t I remember someone saying somewhere that the base of the Rockies is located somewhere on the banks of the Mississippi – because of the rock and soil formations they found there?’

  Leland shrugged. ‘Maybe you do. So what? It just sounds like one of those preposterous scientific oddities to me.’

  ‘Maybe it is,’ said Collis. ‘But maybe it could help us, too. You’re the governor of California, Leland. Supposing the state geologist was to be obliging enough to say that the base of the Sierras was somewhere rather further to the west than it actually appears to be?’

  Leland frowned. ‘You mean … re-draw the map, geologically?’

  ‘Why not? Every mountain range has its outwash soil – rocks and mud that have been carried downstream on to the plains by erosion. If the state geologist could positively identify soil from the Sierras on the plains, then who could argue that the Sierras didn’t begin at the outskirts of Sacramento?’