Mine is a story full of orphans, as is any tale of the American West.

Indeed, after Charlotte died, our family home became a constellation of convents, boarding schools and the houses of my Ohio relatives. William went East to the best I could afford for him; Isobel went to the Domincan sisters in Benecia—by the seaside where, like her mother, she thrived. The other five all went to their ancestral home in Mount Vernon.

I had made Charlotte's own children orphans, most likely as she was: an orphan with one parent yet living. Orphans with an asteroid father who could only impotently protest, "Of course I love you...Of course..." But, of course—and this I couldn't tell them—this was how it had to end.

[The fiddler plays "Loop #12, Perdition."]

Just two years ago, Donner Pass played host to the Transcontinental Railroad; the Golden Spike of last year's papers is a few hundred miles due east of Truckee's meadows.

We now think nothing of that pass—the railroad's shot through it, the rocks that the Forlorn Hope pushed over and that pushed them down again to a fresher, ever more frozen hell have been blasted through by dynamite and pierced by rails of the thickest, strongest steel that penetrate through to the Pacific, that infernally misnamed body of water, known by a moniker nearly as bucolic and bland as that of Donner Pass itself. It's not even worth a stop-off on the way to Yerba Buena, to rivers that run to gold, to Eldorado, and to whatever lies beyond.

No, the Union Pacific railroad wouldn't dare stop there.

[He finishes whatever is left of his drink and makes another.]

END PART FIVE

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