‘No, no, she survived it,’ Collis told him. ‘I guess it couldn’t have been too bad an attack. I didn’t catch it myself, either.’

‘Well, so I see,’ said Charles Tucker, returning his brown derby hat to his gingery head. He suddenly looked somewhere over Collis’s shoulder and yelled, in a high rasping voice: ‘Wang-Pu! Make sure you collar all of that linen they’ve got aboard! I don’t want no ifs and buts! The whole goddam shebang!’

Collis turned around. He couldn’t see anyone in the scrum of the wharf that Charles Tucker could have been yelling to, but his voice had been so penetrating that Wang-Pu could have heard him from down in the California’s lower hold.

‘You look to be a gentleman,’ he remarked to Collis, turning back as if nothing had happened. ‘How are you fixed for capital?’

‘Very poorly, I’m afraid. My appearance is about all I have. My father’s bank went down the drain last month, and I had a couple of gambling debts outstanding. Not to mention a rather awkward problem with a young lady of ill repute.’

‘Well, don’t you worry about none of that,’ said Charles. ‘Put all that behind you. There isn’t a body in this whole city who hasn’t left some embarrassing little heap of squat behind in the East. The main thing is that you’re a gentleman; and as long as you’re prepared to play on that fact, you’ll get along fine.’

‘That was about the meat of what Andrew told me on the ship,’ said Collis.

‘It was sound advice,’ said Charles. ‘Do you want a cigar? I’m just trying to think what you should do now, how you should get yourself started. Gambling, you said? Are you a gambling man?’

‘I have been known to stake a bet or so.’ Collis smiled.

‘How much money do you actually have?’

Collis had never been asked a question like that before, so bluntly. He hesitated, almost stammered, and then said, ‘Well — about a hundred and fifty. Maybe a few cents less. Why?’

‘You’re going to need stake money, that’s why. A hundred and fifty will do you for beginners, but if you need to borrow some, I’ll gladly oblige. I like your style, if you see what I mean. You’re a gentleman. There aren’t too many of those in San Francisco. There’s those that call themselves gentlemen, like the Society of California Pioneers, which means everyone who came here before January 1, 1848. But not many of those are gentlemen in the sense that Eastern folk define it. Mind you, it’s worth having a few friends among ’em, and I can introduce you here and there.’

‘That’s very generous of you,’ said Collis.

‘No, it’s not generous at all,’ retorted Charles. He took out his worn leather cigar case, offered a cigar to Collis, bit the end off his own cigar, and spat it out on to the wharf. He produced matches and they lit up.