‘You’ll love her.’ Charles grinned. ‘Hold on a moment, and I’ll have my carriage whistled up. Billy! Get the carriage around here, will you? Oh yes, Knickerbocker Jane is somebody special. She’ll like you, too. She’s fond of classy accents. They call her Knickerbocker because there was a fire at her place one day, and the fire company which came around to douse it was the Knickerbocker Number Five volunteer company. Jane rewarded each and every one of those firemen personally, and you know what I mean by that. Look now, here’s the carriage now.’

Edging slowly through the wharfside crowd came a slightly shabby phaeton driven by a tall Negro in a cockeyed silk hat. It was reined up alongside, and the Negro climbed down, picked up Collis’s trunk as if it weighed nothing at all, and slung it into the back. Then he bowed, gave an exaggerated grin, and opened the door for Collis to step aboard.

‘This is Billy,’ said Charles, by way of explanation. ‘Billy will take you round to Knickerbocker Jane’s, Collis. You tell her that Charlie Tucker sent you, and say you’d like a room for a week. Get yourself some victuals, and sleep off your journey, and I’ll bring Andy Hunt around at seven, and we’ll all step out for dinner at the International.’

It wasn’t too far to Knickerbocker Jane’s, but the streets were so clamorous and crowded that it took almost twenty minutes for Billy to nudge and push his horses as far as the junction of Dupont and Pine. Collis, sitting back on the sun-cracked leather of the phaeton’s seats, was amazed by the rowdiness and the music and the boisterous laughter that went on all around him. The whole population of San Francisco seemed to be infected with the need to rush around at random from morning till night, only stopping for meals and beer.

At first, as they made their way along Broadway through the dock area, and the district he later learned to call Sydney Town, Collis was afraid that San Francisco might turn out to be even rougher than he had first imagined. Many of the buildings were not much more than shanties, or beached and abandoned ships that had been incongruously converted into warehouses, or hotels. Every other doorway proclaimed itself a saloon, with wooden signs reading ‘Steam’ or ‘XX Stout’, and a clientele inside who kept their hats on and their suspenders adjusted tight, and who spent all day arguing each other hoarse. There were plank boardwalks along the streets, but if they weren’t crowded with people, they were obstructed by makeshift tents or lean-tos, in which you could gamble away six months of laborious gold-panning in an hour and a half, or have your hair cropped by an Italian barber and then glossed up with Taylor’s Brilliantine, or even a tooth pulled.