The buildings that weren’t saloons were dance halls, lunchrooms, dilapidated boarding houses, shipping offices, or gambling dens. The whole street was thronged with longshoremen and sailors, and Chinese carrying huge bundles of laundry and cumbersome boxes, and the air was vibrant with the strumming of guitars and the steady thunder of boot-heels on the boardwalk. Miners and drifters and casual gamblers sat in the sun, their black coats dusty and their necks red, drinking whisky and flipping cards on to upended barrels. And above it all, like the warbling of doves in a dovecot, the prostitutes called out sweet obscenities from their upstairs windows.

Further south, however, the buildings began to improve, and soon they were passing iron-frame hotels, red-brick banks, French restaurants, and fashionable drapery stores. Collis saw elegant ladies with parasols and gentlemen who were nobbily dressed even by New York standards. But the sidewalks were still teeming, and the street was a jingling clattering turmoil of carriages and wagons and horse-drawn omnibuses, and there was a bustling and buzzing of activity that would have made any Manhattan socialite feel quite ready to lie down after an hour, with a cold compress.

They were held up on the corner of Portsmouth Square by a jam of delivery wagons, which seemed to involve a great deal of shouting and picturesque cursing. Then they had to wait at Sacramento Street while a Chinese funeral went by, with tinkling cymbals, and a coffin the size of a small brigantine.

The speed of their progress wasn’t much helped by an impassive-looking Chilean, either, who had chosen lunchtime to drive a herd of fifty or sixty oxen down towards the docks. Collis and Billy were trapped at Dupont and California for almost five minutes while the lowing, shambling, flybitten cattle went past.

At last, dusty and sweating, they drew up outside a three-storey building on Dupont Street, freshly painted a smart bottle green, with gold trim and two polished coach lamps outside the door. It was the best-kept building along the whole street, and it was sandwiched, both conveniently and respectably, between the surgery of Dr W. Carr and the offices of the Charitable Institute for Women. Opposite, their hats pulled over their eyes against the glare of the midday sun, a group of loafers sat at outdoor tables, drinking and playing cards and smoking pipes. They watched Collis with curiosity as he climbed out of the phaeton and crossed the boardwalk to ring at Knickerbocker Jane’s bell. Billy swung Collis’s trunk down and set it down on the ground.

‘Looks a pretty trim place,’ said Collis conversationally.

Billy, leaning on the trunk, simply raised an eyebrow.