He walked on to the post office on Washington Street. Since the California had come in yesterday with sacks of mail from the East, the street outside was crowded with lines of men waiting to collect their letters. Here there was a mixture of men of all kinds, miners and drifters shuffling in line with banker’s clerks and auctioneers and servants from the big houses. Some of them talked and argued, and shook hands with acquaintances they may not have seen since the last mail steamer came in; others waited with their heads bowed, moving forward a step at a time to the pillared porch of the post office. A newsboy in a dirty shirt and bare feet walked along the lines selling copies of the Tribune. Collis joined the end of the line because he had nobody to wait for him.

It took him twenty minutes to get inside the post office, and it was a chaotic, disorganised, noisy scramble to reach the counter to collect his mail. The clerk, a blue pencil behind each prominent ear, quickly sorted through the E’s and found two letters addressed to Collis.

He pushed his way back outside. For no reason that he could think of, he found that he was trembling. He walked next door, to a grocery store called Garret House, and found a spare wooden chair on the boardwalk, where he sat down. A man in faded blue dungarees leaned against the open door of the store smoking a pipe and watching him with unabashed interest.

One letter was from his mother. He recognised the spiky handwriting. The other handwriting he didn’t know at all. It was loopy, slanting, and lean, and from all appearances, it was that of a woman. He tore open the letter from his mother first.