It was a scabby, peeling boat, with its paintwork turned grey by the sun; but as it beat its way northwards between the reddish-brown hills that bordered San Paolo Bay, under a high clear sky, and then wound its way eastwards past Benicia, and through the marshy wind-ruffled approaches to the estuary of the Sacramento River, it was alive with singing, accordion music, laughing, and dancing on the decks. Men in wide-brimmed hats sat in the sloping saloons, betting on poker and faro any money that might have remained unspent after three weeks in San Francisco, and drinking cloudy whisky as if it were medicine. On the foredeck, under a flapping canvas awning, a band of six or seven Poles in red-flannel shirts, their faded pants tied up with string, played a fiddle and a squeezebox and sang ribald folk songs that seemed to have dupa in every other line. Around the galleried afterdeck, bright and tawdry as moths in the panels of sunlight that fell through the windows, girls paraded in dusty dresses, or sat on the knees of bearded and derby-hatted men, smoking and sipping port wine. You could have had any one of them, these girls, in a narrow bunk with varnished sides, for two dollars. They plied their trade up and down the Sacramento River and into San Francisco Bay as regular as pilots or stokers or barges.

Collis sat at a table in the upper saloon, on the starboard side where it was shaded from the midday sun. He was dressed in his light-grey suit, with a chequered hound’s-tooth vest and a light-grey broad-brimmed hat. He was sharing a bottle of whisky with Charles, who was wearing a tight sandy-coloured suit and a ginger hat which matched his whiskers, and with Wang-Pu, the Chinese buyer, who was dressed most conservatively in a black morning coat, a black tie, and grey pinstripe pants. At the next table sat a card school of Sacramento merchants, shoulders hunched, playing their last few games before they returned home to their wives.

Charles was feeling breezy and expansive, and was looking forward to returning home. He had bought up some good-quality hardware and dry goods in San Francisco, all of which were being shipped inland by the steamer Boroughmore, and which would arrive in Sacramento in a day or two, in time for a grand sale. Charles confessed, too, that a couple of weeks in San Francisco was probably enough for any man’s constitution, or at least for his, what with all those girls and all that rich food, and he was almost eager to return to Mrs Tucker’s plain dietary regime, not to mention her plain looks.