‘Short on storage space, mostly,’ replied Charles, as they climbed aboard the surrey. ‘But he’s lent me one of his rented warehouses for three hundred tons of Australian coal, provided I wash it out afterwards, and he’s even found a corner for young Collis’s first business venture.’

McCormick turned to make sure that all their trunks were aboard. Billy and Wang-Pu were making their own arrangements to ride to Charles’s store on a hired wagon. There was probably enough room for them in the surrey, but Collis had the strong impression that neither Charles nor Leland was the kind of man, in Sacramento at least, to have servants riding along with him. Leland in particular. He seemed ponderous, and humourless, and permanently conscious of his dignity.

‘Your first business venture?’ he asked Collis, with a trace of a Scots accent. There was something his voice which made Collis feel that he was being patronised. Something, too, in the way Leland’s dark, deep-set eyes never quite looked at Collis straight, but always appeared to be fixed on something more interesting, like his horses’ ears, or a passing Chinaman in a coolie hat. They passed Wildmore & Glazier’s store, and Stanton’s Chop House, and then they rattled over the rutted thoroughfare to the end of K Street and turned east.

Collis took out a cheroot, bracing his feet against the floor of the surrey as he cupped his hands around the tip and lit it. He glanced as he did so at Leland’s hands on the reins, with heavy, masculine gold rings on three fingers. Leland smelled of somebody’s French cologne, but not offensively. Just enough to make anyone who had been travelling all day feel that he might smell of sweat.

‘I had a tip that a cargo of blankets was due into San Francisco on the Aria,’ Collis said, at length. ‘I rowed out before she anchored and bought the lot.’

‘Blankets?’ queried Leland.

‘I’ll sell them readily enough when the winter begins to bite,’ said Collis.

Charles laughed. ‘It was all Arthur Teach’s idea, originally,’ he told Leland, with enormous good humour. ‘But poor Teach made the mistake of telling Collis, and boasting about it, and before we knew it Collis had rowed out into the Bay and bought them right under Teach’s nose. I would have given a five-dollar piece to have seen Teach’s face when the Aria’s lighters came ashore and told him the blankets were all bought. I saw him later, at Barry & Patten’s saloon, and he was ready to have Collis strung up from the Vigilance Committee’s upstairs rooms like Casey and Cora.’

‘Not seriously, I trust?’ asked Leland.

‘Not seriously,’ said Collis.

Leland sniffed. ‘I never know with San Francisco. The only way you can tell San Franciscans from savages is by their fancy clothes and their bread-crumbed oysters.’