‘Well, what’s all this hedging about? My blankets are still there, aren’t they? They’re still in the warehouse?’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘Then what?’

Andy took his feet off the desk and planted them firmly on the floor. Then he rested his hands on his knees and frowned somewhere in the middle distance in the classic posture of a man who does most of his constructive thinking in the outhouse.

‘I want you to know that it wasn’t my fault,’ he said, by way of prelude.

‘What wasn’t your fault?’

‘The fire. It wasn’t my fault. It happens all the time in San Francisco. You know, what with the outdoor cooking and the oil lamps and the outlaws and all. I mean, half of San Francisco likes to watch things burn, and the other half spends most of its time setting light to them. So between the two you don’t always stand too much of a chance.’

‘My blankets are burned?’ asked Collis. He felt almost as shocked as if someone had told him his mother had died. ‘All those blankets, all that investment — they’re burned?’

‘Oh, they’re not a total loss,’ said Andy. ‘They’re kind of brown around the edges, like overdone flapjacks, and most of the upper ones have holes, but, well, you could salvage a few. I lost five tons of oatmeal and two hundred gallons of turpentine in the same fire.’

Collis rubbed his eyes, he didn’t know what to say. He could have cried, as a matter of fact, but he’d done enough crying for one day, for something else that had gotten burned. Something more fragile, and far less forgettable, than blankets.

‘What the hell am I going to do now?’ he asked Andy.

Andy pulled a face. ‘Nothing you can do. None of the stuff was insured. You’ll just have to get yourself back to the Eagle Saloon, and see what more you can take from the faro tables.’

Collis lowered his head. He bit at his thumbnail. If this wasn’t the damnedest, most miserable day he’d ever had. It was like a punishment. First Hannah, and now this. And wouldn’t that bristly bastard Teach have a good long laugh about it.

He frowned. Surely Teach should have known about it already. Yet when he’d talked to Teach on the wharf, and later at the Bank Exchange Saloon, he hadn’t given Collis any indication at all that he’d heard what had happened. Collis looked up at Andy. ‘Who knows about this fire?’ he asked.

‘Just about the whole of San Francisco. It was evening, see, and it was a pretty spectacular blaze while it lasted. Did you ever see two hundred gallons of turpentine go up in flames? The engine company thought they were going to lose the Maritime Hotel, and half the damned street.’

‘Does Arthur Teach know about it?’