‘Well, I want you to open it up again, and bring me twenty-thousand dollars, exact, in gold dust. Then I want you to draw up a note for me, covering the company for that amount until the banks are open tomorrow.’

Pudgett blinked first at Arthur and then at Dan McReady, and then disappeared to do what he was told. Arthur hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his camel-coloured vest and gave Dan McReady a thin but quite triumphant smile.

Outside the Frémonts’ white-pillared house overlooking the southern curve of San Francisco Bay, the carriages of the Chivalry and the richer members of the Shovelry were drawn up in gleaming, jingling ranks. Their horses snuffled from time to time and shook their heads, while their coachmen sat on the low stone wall that bordered the driveway, playing dice and smoking pipes. It was a cold evening, and the waters of the Bay were a dull lilac colour, flecked with spray.

Through the glass walls of Jessie’s veranda, chandeliers sparkled and elegantly-dressed men and women could be seen talking and laughing. Bret Harte, who came along later, observed, ‘There are more diamonds in this one house tonight than in the whole of South Africa, and enough silk to wrap up an elephant.’

It was one of those occasions which Jessie Frémont, as a hostess, enjoyed the most: an occasion when she brought together the wealthy, the socially graceful, the glib, the coquettish, and the pretty. She would mix them in ways in which they had rarely been mixed before, so that florid clerics would find themselves arguing with sallow-faced Sansome Street gamblers, and stiff-necked South Park ladies would find themselves provocatively entertained by tousled young radical writers. As a Northerner, and the wife of the last Republican Presidential candidate, Jessie had been treated warily at first by the Southern aristocracy of Rincon Hill; but her dinners and soirées had proved to be witty, glittering and bright, and were circled on the social calendar as emphatically as Mary Bell Gwin’s costume balls, or Isaac Friedlander’s monumental dinners.

Collis and Andy had arrived in a rented brougham at eight, after a couple of glasses of Pisco punch at the bar of the International Hotel. Collis, as he mounted the steps of the Frémont porch, looked unnaturally pale, and there were dark smudges under his eyes. But in his evening coat and his starched white collar, his pallor gave him the look of romantic dissolution, and from within the house there was a soft twittering among the fans and frills of South Park’s pioneer daughters.