Collis didn’t answer, but swigged back his drink and set the empty glass firmly back on the table.

‘I know. Why don’t we have another?’ said Henry, with the brightness of a man who has suddenly and intuitively solved a complicated problem.

Collis shook his head. ‘That won’t help. It’s the end of the world.’

‘I know it won’t help.’ Henry smiled. ‘But I always think life looks so much more manageable when one is lying helplessly on one’s back, don’t you? At least, that’s what the colonel’s wife told me.’

The waiter came up and stood beside them, twiddling his moustache. Collis raised his eyes to him wearily and then at last said, ‘Oh, very well. We’ll have the same again.’

The two bruisers must have been following Collis all evening. As Henry and he left the brightly lit frontage of the St Nicholas and crossed Broadway to the north side of Spring Street, they emerged from a darkened store doorway and crossed the street only a few feet behind.

Collis and Henry were both in better humour. Collis was laughing almost uncontrollably at a long story Henry was relating to him about the time he had been obliged to hide in a brother officer’s wardrobe (having already availed himself of the brother officer’s bed and the brother officer’s wife), and how the brother officer had pulled open the wardrobe door, said, ‘Oh, excuse me,’ and promptly closed it again. Henry, after seven whiskeys and as many beers, had decided that $5000 probably wasn’t too much to pay for a salutary experience; and Collis, after six stone fences, had almost forgotten about his problems with Senator Stride and Delphine Spooner.

They turned into Spring Street, still laughing, but as soon as they were out of the gaslights of Broadway and into the shadows, the two men behind them quickened their footsteps and practically ran to catch up with them.

Collis turned. Henry turned, too. Only a few feet away, as bulky and implacable as two small buildings, were Herbert Carpenter’s two Chatham Square toughs, their fists raised and their faces set in those rigid, frowning expressions that men of low intelligence consider obligatory for any tasks of violence.

‘What do you want?’ said Collis, with as much clarity and resolve as he could muster.

The tough with the shaven scalp and the bottle scars answered. ‘Compliments of Mr Carpenter, this is. On account of you kicking him downstairs.’

Henry looked at Collis blurrily. ‘Do you know these men?’

‘Yes,’ nodded Collis. ‘I think they’ve come to beat me up.’

Henry tried to stand very straight. In a slurry voice, he announced, ‘I think you’d better know that I was boxing champion at West Point, 1849. My left hook broke an instructor’s jaw, and my right hook was so deadly that they considered bedding me down in the armoury, along with the Springfield rifles.’