The curtain snapped shut. The woman, Titania, stood in the moonlight, a nasty little sawed-off shotgun in her hands. She was without her heavy coverings, in nothing much more than a slip, and in the moonlight he saw that she was both younger and older than he’d thought, for she had a young woman’s body but an old woman’s hands. Her voice, however, and the simple fact of her finger on the trigger of the sawed-off, said she meant business.

“I heard a noise,” the Stranger said.

“So? And you can put your gun back in the holster. Slowly.”

The Stranger did as she said.

“You put substance in the soup,” he said.

“I know,” she said. “It flavours the meat. What are you getting at?”

“Nothing,” the Stranger said. “This isn’t my business.”

“You’re damn right it isn’t.” She gestured with the sawed-off. The Stranger took a step back from the wagon, and another, and his shadow hastened to match his steps.

He looked at Titania. Her own shadow billowed behind her, a huge, undulating mass that swallowed starlight in its wake. The Stranger took another step back and his shadow hid behind him.

“There was no offence meant,” he said.

“Good.”

Abruptly, she released her hold on the sawed-off, and with that she was gone. The Stranger took another breath and emptied his lungs slowly. When he returned to the fire he saw that both of the tinkerers were fast asleep, entwined in each other’s arms under their heavy coverings. He lay down himself, on his back, and stared at the distant stars.

He had got a good look into the glum interior of the wagon, before Titania caught him. He saw the hanging iron pots and pans, old and bent and blackened by countless fires. He saw the bags of nails, the hammered horseshoes, the beaten copper bowls, the kettles and coal irons, the heaps of badges and buckles, and the spurs with their rowel and chap guards.

It was, then, just as described, a tinkerer’s travelling emporium, cramped and dark, smelling of rust and the road, filled with the debris of everyday life and its mundane demands. Nothing more, nothing out of the extraordinary.