The Stranger squeezed his way among the throng. The only empty seat was across from the card players, near the warmth of the open galley, where a large doughy man and a small, compact woman were working. The man stirred a pot that bubbled over a solid iron cooker, and the woman rolled dough with quick, violent turns. The man, from time to time, reached out and filled a small glass with moonshine from a large bottle, and this he would lift methodically to his lips, wet them, then down the rest in one go. The Stranger slid into the one empty chair. Across the small table from him sat one solitary figure, apart from all the others. It was a short, squat man, in a worn black suit and a rumpled white shirt and a small and rather jaunty trilby on his head. He wore thick-lensed round glasses and a toothbrush moustache. His large eyes were a watery pale blue. The Stranger pressed himself into the seat, hemmed in between the wall and the thick, sweaty back of a woman in a chequered flannel shirt, smudged with pale deposits of substance, who was laughing loudly with her companions. The man in the trilby hat looked at the Stranger’s travails with kind amusement in his eyes. The laughter on the other side grew loud in response to a joke the Stranger didn’t quite catch.

“Everyone’s a comedian,” the man in the trilby hat said. He reached across the table to shake the Stranger’s hand. His grip was strong. “I’m Mr. Norvell.”

The Stranger shook his hand. He said, “If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t look like a prospector.”

The man’s eyes twinkled and he said, “That’s quite all right, I’m not.” He reached under the desk for a black and much battered briefcase and placed it on the table between them, opening it with a click. “I am purveyor of nostrum remedium—that is to say, of patent medicines, elixirs, mugwump, and snake oil. I, sir, am a commercial traveller.”

He said that with an air of quiet pride. When he turned his briefcase to face the Stranger, the Stranger saw inside it there many curiously shaped bottles of small sizes, some made of rough glass, and some of clay and some of wood. Some of the glass was an opaque rich blue and some was colourless and grainy. The wood bottles were engraved with sigils and the clay ones with simple marks like crow’s feet.