At Agar’s Lagoon

SHOULDYOUFLYnorthward from Perth, fringe the Indian Ocean for fifteen hundred miles, and then turn inland for a further three hundred, you might chance to see Agar’s Lagoon. You will recognize Agar’s Lagoon if you look down on a tiny settlement completely ringed with broken bottles.

There is no lagoon anywhere near, because the stony creek skirting the township is far too impatient to carry the flood water away from the Kimberley Ranges and empty it into the quenchless sand of the great Inland Desert. The creek is infinitely less romantic than the bottle ring, estimated to total a thousand tons and laid down by a long succession of hotel yardmen who have removed the empties in vehicles ranging from bullock-drays to T-model Fords.

Nothing can be done about it; for, being so far from Perth, it is economically impossible to return the empties. Of necessity the ring must broaden outward, otherwise the hotel, the post office, the police station, a store and ten houses would ultimately lie buried beneath glass.

To Agar’s Lagoon had come Detective-Inspector Bonaparte, his journey to his home State from Broome, where he had terminated a homicide investigation, having been interrupted by a faulty plane engine. In this northern corner of a continent where plane schedules are erratic, he had to check in at the ramshackle hotel at a time when the tiny settlement was comparatively dead, even the policeman being absent on a patrol.

The hotel was comparable with the saloons of old America, being a structure of weather-board, iron andpise, an oasis amid the thousands of square miles occupied by a hundred-odd white cattle- and sheep-men, prospectors, and the inevitable Government servants.

Bony found himself to be the only guest, and the only man about the place to gossip with was the hotel yardman-cum-barman, a wisp of a man recorded officially as John Brown.