On the outskirts of Albury three utilities had met the transport, and into them went part of the cargo. With it went Jimmy the Screwsman, who eventually found himself at the inland town of Balranald.
In Balranald a newspaper informed Jimmy that the Great Scarsby was still at large, and police of three states were looking for him. He had been incarcerated during the Governor’s pleasure in a criminal lunatic asylum, following trial for abduction in 1940, and as he had been a world-famed magician, hope of recapturing him was not high-in the view of the newspaper. Melbourne was now ‘hot’, even for Jimmy the Screwsman, and Jimmy decided to go west and take his vacation with a married sister in distant and far-away Broken Hill.
He arrived at Broken Hill on 2nd October, entering the city on the mail car from Wilcannia, and there, sick of big cities and tired by his mental activities, he proceeded to relax.
There is nothing parochial or bucolic about Broken Hill. There is no city in all Australia remotely like it excepting perhaps the golden city of Kalgoorlie. There is nothing of thesnobocracy of Melbourne, or the dog-eat-dog taint of Sydney, in the community of Broken Hill, and there is no thoroughfare in Australia quite like Argent Street, Broken Hill’s main shopping centre.
Argent Street is unique. Besides being a street of shops it is the universal place of rendezvous. ‘Meet you down Argent Street’ is the phrase employed by husband to wife, by friend to friend. You may pause before a building erected in mid-nineteenth century; proceed and gaze at a section of a mining camp of the 1870s; stay at a hotel the exact replica of those from which emerged the American Deadwood Dicks; eat at ultra cafes run by smart Greeks and Italians; hire a gleaming automobile and shop at lush emporiums.