Arrayed in a light sports suit and a panama to keep his head cool, Jimmy strolled down Argent Street. The afternoon was still and hot. The shadowed pavements were certainly not empty spaces, and the kerbs were lined by parked cars and utilities. The store windows were filled with luxury goods to meet the prosperity of this mining community, and the shoppers were dressed as expensively as he. Even then great wads of dough were coming up out of the earth to the accompaniment of the ceaseless racket of machinery.

The store once controlled by Samuel Goldspink was about the third best in Argent Street, and Jimmy paused to view the array of gents’ ties and shirts. Ties! He already had dozens in various places, for he had an abiding passion for them, but Bonaparte had ‘suggested’ ties and-hell!

There were but a few customers within, and Jimmy came to anchor beside a man interested in gloves, and, there being a vacant chair, he perched himself on it with the air of a man having a million years in credit.

There were opened boxes of gloves on the counter before the man who was trying them on. He was a tall man, heavy, having a distinct paunch. He was very well dressed, even for Broken Hill. His voice was modulated and almost without accent. He could be a retired share-broker, an undertaker, a film producer. He could be-but Jimmy wasn’t interested. Who would be interested in the man when one could gaze upon the assistant serving him?

She was barely forty, large, severely corseted within an expensive black frock. The pearl necklace floating on the sea of her bosom triumphed in the capture of Jimmy’s attention, for they were real pearls. And those glittering blue diamonds set in the platinum rings on the fat fingers forced Jimmy’s mind to envision the cot wherein these jewels would lie snug o’ nights. There was certain to be a rear yard, with rooms opening to that yard. The burglar alarms, of course, would be just too easy.