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The hotel—the Plaza by name—was an angular three-storied, wooden-frame building that had once been well and truly painted. But that was in the boom days. It had a verandah fronting on the city’s only business avenue, a long, unpaved thoroughfare that had wrecked the running gear of more vehicles in its time than any roadway the world had ever known. Over the verandah, on a level with the first floor, was a wide balcony of similar proportions. In the heyday of prosperity this had been covered by a brilliant striped awning, but that, like the outside paint, had long since yielded to the weather. But for all its dreary, derelict appearance the Plaza stood out amongst the rest of the city’s buildings, with one or two exceptions, as something rather magnificent, if only for its proportions.

McLagan and the banker had the office with its decayed furniture and spluttering wood stove to themselves. That is, they only shared it with its atmosphere of general uncleanness. It was the hour immediately before supper, a meal which Abe Cranfield’s fly-blown menu described as “dinner,” a title his boarders refused to accept. Soon contingents of humanity would foregather in anticipation of a meal to sustain stomachs which had long since learned to satisfy themselves on a diet of unsavoury monotony.