Meantime, the hairy man was handling the diamond, weighing, turning and squinting at it. He abandoned it in a minute or two, at the request of another tough-looking customer at the other end of the bar, who called out, “Throw it over!” and the hairy man threw. After that it was chucked about from hand to hand like a cricket ball among the men, most of whom were half or more than half drunk by this time—pausing occasionally in its wild flight, as one or another kept it to take another look.... I bit a piece of the inner side of my lip right through, but I said nothing and held out not so much as a finger to check the stone’s career.
“Say! did this come from the Aikora by any chance?” suddenly yelled a gray, dilapidated creature with red eyes and ragged beard, who was sitting on a case of goods, being too far intoxicated to stand. “There’s blue clay on the Ai—Aikora.”
“I tell you,” I said, wearily, “I got it in Kata-Kata—black soil swamp country, if you want to know. What’s that got to do with it?”
The red-eyed man essayed to answer, but a wave of intoxication mounted to his brain and he replied in words that were intelligible to himself alone. He would not let go the stone, however. The rest of the men seemed to have lost interest in it by this time, and the dusk, which was now darkening down in the stifling gloom of the bar, seemed to promise me a chance of slipping quietly away.
But the red-eyed man held on to the stone. His words remained unintelligible; he managed, however, to rise from his seat and stagger round to the back of the bar, helping himself to more liquor, and smashing about with his hands among the glasses for a considerable time. By the coolness with which Burchell received these proceedings, I judged the red-eyed man was better able to pay for his fun than appearance might suggest.
It was not long before the final stage arrived. He staggered against the wall, muttered and sank in a heap on the floor, the Sorcerer’s Stone dropping from his pulpy hand as he fell. The storekeeper, with a bored expression of face, came forward to carry him out into the air. I volunteered to help and took care to slip the stone in my pocket again as I lifted the drunkard’s limply-hanging knees. We took him onto the veranda and dropped him on the earthen floor, his head on a sack.
“Drinking himself into the jumps, he is,” observed the wooden-faced Burchell. “Now tomorrow, like as not, he won’t remember a mortal thing about this afternoon. He’ll forget where he’s put his gold some of these days; he’s drunk his mind half away. Have a whisky with me?”
“Not after that,” I said, and walked away.
The Marquis escaped and followed me in a minute or two. In the dusk of the goods shed where the beds were, he fell upon my neck—and it was no joke to have a man of his size making a locket of himself about your jugular vein—and cried:
“Splendid! magnificent! I felicitate you, my friend! You have saved us both two. You have the ingenious soul, the spiritual mind—you are what they call a bully-boy! Look, if that heap of misfortunates had found out, we would have had a sudden death hanging on the end of every minute till we get back!”