"Well, what would a Kafir do with thousands of pounds, anyway?" said
Rosanne, laughing irrelevantly. "I think ten pounds was quite enough."
"That's true—too much for the wretch, indeed! However, he has confessed and told everything he could to help our people to trap the other wretch. Unfortunately, that is not very much."
"No?"
"No; he says he has never seen the man who fetches the diamonds. The only one he has ever seen was a man he is not able to describe because he is so ordinary-looking, who came to his kraal in Basutoland about seven months ago, and made the whole plan with him to come and work on contracts of three months at a time as a compound-boy, steal as many diamonds as he could, and pass them out in the way I have described. Each parcel was to cost ten pounds and to contain no less than ten diamonds. No money passed between them, but every time a parcel was put through the tunnel, the confederate on the other side put a blue bead in its place among the sand. The boy found the bead and kept it as a receipt, and when he came out at the end of every three months' contract he wore a bracelet of blue beads on his wrist. Naturally, the authorities didn't take any notice of this when they searched him, for nearly all Kafirs wear beads of some kind. These beads were quite a common kind to look at; only when they were examined carefully were they found to have been passed through some chemical process which dyed the inside a peculiar mauve colour, making it impossible for the Kafir to cheat by adding ordinary blue beads (of which there are plenty for sale in the compound) to his little bunch of 'receipts.'"
"How clever!" said Rosanne. "And how are they going to catch the confederate? Put a trap-parcel, I suppose, and pounce on him when he comes to fetch it?"
She had seated herself again, opposite Kitty, her arms resting on the back of the chair, her face vivid with interest.
"Cleverer than that," announced Kitty. "They are going to put the trap and watch who fetches it. But they won't pounce on him; they mean to follow him up and arrest the whole gang."
"Gang?"
"Len says there's sure to be a gang of them, and for the sake of getting them all, parcel after parcel of stones will be put through the tunnel, if necessary, until every one of them is traced and arrested."
"Rather risky for the diamonds, I should think!"