The Kimberley newspaper a day or two after had a telegram in it telling of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, and when I saw full particulars of it some weeks after I learnt that my brother had been shot when leading his company in that engagement.
Story 13.
A Fatal Diamond.
Chapter One.
It was a pure white stone of over two hundred carats, and since nature had somehow brewed it ages before it had rested peacefully in its native ‘blue’ as innocent of harm as the meanest pebble near it. No sooner, however, was it unearthed by the pick of one Sixpence, a Kaffir in the employ of the Union Diamond Mining Company of the Kimberley Mine, than its evil influence began to work. Sixpence’s eyes glittered as he saw it glisten in the South African sunshine, and then he gave one stealthy glance at an overseer, who was paid to watch over him and keep him from straying from the paths of honesty, and found that he had little to fear from that quarter. The overseer was indulging in a day-dream, and in his imagination was reacting the incident of the previous Saturday evening, when he had engaged in four fights, three of which he could quite remember. While he was thus occupied Sixpence clutched the diamond, and when he had got it up and hidden it away in the rag he wore round his waist, began to indulge in a delicious day-dream on his own account. He would sell the diamond to a canteen-keeper he knew of, and have one last drinking bout and then farewell to the white man and his troublesome ways. He knew, however, that on leaving the mine he would have to pass through the searching house, and that it would be dangerous to take his chance with the diamond. So he hides it somewhere near where he is working, and when he goes home he has the lump of blue ground, a few yards from which the diamond is buried, photographed in his mind with an instinct strange to any civilised man. That night, an hour after midnight, he steals away from the compound where the Union Company Kaffirs sleep and makes his way to the side of the mine.
At the far end of the mine a company was working by electric light, and the brilliant glare in its claims made the rest of the huge pit look weirdly gloomy, and seem bottomless and infernal. Sixpence, however, had not much imagination, cared little enough for the picturesque effect. He had no room in his mind for any other picture but that of the exact spot where he had concealed the big diamond. Glancing around to see that there was no one about, he turned down a track which led from the reef to the bottom of the mine. Without much difficulty he found the exact spot in the claims where he had hid the diamond. Then, as he held the stone in his hand and realised that the prize was his, he felt inclined to give vent to his joy in a wild Kaffir song of triumph. That bit of a pebble for which the big fools of white men would give so much money and undergo so much toil was his. His last day’s work was done. No overseer would again awaken him in the morning and compel him to go to those hateful claims. His future would be made up of days of delicious loafing, watching his wives hoe in the mealie patch, and his cows feed round his kraal, while he would have an ever delightful story to tell to the young men of his tribe, of how he had fooled the white men, and carried off the biggest diamond that ever turned up in their claims.
Perhaps it was fate, or some wayward influence exercised by the big stone he had found, that made him choose another way to ascend by than that which he had followed when he went down the mine. This brought him up about fifty yards from where he had gone down. It was just as good a path to take as the other, or rather it would have been just as good a path for him to take but for one circumstance.
As Sixpence reached the top of the reef, and was just starting off at a run, he found himself tumbling over something which when he was on the ground he discovered to be a pair of long legs. Those legs happened to belong to one Jack Enderby, a searcher in the employ of the Kimberley Mining Board. Mr Sixpence, who did not read the local papers, was unaware of the fact that the Mining Board, in order to put a stop to exactly the course of proceeding which he was carrying out, had instituted the system of putting men on guard round the reef at night.