Luck at the Diamond Fields

by Dalrymple J. Belgrave

Chapter Three.

Twenty-four hours after Jack Enderby received the hundred pounds he was dressing in some furnished chambers he had taken in Jermyn Street. Those twenty-four hours had done a good deal for him. When he first landed he had felt by no means at his ease. A valuable diamond is all very well, but it is not ready money, and as Jack had fingered the few shillings he had left in the pocket of his old pea-coat, he felt anything but confident, and realised that there was something in the atmosphere of London which made want of money worse than it is elsewhere. Then it was not very pleasant for the once brilliant Jack Enderby of the —th to have no better clothes than the colonial rags he was wearing, and to have to walk about the street in them. But the touch of the crisp bank-notes had changed everything, and had acted as a powerful tonic on his system. They enabled him to get into comfortable quarters, and order suitable raiment; and as he dressed that morning he looked at himself in the glass, and felt satisfied that he was not so very unlike the Jack Enderby of a dozen or so years before. Shaved, and with the beard that he had been wearing cut off, his face did not look so very much the worse for wear. There were some streaks of grey in his moustache, and some lines about the eyes, and on his cheek he had the scar of the blow he had received from Sixpence’s knobkerri, which he would carry to his grave, still it had been paid for pretty handsomely. The last years had been hard ones enough, and he had had a rough time of it, but he had come out all right, and there were not many of his old friends, he expected, who had made as much money off their own bats as he would have done when he sold his diamond.

As he ate his breakfast—enjoying his food wonderfully, the tea, toast, and even eggs, seeming better than they did in Africa—he glanced at a daily and saw that it was Ascot week. Why should he not go down? he asked himself. There was nothing to prevent him now, for though he might come across some of the men who were looking for him very anxiously one Monday some dozen years before, even if they remembered him they would be appeased when they learnt that he would soon be able to settle with them. He was soon dressed—how strange it seemed to be wearing a black coat and a tall hat again—and was in a hansom bound for the station.

As he was paying for his entrance to the enclosure he felt some one touch him on the shoulder, and somewhat to his surprise heard his name spoken by a shabby, horsey-looking man, whose gloomy countenance for a second was lit up with something like satisfaction as he seemed to recognise him.

“How are you, Captain?” he said; “why I haven’t seen you a-racing for this ever so long. You’ve been letting it alone, and you’re right—wish I had; but you must have just one more shy at it this time for the stakes. Do you remember how I put you on to the winner at Cambridgeshire at thirties to one. Well, I’ve got as good a thing as that for you.”

Jack recognised the man who had kept a public-house in a Berkshire village, near where he had been at a tutor’s, before he went into the army. There was a training-stable in the village, whose fortunes the publican used to follow very faithfully. He had had one wonderful tip, which he had imparted to Jack, and they had both backed it to their profit.

“Ah, Captain, things ain’t what they used to be with me by a long chalk. I haven’t got the ‘Horse and Jockey’ no longer; and that bit o’ land I had is gone; and now that I knows a good thing, blessed if I can raise enough to back it to win me a fiver; and mark my words, Captain, there never was a better thing than Revolver for the stakes. Now look ’ere, Captain, it’s putting last year’s Derby winner in at 7 stone 4—how’d that be, ay? I saw the trial, and I knows what I see, and you know that it’s not from knowing too little but too much that I’ve hurt myself betting.”

There was a note in the man’s husky voice which convinced Enderby that he believed in his information. Revolver too, he rather liked the name. It was owing to a revolver that he was at Ascot and not in South Africa.

“What can I get about it?” he asked.

“They have got it at fifteens on the lists, but they are laying twenties in the ring—there is a price! Well, well, one don’t know what’s in store for one, but I’d lay against there being any worse torment than knowing a real good thing and not having a mag to back it with,” the lout said, looking the picture of gloom, but his face lit up with pleasure when Jack promised to back the horse and put a sovereign on for him at the odds.