Luck at the Diamond Fields

by Dalrymple J. Belgrave

Story 3.

Diamond Cut Diamond.

It was a delightfully cool evening, after a hot dusty day on the Diamond Fields, and Mr Moses Moss, attorney-at-law of Kimberley, South Africa, was sitting under the verandah of his house, smoking a cigar, and sipping a cool drink as it was his custom to do before turning in for the night. As he smoked his thoughts turned to his prospects and his position, and on the whole they were of a somewhat cheerful and self-satisfied character. It was only a few years since he had hurried away from England a broken man. He had found the temptations to overstep the boundary which separates sharp from malpractice too much for him, and his conduct had attracted the meddlesome attentions of the Incorporated Law Society, who had made itself very disagreeable indeed to him. The time he had spent on the Diamond Fields, however, had done wonders. He was worth a nice little sum of money; and as an attorney and money-lender he had got together a very lucrative connection.

On the Diamond Fields he had remembered his English experiences. They had taught him the good old maxim, that honesty was the best policy, and this had been the golden rule of his life, which he had always acted upon so far as compatible with the practice of an attorney whose clients happen, as a matter of fact, to be men of somewhat shady characters.

However, he kept always on the windy side of the law, although the temptations to go just a little crooked were very strong. There were at that time many diamonds to be bought, for very reasonable prices, by persons who were content to buy under circumstances which the law punished with great severity. Mr Moss had come to the conclusion, however, that dealing in stolen diamonds was too risky a business to follow. He used to make it his boast that he hardly knew a rough diamond when he saw one, and he said that he never wished to have any dealings in them. Indirectly, of course, he—like every one else on the Diamond Fields—lived by diamonds. His clients as a rule were in what was called the illicit. But he could not help that, he said. Of course he was happy enough to defend any one who had got into trouble for buying stolen diamonds. Then if any one came to him to borrow money it was not his business to ask questions as to what the money was wanted for. The money was generally wanted at once, and gold rather than notes or cheques was in request. But those circumstances did not suggest anything to Mr Moss, or if they did, he kept his thoughts to himself. He was too busy in considering the large percentage he could charge and the security he could get to bother himself about matters that did not concern him. He did not wish to be told anything about what his clients thought of doing with the money they came to him hurriedly to borrow. When on one occasion a man who wanted a hundred pounds in gold at once was indiscreet enough to blurt out something about having a chance to get hold of a ‘big un’ for that sum which was worth ten times the money, Mr Moss was very much hurt at being asked to share any such guilty knowledge. He certainly did not go so far as to refuse to entertain the loan, but he took care to ease his conscience by charging an extra twenty per cent.

Some people said that Mr Moss in a way avenged the claimholders who suffered from the depredations of the illicit diamond-buyers, and that he preyed upon them as they preyed on the mining interest, and there is no doubt a good share of the price of many a stolen diamond got into his clutches. It was characteristic of the sources from which he acquired his money, that the very house in which he lived should have once belonged to one Ike Hart, who in his day had been a very notorious buyer of stolen diamonds, and had flourished wonderfully until he bought one diamond too many, which happened to have been sent him by the police. He had had the advantage of Mr Moss’s professional assistance at his trial and advice about his private affairs. Mr Hart had been convicted, and had been sent to do a sentence of hard labour on the Capetown Breakwater, and Mr Moss had become possessed of his house. Ike Hart was said to have sworn that he would be even with Moss, and to have declared that he had been robbed. However, Mr Moss felt satisfied, as he reviewed his career, that he had never done anything that the law could take hold of. If in one or two cases he had grabbed somewhat greedily at his clients’ property, those clients were out of the way of harming him, and there was not the slightest chance of his being made to disgorge any of the plunder he had got together.

Mr Moss’s house stood back from the road in a good-sized garden—if you could call a place a garden in which nothing grew but a few cacti and a mass of straggling tobacco-trees—which was separated from the road by a high, corrugated-iron fence.

As Mr Moss smoked in his verandah, he began to think that amongst the bushes at the end of the garden he could distinguish a form of a man stooping over the ground. At first he felt nervous; then he became curious, as he made the figure out more clearly. It certainly was the figure of a man, and he seemed to be digging for something. “What was he after? What could he hope to find?” Mr Moss asked himself.

He would find out that for himself, he determined. So he got up, and slinking along very quietly in the shade of the fence, he crept up close to the man who, for reasons best known to himself, had visited his compound at night. The man went on working without noticing him. He was digging into the ground with a broken bit of spade, and seemed to be very intent upon what he was about.

Close to where the man was digging there was a water-barrel, and Mr Moss got behind it, and watched his visitor with considerable interest. When Mr Moss called to mind who the former owner of the premises was, he began to have a suspicion of what his visitor was looking for. He remembered that there had been some talk of Ike Hart’s having several big diamonds hidden away when he was arrested. The man dug for some time, then scratched about with his hands in the hole, then measured from the wall with a tape-measure, and then set to work again. All of a sudden he threw down the spade and picked something up.