“I was the last to go to bed, and then I did not sleep, but waited till about three o’clock, when I knew the camp would be asleep. Then I stole out and walked along the creek to a canvas house which had been pointed out to me as the one they lived in. The place was quiet enough; I can remember now how a dog tied up to a waggon barked at me and how savage I felt with it, and how I laughed to myself as I knocked it over with a stone I hurled at it. When I got to the house I looked through the window. I saw them, they were asleep. I had a bowie knife on me, and I cut the rope with which the door was tied. No—I can’t tell you the rest.”
“Well, you killed him; he’s injured you, but it’s rough killing a man when he’s asleep,” said Bill Hardman.
“Him! I killed them,” said the prospector. “When she woke up and saw what I had done to him, she screamed and cursed at me; the devil came into me, and I stabbed her again and again. It would have been better for me if I had been caught red-handed, and strung up, as I should have been then and there; but I got away. Since then I have never got the sight I saw before I rushed out of their place into the open out of my head. I have hardly seen a white man to speak to since that day, for I wandered away up country and have lived amongst Kaffirs; but now I feel I must tell it to some one.”
“Well, and now what are you going to do? Go back and work at the place you prospected?” asked Hardman.
“Work at the place! What good are diamonds and money to me? No, I have not come back for that. I have come back to see the place where we were happy together once before I got the prospecting fever and left her, and then—well, what should a man do who has no hope and is sick of life and not afraid of finishing it? There, I have told you my story, and now I will say good-day, and good luck to you. If it goes against your conscience not to tell the police that a man has confessed murder to you, for I suppose there are police on the fields now, tell on, and make a clean breast of it.”
Having finished speaking he got up to walk away. “Stop, don’t go yet, sit down and have a talk; tell us more about the place where you found those diamonds. Can you tell us exactly where it was?” said Timson, his voice quavering with excitement, for all the time the prospector had been telling the conclusion of his story he had been thinking of the wonderful diamond mine the other had spoken of.
“Where is the place you said you found so well at?” he added as the stranger sat down and lit his pipe again.
“What! you want to strike my luck, do you? I wouldn’t put a pick in there again for all the diamonds there are in the coast of the earth.”
“Well, if you don’t like to work the place yourself, it seems a pity that no one else should,” said Timson, who, though he had some other weaknesses, was not superstitious. “You see, I don’t believe much in luck, except the luck of getting hold of a good thing when you know how to work it.”
“Look here, mate, I am an old digger, and it goes agin’ my ideas of right to try and worm out another digger’s secret; but if you let us into this thing, we will work it with you fair and square,” said Hardman.