Luck at the Diamond Fields

by Dalrymple J. Belgrave

The other, Jim Heap, was an old Australian digger who had settled at Red Shirt, where he had become a fixture; for besides having some claims, he had become the proprietor of a store, which his wife looked after for him.

He was a favourite confidant of the General, who would explain to him his theories about diamonds, and show him why he felt certain he would soon find and be able to leave the country—theories which Jim Heap would listen to gravely enough, though he did not believe in them one bit; but, as he would say to Charlie, what was the good of putting a damper on the old man’s hopes? His life was bad enough as it was, but would be unbearable if he did not go on hoping that he would soon make his pile, and be able to take his little girl home to England. Sometimes, however, he would offer him advice, which the old General—who, though he considered diamond-digging a hateful occupation into which he had been forced by a malignant fate, believed himself to be as good an authority as any one on the subject—would greatly resent. Charlie Langdale also would sometimes venture on the same subject, and one morning, as he sat after dinner smoking under the trees near the General’s house, he had greatly aroused his old friend’s anger by criticising his way of working.

“What! say my drive is dangerous!” the General had burst out, after he had listened to Charlie for some time, “and I shan’t get anything in that ground I am driving into! I should like to know what you mean by talking to me about it. Why, if I don’t know something about river digging, I’d like to know who does. I have been digging since they first found diamonds in this cursed country, and have stuck to the river all the time, and never left it for the New Rush when all the others did. A lot I have got for it so far. Well, it’s a long lane that has got no turning; and there is Connie, perhaps she wouldn’t be as well as she is if we had left the river and gone to Kimberley,” he added.

“By Jove, yes, you’re right, it’s healthier here than at Kimberley, and she couldn’t look better than she does, could she?” Charlie answered, with a flush of admiration coming across his bright young face, as he looked round and saw a golden-haired, blue-eyed girl, whose bright beauty was unharmed by the pitiless South African sun and climate, which often enough makes sad havoc of a woman’s looks.

The sight of Connie, however, made Charlie go back to his subject, regardless of the General’s wrath. “I don’t like the look of that drive, don’t like those boulders that are above you; why don’t you leave it alone and go into fresh ground? I think it dangerous, so does Jim Heap; he told Connie that you ought not to work in it; and she is wretched about it every time you go to the claim.”

“It seems to me that every one thinks they can interfere with me—you and Connie, and then Jim Heap, who thinks no one understands anything about digging but himself;” and the General drew in his breath to prepare for a burst of eloquence anent Jim Heap, when his daughter came up, and, feeling that he couldn’t do justice to the subject in her presence, he went into the house choking with indignation.

“I wish some one could persuade him to give up that work. But it’s no use, he thinks he is a greater authority about digging than any one else,” Connie said, guessing from her father’s suppressed indignation that Charlie had been broaching the question of the dangerous state of his claim.

“Yes, I wish he would go into fresh ground. I never believed in those claims of his, they’re too near the river.”

“You will never get him to do that. You know that years ago he saw a big diamond found in the claim next to where he is, which looked, he said, as if it were chipped off a much bigger one, and he is as sure in his own mind as he is of anything that the other bit is somewhere about near where he is working.”

“Well, I dare say the claim is safe enough, and I hope he will come across the big ’un, which is going to make his fortune,” said Charlie, who was always ready to look at the bright side of things. “It was only the other day he was saying that it was about time he found, as you were growing too old to be living at Red Shirt.”