“You mean they are convicts. What sort of offences do you suppose they have committed, and where do they come from?”
“They have come from Kimberley, and they may have committed any offence, but it’s long odds that they have bought diamonds—that’s their special weakness on the fields.”
“Bought diamonds!—why I should have thought that was just what diamond-diggers wanted people to do.”
“Bought diamonds that the Kaffirs have stolen from their masters’ claims, I mean; those men, however, have probably made a mistake, and been caught by the police. When the police see that the wily illicit diamond-buyer is well on the feed they throw one of their flies, and send him a Kaffir with a diamond to sell. If the fish rises to the fly and buys, they strike, find the diamond, and haul the I.D.B. up before the court, when he gets five years. It’s a pretty sport is trapping I.D.B.’s, and these are most likely some of the many fish who have been caught.”
“What a wretched mean business it seems to be, but I’m sure he could not have been trapped.”
“Hallo, so you talk about him as ‘he,’ do you?” thought Johnstone. “You mean the tall convict; I was looking at him just now, and wondering what his history was. Well, if he has a long sentence, if I were he, I’d make a bolt for it. The convict-guards are always more or less asleep, and I’d chance their shooting straight. I suppose it would not be much good though, one could never get away across the veldt without a horse.”
“If he had a horse do you think he would get off? Where could he get to?”
“Sixty miles north he’d be out of the reach of the police, in Stellaland, where there is a lot of rough work going on, and any one who had plenty of pluck would find men who would welcome him as a comrade, and care very little whether he had a broad arrow stamped on his shirt or not.”
“Ah, well, perhaps he is used to being a convict, and does not care to escape,” Kate said, for she felt that perhaps she was unwise in showing so much interest in the convict’s fate.
“Perhaps he is; don’t know that it matters whether one is a convict or not, if one has to live in this country. Certainly, being in their infernal civil service is next door to it,” Johnstone answered, as he walked to the river-side with them. As he returned after seeing them cross, he wondered where Kate could have seen the convict before. That they had met he somehow felt certain. He was right; Kate had recognised George Darrell, her fellow-traveller in the coach, in the convict. He had had a run of bad luck since they had parted. First of all his old partner, Jim Brawnston, had been obliged to leave him, as one of his brothers had died, and he had been wanted on his father’s farm in Natal. Then for a long time he had found no diamonds.