"'Anything is better than your rumblings,' said Claas, and so they hastened on the backward course. 'For,' as Vassell told me, 'I was in deep tribulation of fear lest the vultures might gulp down the diamond, or some beak strike it afar.'"
Here the huge old burgher sat up straighter and paused so unexpectedly that his sudden silence was startling. I imagined he listened to something far off in the stillness of the waning moon. Lieutenant Deschamps and the French Canadians sat indifferent, but I sprang up and put hands to my ears. Nothing could I hear but the occasional stamping of our horses, the walking hoofs of our vedettes by the river's bend, and the clinking of swift water over gravel.
"Did you hear something strange?" the patriarch asked me.
"Did you?" I asked.
"Is it likely that a great-grandfather's ears can hear better than a young man's?" he asked courteously.
"But you stopped to listen," I replied.
Then he shamed me by saying gently: "An old voice may need a little rest. But now I will go on:
"My cousins trekked back as fast as their oxen could walk. They found the Kaffir still squirming, and covering his eyes from the vultures. This went to Vassell's heart. He could not cut the diamond out of the living. And perhaps it was not in the man. Vassell drove away the vultures and examined the wound. Then his heart was lifted up exceedingly, for as he told me, 'fear had been heavy in me lest the diamond had gone clear through the Kaffir and been lost on the veldt. But now my fingers felt it under the flesh of his back. An inch more had sent it through. And it seemed so sure the pagan must die before morning that my conscience was clear against extracting the stone in haste.'
"This Wolwe Veldt was then Lion Veldt, and Vassell thought it prudent to carry the Kaffir into the night-laager, for lions bolt big chunks, and the diamond might be in one of them. Claas consented, and so the tame Kaffirs lugged the wild one into one of the ivory-wagons, and left him to die at his leisure.
"Late in the night Vassell, wakened by Claas snoring, felt a strong temptation. He might get up and knife out the stone unseen. 'But I put the temptation away,' he told me, 'for my movement might waken Claas, or the Kaffir might kick or groan under the knife, and my brother might spy on me. So I mercifully awaited the hour when the Lord would let the diamond come into my hands without Claas suspecting anything. Besides, it was against my conscience to cut the Kaffir up warm when it seemed so sure he would be cold before morning.'