But what I did find, there on my blanket beside my pillow, was a big, blue, uncut diamond, together with a scrap of paper bearing the one word "Farewell."
THE SALTING OF THE GREAT NORTH-EASTERN FIELDS
THE SALTING OF THE GREAT NORTH-EASTERN FIELDS
CHAPTER I
To be "broke to the world" was by no means a new experience to Dick Sydney, and as he sat on the sandy shore near Luderitzbucht and watched the setting sun turn the broad ocean into molten gold, he was little troubled by the fact that his last mark had been spent an hour or two back for a very belated and necessary breakfast, and that he was now absolutely penniless. Always an optimist, Dick easily outdid the immortal Micawber in his faith in something turning up just when things looked their blackest, and he had literally no thought for the morrow, until his hand, mechanically groping in his pocket for the wherewithal to fill his pipe, advised him of the fact that even his "baccy" was finished.
This was serious, for Dick's old battered briar rarely left his mouth; and whilst the odoriferous Boer equivalent for the "divine weed" held out, food and drink were but minor considerations. But something must be done now, so, knocking out the ashes from his last whiff, and with one more futile grope in his capacious pocket, he stuck his empty pipe in his mouth, rose, stretched himself, and, glancing once more at the pageant of the western sky, turned back towards the contemptible collection of tin shanties, drinking saloons, empty beer-bottles, and Germans, known as Luderitzbucht.
A few months back, the discovery of diamonds had brought fame to this wind-swept wilderness, and fame had been immediately followed by the choicest collection of cosmopolitan scoundreldom that a mining "rush" had ever been responsible for.
Now Dick Sydney, though a man of variegated experience and a bit of a "hard case," was still passing honest, and a gentleman; and he soon found that he stood but little chance in Luderitzbucht. His modest capital, which he had hoped to increase in this new Diamondopolis, had vanished within a few weeks of his arrival, swallowed up by shares in diamond-fields that existed only in the vivid imagination of the swindling "company-promoters" or so-called "prospectors," who infested the place; and when his illusions of easily-made wealth had vanished also, and he had tried to obtain a billet, he had failed utterly.
His knock-about experiences had included several spells of gold- prospecting and mining in California and other wild spots, and, being as hard as nails, he was admirably suited to the life of a prospector, and prospectors were being paid large salaries in those early days of the diamond rush in German South-West Africa. But, unfortunately for himself, Dick possessed a constitutional but at times embarrassing prejudice against lying, and in his numerous applications about prospecting jobs had made no secret of the fact that his prospecting had never been for diamonds.
And as a result he had had to stand aside and see all sorts of gentry taken on for the numerous expeditions that were constantly being arranged: runaway seamen, cooks, stewards, and stokers from the ships, gangers and navvies from the railways, ne'er-do-wells of all descriptions, with but here and there an old "river digger," or genuine prospector to leaven the lump.