"Ah," he said, "I heard you was having a thick night, and you look like it. Blued your cheque, I suppose?"
"Not all," said Dick, "but it's gone!" And he told him everything.
"Blazes!" exclaimed the little man, leaping from his bed and beginning to dress in mad haste. "You fathead, you've done a fine thing. Why, you let me believe the fields were salted!"
"They were," said Dick, "but the real stones were there all the same!"
"But, you loony, I should have known this at once! Why, I went straight and wired to the people who must know these things; the people who make or break all diamond ventures! My people!"
"The Johannesburg Company that sent the professor?" asked Dick, in his innocence.
"Johannesburg, the professor! I don't think!" said Solly with the greatest scorn. "No, the people that control diamonds are . . . a little firm of tobacconists in Kimberley!"
THE FOLLOWER
In a desolate and lonely spot near the wide expanse of mud-flats which form the mouth of the Orange River there stands the roofless ruin of an old farm-house. Its stone walls, of huge thickness, and the high stone kraal with huge iron hinges only remaining where once swung a formidable door, speak eloquently of the time when this remote part of Klein Namaqualand, in common with the islands and lower reaches of the Orange River, was infested with bands of Hottentot outlaws and robbers, and when the daring white man who had ventured among them kept his scant flocks and herds under lock and key, and guarded them with a strong hand.
To the south, towards Port Nolloth, stretches seventy-odd miles of desolate, waterless sand-scrub; eastward lie vast expanses of similarly dreary, featureless, undulating scrub, beyond which rise the unknown and mysterious mountains of the Richtersfeld and hundreds of miles of uninhabited country; westward is the wide lonely ocean; and to the north, across the Orange River, lie the dreaded sand-dunes of German South-West Africa.