Junkie Brook, with that vigour of character which had asserted itself on the squally day of his nativity, joined Frank Dobson and John Skyd in a hunting expedition beyond the Great Orange River; and when the Orange Free State was set up by the emigrant Dutchmen, he and his friends established there a branch of the flourishing house of Dobson, Skyd, and Company. Being on the spot when South Africa was electrified by the discovery (in 1866-67) of the Diamond Fields of that region, they sent their sons, whose name was legion, to dig, and soon became diamond merchants of the first water, so that when Junkie visited his aged parents on the Zuurveld—which he often did—he usually appeared with his pockets full of precious stones!
“I’ve found a diamond this time, nurse,” he said, on the occasion of one of these visits, “which is as big—oh!—as—as an ostrich-egg! See, here it is,” and he laid on the table a diamond which, if not quite as big as the egg of the giant bird, was large enough to enable him, with what he had previously earned, to retire comfortably from the business in favour of his eldest son.
The sudden acquisition of riches in this way was by no means uncommon at that time, for the “Fields” were amazingly prolific, and having been discovered at a crisis of commercial depression, were the means, not only of retrieving the fortunes of South Africa, but of advancing her to a condition of hitherto unparalleled prosperity.
Mrs Scholtz—by that time grown unreasonably fat—eyed the diamond with a look of amused contempt; she evidently did not believe in it. Patting the hand of her former charge, she looked up in his laughing face, and said, with a shake of her head—
“Ah! Junkie, I always said you was a wonderful child.”
Sitting on a bench in front of the house—no longer domestics, but smoking their pipes there as “friends” of the family, who had raised themselves to a state of comparative affluence—George Dally and Scholtz, now aged men, commented on the same diamond.
“It’ll make his fortune,” said George.
“Zee boy vas always lucky,” remarked Scholtz; “zince I began to varm for myself I have not zeen so big a stone.”
“Ah! Scholtz,” returned his friend, “the hotel business has done very well for me, an I don’t complain, but if I was young again I’d sell off and have a slap at the ‘Fields.’”
“Zat vould only prove you vas von fool,” said Scholtz quietly.