Dalrymple J. Belgrave

"Luck at the Diamond Fields"

Story 1.

A Tale of the Kimberley Coach.

Chapter One.

The coach to the Diamond Fields was just starting from the Beaufort West railway-station, and the passengers who were destined to travel over hundreds of miles of burnt-up veldt together, to be jolted over water-courses, choked in dust-storms, and suffer the many discomforts and annoyances of South African travel in each other’s society, were eyeing one another distrustfully.

The feeling uppermost in the minds of several of them was that they were very likely to become not a little tired of one another before they reached the iron town of Kimberley.

With one or two exceptions they were old residents on the Diamond Fields, returning after a trip home to Europe or to the Colony, and therefore they knew each other very well, at least by sight. Their acquaintanceship as a rule made them look forward with all the more distaste to the idea of spending some days in the same coach.

There were ten passengers, and Kate Gray, a soft, refined-looking English girl who was travelling by herself, and whose black dress suggested that she was equally alone in her journey through life, shrunk into the corner of the coach with a half shudder, and thought that her fellow-passengers were a singularly unprepossessing lot. She had tried to make light in anticipation of the annoyances in store for her; but now they were forced upon her, and she felt uncomfortable and out of heart. She had lived for two years in South Africa, and though she had had great sorrow, none of those rougher experiences of colonial life had come in her way which it now seemed likely enough that she was destined soon to meet with. She was the daughter of a retired army officer, who, believing much in his business capacity and power to make money, had put his all when he left the army into an ostrich farm in the Cape Colony, and had taken his daughter out with him. Their life had been a pleasant one enough for some time. The farm was a pretty place. They were not very far off Capetown, and they had pleasant neighbours within reach.

Unfortunately the farm was not suited to ostriches. The wretched birds refused to thrive and increase. They showed a wayward ingenuity in hunting poisonous plants and shrubs, on which they succeeded in committing suicide. Colonel Gray, when his birds died, borrowed money and bought more; then they died, and he bought sheep, which did the same. Then he died himself—more of sheep and ostriches than anything else; and after his death it was found out that he had lived long enough to ruin himself, and to leave his daughter without a penny. She at first thought of going home, but the long list of girls placed as she was, who advertised their willingness to teach, or act as companion only for a home, made her think that she was fortunate to be out of England. Then she heard of some Cape Dutch people up country near the Diamond Fields who wanted an English governess, and she took the place. She was plucky and capable, as well-bred English women are as a rule, and she had determined to think little about the discomfort of the journey, but as she noticed one of her fellow-passengers, a peculiarly aggressive specimen of the Diamond Field Jew, trying to stare her out of countenance, with an impudent leer of admiration in his coarse face, she realised that her position was an unpleasant one. This gentleman was a rather well-known character at Kimberley—a certain Mr Joe Aarons, who had bought many stolen diamonds during his sojourn on the Fields, and was represented to be very rich and prosperous. Unfortunately for his fellow-travellers, Mr Aarons, in the circle in which he moved, was considered a neat humourist, and already he had made one or two remarks which gave his audience a foretaste of the comfort he would likely be to them. Two meaner Jews, men of the Aaron type, but less distinguished characters, appeared to be highly delighted at Joe’s wit; and so was the only other representative of the fair sex, a lady known on the Diamond Fields, where she kept a canteen, as Mother Hemp—the prefix being added to her name rather in a spirit of sarcasm than affection. Probably this good lady had realised that it was quite useless to expect the arts of her toilet to withstand the strain of a coach-journey of almost a week, so she had not even taken the trouble to start fair, and already the coating of paint and powder was cracking and curling away from her yellow old cheeks, which looked curiously shrunk. Also, to be more comfortable on the journey, she had packed away her false teeth. The rest of the company, however, looked upon Mr Aarons with anything but favour. A big, important-looking man, Mr Bowker, the great Kimberley claim-owner, who was just returning from the Cape House of Assembly, felt somewhat disgusted at the idea of having to travel up to the Fields in the company of Mr Aarons. He had perhaps had in his time a little more to do with that person than he would like every one to know, and he was afraid that he might become too familiar on the journey. Then there was a young gentleman who was going to practise in the High Court of Kimberley, and who having had the advantage of three years of home education, was horribly disgusted with the land of his birth to which he had returned, and lost no opportunity of railing at all things connected with Africa. A colonial attorney, on his return from a trip home as he called it—though in England he was strangely abroad—made up the aristocratic element. The two other passengers were river-diggers, partners, and in a way great friends, though men of somewhat different character, and curiously unlike experience. One of them, Jim Brawnston by name, was as good a specimen as one might wish to meet with of the South African born Anglo-Saxon—a brawny giant, of about twenty-eight, with a bushy beard, a pleasant honest look in his light blue eyes, and a laugh like a lion’s roar. In his time he had followed most of the callings which are open to a Cape colonist who has a disposition to rove about rather than to settle down anywhere. He had been a digger when the Diamond Fields first broke out, then had gone a trading trip up country, then had taken a turn at transport riding, and had for a time returned to his old business and become a digger on the banks of the Vaal.

Kate thought, as she caught a glance of the face of the other, a man some half dozen years older than his companion, that he was the most interesting of her fellow-travellers. Though his get-up was rough enough—he wore a flannel shirt, a pair of Bedford cord trousers, and an old shooting coat, which, though an expert would recognise it as having been the work of a good maker, was curiously faded and worn—Kate felt certain that he was an English gentleman. And there was an expression in his tanned face and sad-looking eyes—eyes which seemed to tell that he had had in his time a good deal of trouble—which made her feel that his presence in the coach would make the journey less distasteful to her. He was listening with an expression of grave amusement to the two limbs of the law as they swaggered about England, what they had done when they were at home, where they had been, and whom they had known.

His expression altered to one of anger and disgust when he caught some of Aarons’ conversation, and noticed how horrified and frightened Kate looked. “Surely she can’t be travelling with that old hag,” he thought to himself, as he looked at Mrs Hemp.

“And are you going up to the Fields, my dear?” said that lady to Kate, with a sham smile on her evil old face. “We two ladies and all these gentlemen; well, we must look after each other, and keep them in their right place.”

“I am in my right place sitting next to you, ain’t I, miss?” said Aarons, with a look of insolent admiration, which made her feel extremely uncomfortable.

Jim Brawnston had always found that his partner George Darrell avoided woman’s society, and seemed to have a deep-rooted dislike to the sex, but to his surprise on this occasion he interfered.

“I think you had better change places with me, you will be more comfortable,” he said to Kate, with a look at Aarons which expressed a good deal. The latter seemed to be considerably surprised.

“Sit where you are, my dear,” he said; “you’re in very good company where you are, and I’ll look after you.” However, the young lady changed places without paying any attention to him, and as they settled themselves down, there was a crack of the whip and a yell from the driver, and the horses started off at a gallop.

Darrell took his seat next to Aarons, and after he had settled himself down, he turned round to his neighbour.

“You hound, if you open your lips to speak to that lady I will throw you out of the coach,” he whispered to him.

The Jew replied, with a choice collection of bad language, that he would talk to whom he pleased.

“Who are you, with your damned side? I dare say you ’aven’t got a couple of pound in the pocket of your ragged coat; who the—” Joe said, and then pulled up and stopped—there was something in the other’s expression he didn’t like. Darrell had no more to say to him, but leaned back in his seat and smoked his pipe.

He wondered whether or no he had not made a fool of himself in interfering. Well, it would have annoyed him all the journey to have seen her sitting near that greasy-looking brute of a Jew, he thought to himself; she seemed a good deal happier sitting next to Jim Brawnston, and talking to him brightly enough. The woman didn’t live who would not be perfectly reassured by that kindly giant’s honest face.

It was a pretty face enough, Darrell thought; it reminded him of days long past before he left all he cared for behind, and became the hopeless wanderer he was now. “She looks as if she has had a good deal of trouble; what can she be going up to the Diamond Fields by herself for? If she had people there they ought to look after her better than that,” he thought. As he looked at her, another face rose up before his memory, which had once intoxicated him by its beauty till he threw his life away for it—the face of the woman in England who called herself by his name, and had a right to do so. He had seen no refined woman for years, and there was something in Kate’s face which brought old memories back. Yes, he had made a mess of it and spoilt his life—that was the burthen of his thoughts as the coach made its way across the sandy veldt, and the sun got up and scorched them, and the dust-clouds gathered together and choked them, and the stones on the road threw them up and down till all their bones ached.

“Well, I do declare he ain’t much company; seems mighty proud, and I dare say he ain’t got a penny to spend. I knows his sort, and don’t like ’em,” said Mrs Hemp to Mr Aarons, after she had addressed several remarks to Darrell and got no answer.

Joe Aarons scowled at Darrell and made no reply. When his interests were not at stake he seldom felt very keenly about anything, but he did long to pay the other out for the treatment he had received from him, and for supposing that he, Mr Aarons, the well-known Kimberley diamond-buyer, who was worth his fifty thousand pounds, insulted a girl who was travelling up by herself and couldn’t be of much account, by talking to her. He felt mad with anger as he looked at him. How he would like to pound in that face which had borne a look of such unaffected contempt for him, and hear that cold insolent voice cry out for mercy! Darrell paid little attention to him, and sat gloomily wrapt in his own thoughts.

Mrs Hemp addressed various remarks to him which he did not listen to. The English girl in the front seat talked to Jim Brawnston.

“Queer tastes that girl must have,” Aarons thought to himself; “talks to that digger chap who’s as rough as they make ’em, and looks at me when I say a word to her as if I were dirt,” and he looked at the diamond rings on his coarse dirty hands, and wondered at that to him unknown specimen of humanity, the English gentlewoman.

Some hours after sunset the coach drew up at one of those squalid roadside canteens which in South Africa are dignified by the name of hotels. The days one spends in South African travel are bad enough, but the nights at the worst of all bad inns are far more wretched. A blanket in the open air under the marvellous star-lit Southern sky is something to look back to with pleasure, though the chill half hour before daybreak is not so very pleasant at the time. But those hotel bedrooms are things to shudder at, not to see; they open up to one’s mind new possibilities of dirtiness. Then there is the evil-smelling dining-room, where the table has a historic cloth supposed once to have been white, which bears the grease and stains of long-forgotten meals, which generally consist of lumps of mutton and hard poached eggs served on the same plate. If the master of the house is a Dutchman, he will most likely be full of dull, brutish insolence; if he is an Englishman, he probably will be drunk. The waitress will be a filthy Hottentot woman; while as one eats in the inner rooms one will hear noisy natives getting drunk off Cape smoke just outside.

It was at such a place as this that the coach stopped for the night, and discharged its passengers for a few hours’ enjoyment of the accommodation it afforded.

A meal had been served, and those passengers who were able to secure beds had retired for the night. Darrell was smoking and reading by the dim light of a flickering oil lamp in the living-room. Jim Brawnston was stretched upon the floor in a sleep from which he would not easily wake. The Jews were listlessly fingering a dirty pack of cards; nobody had cared to play with them, and they had not thought it worth while to play with one another; while the landlord, who was not very sober, was laughing hoarsely at some not over pleasant stories they were telling.

“Do you know there is a lady in the next room?” said Darrell, who had thrown his book down and walked up to where they sat.

“Lady? Do you mean Mother Hemp, or the other girl?” said Aarons, and his brutal nature found vent in a sentence of Houndsditch sarcasm. His words were coarse enough to have aroused a milder temper than Darrell’s, whose face turned pale with anger as he heard them. Aarons’ sentence was not quite completed, for before he finished it Darrell’s long left arm had swung out from his shoulder, and his fist had come down with a crash on to the Jew’s jaw. The others saw that if they joined in they would be four to one, so they made a rush at Darrell, the landlord swearing that he’d be damned if he’d see a gent who’d behaved like a gent in his place, ordering drinks and paying for them, hit like that. He looked at Jim Brawnston’s sleeping form, and reassured by the sound of a deep snore, he joined in the fight, aiming a blow at Darrell’s head with a bottle. The latter was not quite as cool as a man ought to be who is fighting four men at once. Instead of keeping on the defensive, he only thought of inflicting as much punishment as possible upon Aarons, and pressed on to strike him again as he staggered back from the first blow. This gave the landlord a chance of getting at him from behind, and he succeeded in pinning his arms, and preventing him from hitting out. A savage gleam came into the Jew’s eyes; he saw that his enemy was in his power as he forced back Darrell’s face with his left hand so as to get a good blow at it with his right.

“Now, my broken-down swell, you’re going to learn not to give your betters any of your damned cheek,” he was saying with a tone of triumph in his voice. The whole group had been too busy to notice a bedroom door which led into the living-room open, and a figure dressed in white glide up to where Brawnston lay sleeping. Kate, as she tried in vain to get some sleep, had heard the row from the beginning. It was not a pleasant scene for a young lady to take part in, but she had heard enough to tell her that the man who had been foolish enough to begin the fight on her account was likely to suffer more than he deserved. She had not understood Aarons’ brutal remark, and would have been better pleased if Darrell had not answered it so forcibly, but she knew the blow she had heard through the door had been given on her account. As she opened the door she saw Brawnston’s sleeping figure close to it; near him on a table there was a jug of water; she dashed it over his face as the quickest way of waking him. The experiment had succeeded admirably. He had woke up with a start, saw the fight which was going on, and in a second was in it. It did not take him long to knock two of the Jews out of time, while the landlord, seeing how things were going, took up the position of a non-combatant.

“Leave him to me,” Darrell cried out as he tried to close with Aarons. There was a look in his partner’s white face which made Brawnston know that he meant mischief. A few seconds’ struggling and then Darrell’s long, lithe fingers were round the Jew’s throat, and as he tightened them there was an ominous twitch round the corners of his mouth.

“Stop it, man, or you’ll kill me,” the Jew gasped out as he felt himself choking. If he had been a good judge of expression, and had been in a position to take stock of Darrell, he would not have been much reassured at the effect his suggestion had. Brawnston didn’t interfere; he was contemplating in a dreamy way the two other men whom he had knocked down. It looked as if a crisis had come in Joe Aarons’ history, but just then a cool hand clasped Darrell’s wrist, and on looking round he for the first time saw that there was a woman present at the not very pretty scene that was taking place.

“Stay, leave him alone, you’ll kill him!” she said, rescuing Darrell from himself and his savageness as she had rescued him just before from his enemies. He will never be likely to forget the little figure with her glorious brown hair sweeping over her shoulders, and the half-frightened, half-disgusted look on her face. He felt rather more ashamed of himself than he had been for some time, so he let go his grip on Aarons’ throat, who fell back a limp mass upon the ground.

“I am sorry that you should have been disturbed by this sort of thing; extremely sorry,” he said to her as she disappeared through the door again.

“What a brute she must think me, as bad as that cur,” he said half to himself, half to Brawnston, glancing at Aarons. “By Jove!” he added, “he looks rather queer.”

“He’s all right; it will be a rope that will break his neck,” said Brawnston, as the man on the ground began to move. The other two men began to pull themselves together, and after a good deal of bad language from the defeated party, the incident came to an end, and every one turned off to sleep; Darrell thinking to himself that his endeavour to prevent the lady passenger’s sleep from being disturbed had been singularly unsuccessful.

The next morning when the coach started, several black eyes and damaged faces bore witness to the disturbance of the night before. Aarons was badly marked, and seemed by no means to have recovered the rough handling he had received; for he was much less cheerful than he had been, and his conversation for some time was confined to a few muttered vows of vengeance against Darrell. Jim Brawnston, too, had the satisfaction of being able to admire the colour he had put on to the faces of Aarons’ two friends. The treatment seemed to have been very beneficial in taking the insolence and noise out of the patients who had been subjected to it, and in consequence the journey became much pleasanter; and after all it was not so bad as it had promised to be. Brawnston had plenty of stories to tell of South African adventure. After Darrell expressed his remorse at having been to a certain extent the cause of the unseemly broil of the night before, and had been forgiven by Kate, as he was soon enough, a sympathy that became stronger every day grew up between them.

It was on the fourth day of their journey that the coach had outspanned at a farm-house by the roadside, and Kate and Darrell were sitting under some trees in the garden of the farm-house, by the edge of a cool shaded pool of water. There is a certain charm about those South African farms which most travellers in the country must have experienced. One seems to have never before enjoyed seeing trees and the soft green of vegetation until one has travelled for miles in the desert. The few bright flowers and the patch of waving maize are more grateful than in a country of fields and trees the most carefully tended garden could be. One of the team of mules which had been inspanned at the last station had turned sick, and the guard of the coach, careless of the remonstrance of the other passengers, who were in a hurry to get to their journey’s end, had prolonged their outspan for some hours to give the sick beast time to get round. Neither Darrell nor Kate were indignant at the delay or were in a hurry to start. They had only known each other for a few days, but already they felt as if they were old friends. Those long days of travelling across the stretches of desert veldt can be pleasant enough. There is something in the atmosphere and surroundings of the country that makes one forget the past, and feel careless of the future; it has the same effect upon one’s mind as the sea has. One gets the feeling of rest and distance, and begins to fancy that one has little to do with oneself, as one was once in other lands that seem so far away. There is nothing to be met with that reminds one of the rest of the world. The strings of laden waggons slowly wending their way over the veldt to the distant Diamond Fields, give an idea of carelessness about time, and worry, and the world in general. The sleepy looking farm-houses, where there is none of the thriving bustle of other lands—and everything suggests progression only at ox-waggon pace—help to carry out the idea.

In those days Darrell had learnt almost all that there was to learn about this companion’s history, but had in return told her very little about himself, though she had gathered from what he said that he had seen a good deal of life, had lived most of his life in good society, was a gentleman, but for some reason or other, so she fancied, the memory of his past life was painful to him, though she was sure that his story had not been discreditable. As they sat in the shade looking at the group of passengers collected round the sick mule, and listening lazily to the voice of the member of the Legislative Assembly, who was denouncing the guard for not inspanning at once, the same thought was in both their minds—their journey would soon be at an end, and very likely they would never see each other again; for the farm she was going to was sixty miles from Kimberley, while he was going to the Vaal River diggings. One thought had been for some time in his mind. Why should his whole life be wrecked because of that act of folly in his youth? Did not the thousands of miles that separated him from England break the shameful tie he loathed? Who need ever know that George Darrell, digger, of Red Shirt Rush, Vaal River, was the same man as Darrell of the Lancers, who like a fool made his good old name shameful by giving it to the woman he had married. He cursed his folly as he remembered himself little more than a boy marrying a woman years older than himself, who, wild as he was then, was as much his inferior morally as she was socially. It was the life he had been leading which had left him weak enough to become drunk with that woman’s coarse beauty, he told himself, as he cursed the folly of that one sin, for which fate never forgives a man, which he had committed. She did not want anything more from him. He had settled all he had on her before he left England for ever; she had got all she married him for, and would not bother him any more. Why should he not forget all about her and his old life?

“Yes,” he said, partly answering something she had said and partly continuing his own thoughts, “there is something in this country that gets rid of old memories, hopes, and ambitions. Four or five generations of it have turned the descendants of knightly French Huguenots into the dull brutish Dutch Boers one meets here, who have not two ideas in their heads beyond eating and sleeping, and are far less civilised than the Kaffirs. Yes, it’s a good country to forget in.”

“I hope not,” she answered; “I don’t want to forget my past; I have plenty of happy memories.” As she spoke a sad look came into her eyes.

“You have a past you can look back on with pleasure; I can only curse my folly when I look back,” he said bitterly.

For a second or two he was silent, struggling with himself. Why should he suppose that she would take any interest in hearing the shameful secret of his life?—but something told him that he had better tell it. Then without leading up to it, he told her the story of his marriage, and about the woman in England who was his wife.

Very clumsily he told it, but he felt all the better when he had got it out. At first when she heard his story she realised how much she had begun to care for this man whom she had known only a few days; then she felt angry with herself for feeling so much interested in his history, and determined that he should never know that she had not listened to it with perfect indifference.

“What a fool I was to think that she would care; I might have saved myself the trouble of telling her my private affairs,” Darrell said to himself, when, having listened to him with ostentatious unconcern, she made some excuse to leave him and go to the coach.

When he came up some ten minutes after he found that she had left the party. The people to whose farm she was going had been to Kimberley, and on their way back they had come round to meet the coach. She was to go with them, and had got into their waggon. The horses were inspanned to the coach; he had only time to say good-bye when they started off. Would they ever meet again, he thought, as he looked back over the flat at the waggon, until it became a white speck on the horizon.

Chapter Two.

A year had passed since Kate said good-bye to George Darrell. Her life seemed to her to be divided into three volumes—her early life, the journey up to the Diamond Fields, and her present life at Jagger’s Drift. The last volume seemed likely to be dull enough. Day after day passed without any strange face coming or any incident happening. The family consisted of Mr Van Beers, a good-natured old Dutchman, who slept a good deal, and had very little to say for himself when he was awake; his wife, who had never time to attend to anything but the children, of whom there were about a dozen, the eldest a boy of fourteen, the youngest an infant in arms. Taking it altogether, Kate’s life was a fairly happy one, for though it was dull, there was very little to trouble her, and it was free from many of the little vexations which would be her lot at home. One drawback of it was, that she had too much time for thinking, and her thoughts curiously often went back to the incidents of the journey up, and she often in her mind’s eye saw the face of George Darrell as it looked when he blurted out the secret of his life. From that day she had never heard of him; little news ever came to Jagger’s Drift, and none would be likely to come of such an obscure person as George Darrell, digger, of Red Shirt Rush, Vaal River. That digging she had heard was up the river some sixty miles off. Many a time she had looked up stream and wondered how he was faring, and whether he still ever thought of her. The Homestead at Jagger’s Drift was a large, one-storied house, with a garden running down to the river. On the other side the house fronted a long flat, stretching far away to a range of low hills in the distance. A dozen or so of wood waggons would pass every day on their way to the Diamond Fields, but there was little other traffic. Across the river was Gordon, a place which some speculative people fondly believe is destined to be an important centre in the future. It had for reasons known to the authorities at Capetown, and to no one else, been chosen as the seat of the magistracy for a large district, and there was a magistrate’s house, a jail, and some police tents; while a court-house was being built. There were also two canteens, in one or the other of which in turn the spare population collected and listened to the proprietor of the establishment as he cursed his rival.

The new Government buildings were to be on a grand scale, quite up to what Gordon was destined to become in the future, according to the estimate of the most sanguine believers in it. “They mock us with their damned buildings,” was the opinion often expressed by Jack Johnstone, the Civil Commissioner’s clerk, as he looked at the new erections with a malevolent eye, for he had applied persistently and in vain for an increase of his salary, and he looked upon all other expenditure of Government money as a personal insult.

“Blessed if they haven’t brought a lot of white convicts over here to muddle away at that cursed place,” he said to McFlucker the canteen-keeper one afternoon, as, with a pipe in his mouth, he stood outside the latter’s store, and looked towards the hated erection, where some Kaffirs and white men were working listlessly as convicts do work. “That’s not a lag’s face, I’d have bet; if I had seen it anywhere else I’d have sworn that fellow was a gentleman and an honest man; he looks it, though he has got a broad arrow stamped on his shirt,” he said, as he noticed one convict, a tall man, who looked very unlike his companions. “But I dare say he is the biggest scoundrel of the lot,” he added.

Just then Kate Gray, who had come across the river with some of the young Van Beers, walked past the building. Johnstone, as he watched her with a good deal of admiration, noticed that she was also looking in the direction of the tall convict who had attracted his attention. To his surprise he felt almost certain that he saw their eyes meet with a glance of recognition. She seemed to start and almost pause for a second. The convict pushed his hat over his eyes, and stooped over his work as if he did not wish to be recognised.

“By Jove, I’d have bet those two know each other, or have seen each other before, but it must be only a fancy though—it isn’t likely,” Johnstone thought to himself, as he took off his hat and shook hands with Miss Gray. After they had talked for some time about the few subjects for conversation that their life at Gordon afforded—the health of McFlucker the storekeeper’s wife, the date of the return of the magistrate at Gordon, who was away on leave, and the fact that the river was rising—Miss Gray turned the conversation to the subject that had interested them both.

“Who are those men working at the court-house,—the white men I mean?” she asked, as Johnstone thought, with considerable interest.

“They are gentlemen who are working for her gracious Majesty without pay, and receiving their board and lodging gratis.”

“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.

After a bit, however, his luck seemed to have changed, and diamonds began to turn up on his sorting-table. The queer thing about those diamonds was, that they were unlike river stones, and much more of the appearance of the stones found in the mines. The diamond-buyers to whom he sold seemed, he thought, to look at them and him rather queerly when he brought them out to sell. He did not, however, trouble himself much about this. While he was working at his claim, not over rejoiced at the slight turn of luck he was experiencing, as he had hardly any ambition to make money, one day a conversation took place in the office of the head of the police in Kimberley, which would have opened his eyes if he had heard it. There had been a good deal of what is called illicit buying down the river for some time. Persons who had bought stolen diamonds, and wished to dispose of the diamonds advantageously, had taken to get men who pretended to be river-diggers, to profess to have found them in their claims, and sell them advantageously. Stolen diamonds are rather awkward property to dispose of, as dealers have to keep registers by which diamonds can be traced back to the diggers who first found them; so it was an advantage to give a diamond that had been stolen a fictitious history.

The head of the police had determined to put a stop to this practice, and had sent a man down the river to see what was going on. The information he had received had surprised him a good deal, and at first he hardly believed it. “What, Darrell of Red Shirt Rush in this? Why, I should have thought he was straight,” he was saying to one of the detectives, who had come in to see him with another man.

“It ain’t the first time, sir, you’ve thought that about a party we have found to be pretty deeply in the trade; now this man here sold Darrell as many as half-a-dozen diamonds which we can swear to, and which we can prove he has sold again; is not that so, Seers?” the detective said, turning to the ill-looking, undersized man who had come in with him.

“Yes, sir, he has bought ’em off me; he has been buying for this last twelve months to my knowledge, and working off illicit stuff from his claims,” the man answered, his eyes as he spoke wandering about furtively, looking anywhere except into the face of the person he spoke to.

“Well, I suppose there is no doubt about it. It’s high time some one was made an example of down the river; you and Sergeant Black had better go down and trap Darrell, with this man Seers,” the head of the police said after he had talked for some time. “Look here,” he added, calling the detective on one side, “that fellow is an infernal scoundrel, and are you sure he is not humbugging us?”

“Well, sir, white traps mostly are infernal scoundrels, but what he says is right enough about Darrell. What object should he have in telling us what was wrong?—besides, I don’t think he would try and fool me,” the detective said with a grin, which expressed considerable satisfaction with his own astuteness.

Two evenings after this conversation, the man Seers came into Darrell’s tent, pretending that a mate of his was ill, and he wanted to be given some brandy. Darrell knew the man by sight, having seen him lately hanging about the diggings, and had not been much prepossessed by his appearance. He was civil enough to him, however, telling him he had got no brandy, and listening to his description of his mate’s illness.

The man talked away for a few minutes, and then went to the opening of the tent, gave a shout, and then in a second, to Darrell’s astonishment, two men, one of whom he knew by sight as a Kimberley detective, made their appearance. In a twinkling they had handcuffed him, searched him and the tent, and found a diamond in a pannikin near his bed. Darrell’s protestations of his innocence went for very little, and in the course of another twenty-four hours he found himself a prisoner in Kimberley jail, awaiting a trial for buying a diamond illicitly.

On his trial it was proved that Seers had been searched before he went into the tent, and had no money upon him; when he came out he had ten sovereigns in his possession. The detectives were able to swear to the diamond found in Darrell’s possession as the one they had given Seers before he went into the tent. The case seemed to be exactly like the ordinary cases of trapping that come before the courts at Kimberley almost every week. The judge who tried it expressed his opinion that it was one about which he had not the slightest doubt as to the prisoner’s guilt, and sentenced him to hard labour for five years.

The crime of buying stolen diamonds is considered on the Fields one of the most heinous of offences, those who are convicted of it being seldom allowed to escape without a severe punishment.

After Darrell had done some of his sentence in the Kimberley jail, he had been sent with some other convicts to work at Gordon, so that was how it came to pass that Kate recognised her travelling companion in the tall convict.

When she got back to the Homestead she found that a young Van Beers, a son of the old farmer, had arrived from Kimberley. Jappie Van Beers was not a very pleasant type of the young Boer, but by no means an uncommon one. He was a noisy braggart, who might be heard wherever he went, shouting out in his broken English about himself and his belongings, and bragging about his shooting and riding, his horses, dogs, and guns. He sometimes would express violent anti-English sentiments, but for all that he imitated the people he professed to hate, and it was not at all difficult to see that he was half ashamed of being a Dutchman. He owned some very good claims in the Kimberley mines, and had made a good deal of money on the Fields. When he was at the Homestead he gave himself great airs, for he did not think it necessary for him to show much deference to the old people, since he was so much richer than they were, while their homely Dutch ways of life afforded him opportunities for the expression of considerable contempt. What made him more odious to Kate was, that he had taken it into his head to pay her an amount of attention that was very embarrassing to her. The truth was, that Jappie Van Beers had fallen head over ears in love with the pretty governess at his father’s house. He had contrasted her very favourably with the heavy, shapeless-looking Dutch young women whom his cousins and brothers chose for their wives, and had determined that she should be Mrs Jappie. On the occasion of his last visit to the Homestead she had snubbed him most unmercifully, and she hoped that in future he would keep at a distance. There was something in his manner as he shook hands with her that told her he had got over any discomfiture he might have been made to suffer before.

“Ah, Miss Gray, you’re looking very well and pretty, though you seem to be just as proud as ever. Well, I have a little bit of news for you. I have met an old friend of yours on the Fields; a friend of mine who knows you. He came up in the coach with you; he told me all about your goings on when you came up in the coach,” he said to her after they had shaken hands. Kate looked extremely uncomfortable; the last subject she wanted to talk about was that journey and its incidents. Jappie Van Beers appeared to derive a considerable amount of satisfaction from her embarrassment.

“Yes, Miss, my friend Aarons told me about you,” he continued; a malicious grin coming across his stupid heavy face.

“Is that person a friend of yours?” Kate asked; her expression showing that she did not think any the better of Jappie for his choice of friend. The other looked a little put out. The truth was, that when he was in Kimberley he associated with a good many of the worst characters in the place, not because he was one of them, but because it suited their purpose to flatter him, and allow him to be as insolent and boorish as he pleased.

“Well, I know him to speak to, and he told me about you, and he gave me a message for you. ‘Tell her,’ he said, ‘that she is likely to see her old sweetheart again, if she looks amongst the men working on the roads at Gordon.’ Then he told me how you went on when you travelled with this Darrell, the thief whom they trapped at Red Shirt Rush. Aarons gave me a paper and said that perhaps you would like to read about the trial, and see what he had done.” Jappie was surprised to see how little attention she paid to his chaff; but she took the paper from him very eagerly and turned over the pages until she came to the report of the trial. The report was short. Kate felt sure that Darrell was the innocent victim of a conspiracy, and the idea came at once into her mind that somehow that conspiracy had been carried out by the man who took care that she should learn how successful it had been.

“Yes, this seems to be the same man I came up with in the coach, but I don’t know why your friend should take so much trouble to let me know about it,” she said, making an effort to speak as if she had read the report with little interest.

Jappie, feeling that his chaff had fallen rather flat, became silent, and contented himself with staring stupidly at her.

She read and re-read the report. Five years of that degrading slavery—five years working with Kaffirs and white men who were more degraded than Kaffirs!—it seemed to her that he never would be able to survive his term of punishment.

“Well, Miss Gray, you’re angry with me because I just chaffed you,” said Jappie, flicking his whip against his boots and looking half ashamed of himself; “I will tell you something that will make you forgive me. I have brought my little white horse, which you may ride. I know you like riding; and you can ride down to the river in the mornings with me and see the lines pulled up as you used to. I brought the little white horse because I knew you liked to ride him, and I will take out Kedult; he is the best horse in the Colony. I won a race with him the other day at Cradock, and beat all the imported horses.”

A morning ride with Jappie did not hold out a very pleasant prospect, but as he spoke there flashed vividly upon Kate’s memory a sight that she had noticed day after day the year before, when she used to go out in the morning with the children to see the lines pulled up. It was the sight of a party of convicts and convict-guards on the other side of the river; the former working, filling water-barrels, the latter listlessly watching them. This recollection made her determined to go out for those rides, however unpleasant they might be, and instead of refusing Jappie’s offer, she accepted it with an enthusiasm that flattered and delighted him. The next afternoon Darrell was at his task at the court-house, with two or three ill-looking white men and a gang of Kaffirs, who appeared not to take their punishment much to heart. Watching them were two white convict-guards armed with carbines, who lounged about listlessly, finding their duty very tedious, and some Zulu police armed with rifles and a collection of assagais, who looked as if they would deal out death and destruction, if not to the fugitive, certainly to some of the bystanders, should there be any attempt at an escape.

Every now and then Darrell looked across the flat towards the river, where he had seen Kate go the day before. She had recognised him, he knew. What did she think of his disgraceful position?—but what should she think? She had only known him for a few days, and in that time she had learned more to his disadvantage than otherwise, he thought to himself. For once the long weary afternoon’s work had some interest;—should he see her again, he kept wondering? At last he saw her coming from the river-bank. He watched her, though he tried to look down so that their eyes should not meet. As she passed she took a hurried glance at the convict-guard, who were paying little attention to the prisoners. The white men were thinking of the hard luck that gave to them such a dreary dead-and-alive lot in life. The Zulus as they clutched their weapons were back again in their imagination at some scene of savage bloodshed, and were happy. Then she for a second managed to catch his eye, and as she did so she threw a crumpled-up piece of paper to him. He snatched it up, and half hiding behind part of the building he unfolded it, and read the few words written on it.

“You have a friend; look out for a signal to escape when you are at the river to-morrow. I know you are innocent.” As he read this he felt a new man. He had even in his miserable position felt depressed to think that he had not a friend in the world. But here was some one who believed in him. Then he remembered that she would be likely to get into some trouble if she were mixed up in any plot to secure his freedom. But he had no means of warning her; he could only wait and wonder what the letter meant.

At seven o’clock next morning, Darrell was marched as usual to the river-bank to carry water up to the magistrate’s house and the public works. Drearily and hopelessly he laboured at the wretched work of filling the water-carts. What did that note mean, he kept asking himself? How could that English girl in a strange country help him? Perhaps she was acting for others, he thought, and the only part she took was to give him notice. If so she might not run any great risk of getting into trouble. But this theory had to be put on one side. Who was there in the country, or for the matter of that in the world who would take the trouble to help him? He looked at the distant range of hills far away across the river; if he could only get there he would be free and safe, for not only was it native territory, but it was in a disturbed state, and there were bands of men collected together there, one or two of whom he happened to know who would welcome him as a comrade very heartily. The men worked at their tasks slowly enough; the convict-guards thought that they might just as well hang about the river-bank looking after convicts, as be anywhere else engaged in the same dreary work, so they did not hurry them. After he had worked for some minutes, Darrell saw two figures on horseback across the river; he recognised one of them as Kate, the other was a young Dutchman he had seen ride towards the farm a day or two before. He looked at their horses, and he coveted the one the Dutchman was on. It was a good horse anywhere, and looked as if it were just suited for the country. If he were on it and had a fair start, he would save the Colony the cost of his board and lodging, and show his enemies a clean pair of heels. Of course he remembered the letter, but he felt sure the young Boer would never be induced to help him. After they had ridden along the river to a place about a hundred yards down stream from where he stood, he saw the man dismount and leave his horse to be held by his companion. Darrell began to feel a thrill of excitement as he watched him go down to a boat, get into it, and drop some way down stream. He watched how the stream of the river ran, and he guessed how it would carry any one who jumped in from where he was, across to the point where Kate was with the horses. The Dutchman had almost crossed the river, and was pulling up a fish on a line he had rowed up to. Darrell took in the situation, and his heart beat, and he felt a longing for liberty as he first looked at the good horse on which he could secure it, and then at the convict-guard near him who was yawning sleepily, as he sat with his carbine in his hand. Just then he saw Kate hold her handkerchief above her head and wave it. It was the signal, and he knew how good a chance he would have if he obeyed it. There was no time for delay, and in a second he had taken a header from the bank and was swimming for life and liberty. For a minute or so there was some wild shooting, as the guard aroused by the splash took a hurried shot at him, and the Zulus let off their guns recklessly.

The sound of the shots startled Jappie, who had been intent on pulling up his fish. For a second he stared stolidly, and then as the convict came to the other side, hitting just upon the spot where the horses were, he saw what his object was.

“Allah Macter, but he is going to take my horse. Hi! Miss Gray, gallop the horse away; keep away from him, he’s going to take the horse.” The guards on the other side had ceased firing, as they were afraid of hitting Kate and the horses. Kate did not make any attempt to get away from the convict; in fact Jappie felt certain that she was doing her best to help the fugitive. Jappie yelled and gesticulated, but it was no use. To his disgust he saw the convict come up the river-bank, jump into the saddle, and give a shout of triumph, and then go off across the veldt. Above all things, Jappie valued and swaggered about his horse. He had won one or two races with him already, and hoped to win more, and he was never tired of boasting and bragging about what he hoped to do with him.

“O the skellum!—O the scoundrel!—there is not a horse in the province that can catch him, and there is no one ready to follow him,” he shouted out to no one in particular as he splashed clumsily across the river against the stream. For once he thought of Kedult’s pace and staying powers without much satisfaction. When he had got to the other side he stood shouting and yelling to the convict-guards, and watching Darrell growing smaller in the distance. It was something of a relief to him when he saw two troopers of the border police cross the drift. They had saddled up when they heard the alarm of the escape, and were starting in pursuit. Jappie ran after them, and shouted out some directions to which they paid very little heed.

“Ah, they will never catch him on Kedult; he will ride the horse to death first,” he despondently said as he watched the troopers ride across the flat. Kate began to realise that she had probably got herself into a good deal of trouble, for the part she had taken in the escape was pretty evident. She did not know what offences she might not have committed, still she felt that she would gladly do it again, and chance whatever punishment she might have to suffer, rather than have to see Darrell suffering his degrading punishment. Certainly he would be a fugitive and an outlaw, but that would not be so bad for him, and he would have a better chance of proving his innocence than if he were a prisoner; so she hoped.

“Well, Miss Gray, so you have played me a nice little trick, letting that skellum steal my horse. That was your doing. You think yourself very slim to be able to fool me into leaving you with my horse, so that you could let your sweetheart have it to get away on; but you have made a mistake—I am going to go to the magistrate, and he shall know what you have done. You will find yourself in prison very soon for stealing my horse and helping a prisoner to escape,” said the young Boer to Kate, when he met her at the door of the farm-house as she rode back. He was half crying about the loss of his horse, and desperately angry; and yet, as he looked into the pretty English girl’s face, a very different idea to that of revenge suggested itself to him. There was something he cared for even more than his horse.

“Look here, miss, you have lost me the best horse in the country, but I forgive you, because you’re such a pretty girl. No Dutch girl would do what you have done; they would be ashamed to; but I like girls who have plenty of pluck. Be my sweetheart instead of that skellum’s, whom you will never see again, and I will say no more about what I saw. Look, I am rich; I have some of the best claims in the mine, and have ten good farms. I think there is no girl in the Colony who would not marry me, and I offer to make you my wife—a poor little English girl, whom I could send to prison if I thought right. Come, I have lost my horse and won a frow, for you must marry me or go to prison—which will you do?”

To emphasise his declaration he threw one of his clumsy arms round her neck and tried to kiss her. Her answer came in a way that surprised him. She dodged away from his grasp, and as he came forward again she slashed him twice across his face with her whip, and then ran away into the house, leaving him standing in the yard listening to the laugh of a Kaffir servant who had witnessed the scene.

“All the worse for you, missy,” he cried, almost blubbering from the pain and from his anger. “You shall suffer for this, and for stealing my horse.” Then catching sight of the Kaffir’s grinning face he relieved his feelings by cutting that unfortunate son of Ham across the back with his ox-hide whip till he yelled with pain. Somewhat calmed by this he walked down to the boat and went over to Gordon, determined to let the law of the land revenge his wrongs.

It turned out that his threat was not an idle one. Already the inhabitants of Gordon were discussing the part she had taken in the escape of the convict. One of the guards noticed her give the signal, and his evidence was confirmed by Jappie.

Johnstone, who had been acting as magistrate, cursed his fate which obliged him to commit Kate to take her trial at Kimberley. But the affair was a serious one, and became more serious when the next day the border police came back without having found their man.

“It’s a beastly duty to have to discharge, particularly for such a pitiful screw as one gets from this cursed Colonial Government. But I had to do it on the evidence,” he said to her when the inquiry was ended, and she was duly committed to take her trial, and circumstances allowed him to resume his non-official way of looking at things. “You need not be nervous, however; jury won’t bring themselves to convict you,” he added, to reassure her.

The case created immense excitement at Kimberley. From the first public feeling was with the prisoner. Jappie was considered to show great vindictiveness, and the story of his having been an unsuccessful suitor to the prisoner somehow got abroad. He had got his horse back too, it having been sent to him from Stellaland, and this, in the opinion of the public, made the animus he showed all the more vindictive. When the day of the trial came on, and the prisoner was seen in the dock, public opinion expressed itself most unanimously in her favour.

The Crown prosecutor’s arguments were very cogent, and the judge’s summing up dead against the prisoner; but the jury gave their verdict without ever turning round in the box. It was not guilty.

“There ain’t such a crowd of pretty girls in this camp that we can afford to shut ’em up in prison,” was the opinion expressed by the foreman as he partook of champagne at the expense of a sympathiser with beauty in distress.

In the mean time George Darrell found himself secure in Stellaland. After riding all day he had pulled up with his horse dead beat, at a house which had once been used as a store some miles on the other side of the river which marked the border of Griqualand West. The house was inhabited by some white men, who constituted themselves into a body which somewhat resembled the free companies some centuries back—nominally fighting for the Kaffir chief, but really pretty much for their own hand.

“Hullo, who the devil is this?” exclaimed one of these warriors, who was sitting on the bench outside the house as Darrell came up.

“Hullo, he has got ’em on—he has got ’em all on,” said another of the company—a gentleman who in the course of his varied career had been a singer in a London East End music-hall, and now sang the songs of Houndsditch in a strange land—as he saw the fashion of Darrell’s garb.

“Look here, it won’t do; it will bring the peelers on us.”

“He’s a good fellow; I know him—worth a dozen of you,” said a black-haired, handsome, devil-may-care-looking young fellow, known as Black Jamie, who acted as the leader of the company. “It’s Darrell, who used to be working down the river. I heard he was ‘run in’ some time ago,”—and getting up, he came forward and shook the new arrival heartily by the hand.

It was lucky for Jappie that Black Jamie had a high opinion of Darrell; for it was on that account he was induced to give in to the other’s wish that the horse should be sent back by a Kaffir to his owner—a proceeding which was thoroughly repugnant to the feelings of himself and the honourable company he commanded. He let Darrell have his way, however, and then sent him on with some Kaffirs to their huts, where the police, even if they crossed the border, would not care to follow him. A day or two afterwards, when danger of pursuit was over, Darrell was enlisted as one of Black Jamie’s troop in the service of Mankoran, the chief of the Bechuanas.

Chapter Three.

“So it seems that the Cape Colony was very nearly saving us the trouble of looking after poor Tom Gray’s girl,” said the Rector of Morden, Warwickshire, to his wife, who sat opposite to him at the breakfast-table, as he put down the newspaper he had in his hand. The Warners of Morden Rectory were distant cousins of Kate, and the Rector had been her father’s greatest friend at college. When they had heard of his death they had written out offering Kate a home, for they were kindly people, and as they only had two boys of their own, they thought she would not be in the way.

“Poor girl, it was very foolish of her to make herself so notorious; however, I like the way she writes. I should not say there was anything sly about her,” answered Mrs Warner.

Kate Gray had, in answer to their invitation, written to them, telling of the trouble she had got into, and confessing that though the jury had acquitted her, she really had helped the convict, whom she believed to be innocent, to escape.

“It is sensible of her to send the newspaper report of the trial. After all it’s just the sort of thing her father would have done at her age,” answered the Rector; and his thoughts went back to his old friend, with whom he had got into many scrapes in their old Christ-Church days.

Mrs Warner was inclined to take rather a more serious view of the affair, but for all that she agreed with her husband that it would be best to have their cousin home to stay with them; and so she was advised to come home as soon as she could, and forget all about her adventure at the Cape, in the pretty Warwickshire village. She was glad enough to accept their offer, for though she had become a heroine at the Cape, she found that heroines were rather at a discount as governesses, and that it was difficult to see what she could do with herself there. So two years from the day of her trial found Kate quite at home at the Rectory, and happy enough in her new life.

“The Watsons are going to bring a friend with them to tennis, I forget his name,” said Mr Warner to his wife one day at luncheon. “He seems rather a pleasant sort of man. I met him at Coventry the other day; he comes from the Diamond Fields, where he made some money. I wonder whether you ever met him out there, Kate?”

Kate looked troubled. It occurred to her that more people were likely to know a young lady who had stood in the dock in a criminal court than she knew; and in consequence she did not feel over comfortable at the idea of meeting any one who came from the Diamond Fields.

The others understood her embarrassment, though they tried to persuade her that there was no reason for her fears. “People who have known one another at the ends of the earth would never tell tales. I should say that rule would be kept for mutual convenience,” said Mr Warner, who, like many an untravelled Englishman, believed that the goings on of those living in distant lands were, as a rule, such as they would wish to keep dark at home. However, Kate showed so much apprehension of a meeting with a man who might remember the trial, that they did not dissuade her from keeping away and avoiding it. So it happened that in the afternoon she was sitting in a school-room by herself, waiting securely there until the visitors had gone away again. She had heard them arrive, and heard a voice in the hall which she knew must belong to the Watsons’ friend from the Cape, and it had seemed somehow to be familiar to her ear. She sat with a book before her, reading very little, and thinking a good deal of the events of two years before, which now seemed so far off—of the long journey across the veldt, of the scene at Jagger’s Drift, and then of her trial at Kimberley. What had become of the man for whom for some motive she could hardly fathom she had risked so much? Likely enough he was buried under the South African sand, or perhaps he was taken again, and was working out his sentence. Again his figure came back to her mind, dressed as he was when she last saw him, in coarse canvas shirt and trousers decorated with numerous broad arrows and other Government marks.

Just then she heard her aunt’s voice from the garden, shouting out to some one in the hall.

“Second door to the right, as you go in, you will find the rackets; no, left I mean.” Whoever was being spoken to did not hear the last words, for instead of going into the room where the rackets were kept, he opened the door of the room she was sitting in. It seemed to her as if her thoughts had taken bodily shape, for there stood the man she was thinking about. He seemed to her to be dressed as he had been when she had seen him last, for his flannel and soft hat had much the effect of his convict garb.

“At last I have found you, and I have been trying to find out where you were for the last year,” he said.

“I thought you were still looking for the rackets, and came to show you where they were kept. I need not introduce my cousin to you, as you seem to have made each other’s acquaintance,” said Mrs Warner, as she came into the room some ten minutes afterwards.

“Yes; we were old friends in South Africa,” answered Darrell.

“I hope you will persuade her to come and play tennis. Do you know you were the cause of her staying away? She was afraid of meeting you because of that foolish business of hers about a convict’s escape, which I suppose you must know all about,” said Mrs Warner.

“Yes; I know a good deal about it, for I happen to be the convict. Don’t be alarmed, though—I am quite a respectable person now, for thanks to Miss Gray, I have proved my innocence and got a pardon.”

Mrs Warner looked somewhat dubiously at her guest. The hero of Kate’s adventure was the last person she had ever expected to entertain in her house. Ex-convicts, even when they have not escaped, but have duly served their sentences, are not thought desirable acquaintances; on the other hand, her guest was perfectly well accredited and she liked his looks. Altogether she was inclined to think Kate less foolish than she used to do; and she did not attempt to prevent her from being persuaded to join the rest of the party in the garden.

Darrell did not play tennis that afternoon. Sitting on a low garden-chair he told Kate his history since the moment she had seen him lose himself in the distance as he rode for his liberty. His life in Stellaland had been full enough of adventure, but nothing had happened that had any particular effect on his history, until one day when he was sitting with some of his companions at the house he had first seen them at. He was feeling rather sick of his life, although he liked the excitement and adventure of it, and he was willing enough to fight for Mankoran, who was being left in the lurch by the English, to whom he had always been loyal, and attacked without any cause by Boer freebooters who wanted his land. He was getting rather tired of the lawlessness of his companions, who cared more for what they could make than for the justice of their cause, and were not too particular about whom they took plunder from, so long as they could get hold of it.

As he sat smoking his pipe, and wondering what would be the end of his life, a man drove up to the door in a cart, and giving the reins to a Kaffir who was with him, got out and walked into the store.

Darrell recognised the man at once. He was the man Seers who had trapped him. At last he had a chance of finding out something about the plot of which he had been made a victim.

Seers walked into the house, and then started back in no little terror, for he found himself in a nest of hornets. There were two other men besides Darrell whom he had helped to get into trouble when he was acting for the police. They were both inside, and as soon as he saw them Seers ran back and jumped into his cart before Darrell could stop him. The man Seers had recognised was an American, who they called Colerado Joe—one of the most reckless ruffians of their band. As he caught sight of his enemy he made a rush for him, but was too late. Then he ran back to the house for his carbine, and followed by the other man, who was also armed, began to fire at the cart. Three shots were fired, and one of the horses fell down dead. Colerado Joe with a yell ran up to the cart, which had come to a stop.

Things looked like going pretty hard with Mr Seers. He had been hit pretty badly, but his condition did not commend him to the pity of his enemies.

“Guess we’ll hang him at once, before the others turn up. It’s more our affair than theirs; eh, Pat?” the American said to his friend.

The other took pretty much the same view, and they were both somewhat entertained by the ghastly terror of Seers. Just then Darrell came up. When Seers saw another of his victims appear on the scene he felt his position hopeless.

Darrell, however, was by no means inclined to allow the mouth of the man who had given false evidence to be closed for ever. He stuck to the point that Seers’ life should be spared, and after the matter had nearly ended in a fight, he was allowed to have his way.

“Well, that carrion ain’t worth fighting about. If you want him you can have him, but he won’t be much use to you long,” the American said, as he turned away, followed by his mate.

Darrell picked up the wounded man, took him to the house and looked after him.

The wound, however, which he had received, turned out to be a fatal one, and when Seers became satisfied that he was not going to recover, he made a clean breast of it.

“You have a nasty bitter enemy in Kimberley, I don’t know whether you know it—that fellow Joe Aarons. He has a down on you, has Joe. He knew my game—that I was working for the detectives—and he came and offered me a hundred if I’d trap you. I had been sent down the river to look after what was going on down there, and it didn’t seem a very hard job, so I went in for it. You found a little just about the time you were run in. Well, that was—thanks to me. I put those diamonds amongst the gravel you were washing. They were police stuff, and the police knew you sold ’em. When it actually came to trapping you, it wer’n’t so easy. But, lord, those police, when you have done a bit in their way, get to believe in you wonderful. I worked it; bless you, I hid the coin that I swore you give me near the tent, and after I had slipped the diamond down, I got out the money and then I hollored out for the police. The clearest case he had ever seen, the blessed beak said. Well, it were clear like the three-card-trick is clear. It wer’n’t fair, and I am sorry for it, only that Joe Aarons shouldn’t have come down with his hundred. I always had a weakness for a lump sum. It was the only time I ever went wrong while I was working for them. But bless yer, as soon as I began to do a bit of buying again on my own account, they are down on me, and I, like a fool, cleared for this country. I’d have done better to have stopped in Kimberley and done my sentence. I see that as soon as I come across that devil Colerado,” the man said in a husky, quavering voice.

Darrell managed to get a border magistrate to come up and take the deposition before Seers died. With this evidence he easily got his sentence quashed. After that he had gone back to the river, where he did fairly well, and putting what he made at the river into some claims in one of the mines, just before a sudden rise in their value, he managed to make a fairly good thing of it.

“I have to thank you for everything. I should still be wearing convict’s clothes if it had not been for you. I have felt ashamed of myself when I have thought how I rode off and left you to get out of the trouble you might have got into how you could. I never could hear what happened to you after the trial. I have been longing to thank you,” he said, when he had come to the end of his story.

“My trouble was not very great,” she said; and she began to think that it would have been better if she had never met him again. She remembered their last conversation.

“I have wanted to tell you something. You remember when we last talked to one another on the road up to the Fields. That story I told you of is all over; the person I told you about then is dead.”

Their minds both went back to that conversation on the veldt, and they took up their story as it had been left off then. Before it was time for Darrell to say good-bye, they had settled how it was to end.

Story 2.

Kitty of “The Frozen Bar.”

Some years ago there was at Kimberley a very popular house of entertainment, called ‘The Frozen Bar,’ which had been in existence since the early days of diamond-digging, and had become one of the institutions of the Fields. From a mere bar it had grown into a hotel—bedrooms having been put up in the compound behind it, and a dining-room opened for the use of its boarders. Still the old name—which had been a happy thought in the old days when ice was unknown and yearned for on the Fields—was retained. So far as it was possible for an iron house under a blazing South African sun to be kept cool, it justified its name. Ice, when the ice-machines had not broken down or the ice-manufacturers gone on the spree, was very plentiful there. Hot brandies and sodas were never served out. And it was always refreshing to see its proprietress, pretty little Kitty Clay, who was always cheery and bright, however trying the times or the weather might be, and would look fresh, clean, and cool even in the misery of a Diamond Field dust-storm.

‘The Frozen Bar’ was used by men who as a rule did not care to frequent common canteens and rub shoulders with the people who were to be met with in such places. Bad characters fought rather shy of it. For instance, Jim Paliter, the gambler and sharper, who was always lurking about to look for some unwary one who would first shake the dice for drinks, and afterwards to while away the time throw for sovereigns, never made it his hunting-ground. His self-assurance was proof against a good deal, but Kitty’s quiet way of letting him know that his room was preferred to his company was too much for him. I.D.B.’s, as that section of the Kimberley public who live by buying stolen diamonds are called, did not care to use it, unless they were prosperous and in the higher walks of their trade. It was situated near the Kimberley mine and the diamond market, and all day long it did a roaring trade. The crowd who thronged its doors was representative of Kimberley, for it contained men of many different races and types. Men came there dressed in every description of costume, from moleskins, flannel shirts, and slouch hats, to suits of London-made clothes sent out from home by West End tailors. You would see the rugged, weather-worn faces of men who had been diggers all over the world wherever the earth had yielded gold or precious stones, and the dark, hungry-eyed, bird-of-prey-like faces of Jews who are drawn to the spot where men find precious stones as vultures are drawn to a corpse. It was in the afternoon, just after luncheon, that the place would be most crowded. Then Kitty would be in her element, taking money, though more often ‘good-fors,’ answering questions, chaffing, and laughing over the news of the day—the latest scandal or the best joke against some one—and making comments upon it, very often more humorous than polite. Poor, cheery, big-hearted little Kitty, the best woman in the world—so many a man said, and with some reason. Maybe she used to laugh merrily enough at stories she ought not to have listened to, and the remarks she made were perhaps not over womanly, still no one could deny that she had a tender woman’s heart. In the early days of the Fields, when hardships were greater, and the ups and downs of life were more marked, there were many who had good reason to be grateful to her. She had been a friend in need to many a man who from illness or accident had been pushed down and was likely to be trampled upon in the fierce struggle for existence in the first days of the rush to the new diggings. There were generally boarding at the ‘Frozen Bar’ one or two men for whose custom the other licensed victuallers did not yearn—men whom Kitty had known in their brighter days, and whom she would not go back upon because they were down on their luck and out of a billet.

She was nearer thirty than twenty, and her life had been rather a hard one, though it had left very few traces on her bright little face, and her troubles had not made her laugh less cheery or her smile less kind, though perhaps they had caused that dash of cynicism which sometimes showed itself in her talk. She had begun life as a ballet-girl in a London theatre, had travelled half over the world with a theatrical company, and at Cape Town had married a Diamond field man who had taken her up to Kimberley.

Her husband, whom she had never cared for much, turned out anything but a satisfactory one. But her married life did not last very long. Less than a year after her marriage, a middle-aged female arrived on the Diamond Fields and laid claim to her husband, and as she was a person of great determination, and was able to prove that she had married him some years before in London, she carried him off in triumph, leaving Kitty to find out whether or no a bad husband was better than none at all. Kitty would probably have answered this in the negative, for she was very well able to take care of herself. She started ‘The Frozen Bar’ and prospered there, and if she had only been good at saving money would have become quite a rich woman.

One evening there were several men lounging in the bar listening to Kitty’s chaff and stories, when some one started a subject which made her look a good deal graver than usual. “So your friend Jack is back again in the camp,” one of her customers had said.

“Jack—which Jack? there are a good many Jacks on the Fields, you know,” Kitty answered; but with a note of trouble in her voice which suggested that the other’s words had conveyed some news to her that she was sorry to hear.

“Jack Douglas, I mean. He has let his prospecting job down the river slide, and he is back in the camp again, and he has been back for a week, and been on the spree all the time.”

“How that chap has gone to the bad! I remember him when he was quite a decent fellow, and to-day I saw him with some of the biggest thieves in the camp—Jim Paliter, Ike Sloeman, and all that gang.”

“Mark my words, we shall see Jack Douglas run in for I.D.B. some of these fine days; he is going that way pretty quick,” another man said; and there was something in his tone and expression as he spoke which irritated Kitty into showing a good deal of feeling.

“Why do you talk about my friend Jack? I don’t have friends, only customers, and when they have spent their money and gone to grief there is an end of them so far as I am concerned. But he used to be your friend Jack once upon a time; why don’t some of you fellows try and give him a help instead of pointing at him, and saying he has gone to the bad?” she said.

“Oh, he is no good; he has gone too far to be helped,”—“It’s all his own fault,”—“He will never do any good here, he ought to clear out,” were the answers to Kitty’s suggestion. The men, though they talked slightingly enough of Jack, looked, one or two of them, half ashamed, for Jack had been a popular man on the Fields in the old days when he owned claims and was not badly off, and the men who discussed his fate so coolly had once been glad enough to be his friends.

“Clear out indeed! Where to? To the devil for all you care. That is so like you men; that is how you stick to a friend.”

“Listen to Kitty; why, she seems to be quite sweet on Jack Douglas. Look out, Kitty, he would not be a good partner in the business; why, he’d precious soon drink up the profits,” said a little Jew who had been listening to the conversation though no one had been speaking to him.

An angry flush came across Kitty’s face. For once, she could not think of a neat retort, and she answered, showing that she was hurt. “Look here, Mr Moses or Abrams, or whatever your name is, suppose you keep your advice till it’s asked for. I never spoke to you when I talked about people helping Jack; no one expects one of your sort to help a man, and Jack would not care to take any help from you.”

“Don’t know about not wanting my help; he is glad enough to be helped by some very queer people,” said the little Jew as he walked out of the place, grumbling out something about never coming in again.

“Douglas may be a fool, and he may have gone to the bad, but I hate to hear a little cad like that sneering at him,” said Kitty; and then feeling that she had perhaps made rather a fool of herself she changed the conversation, and in a minute was laughing at some rather pointless story, chaffing another man about some joke there was against him, and seeming to be in the wildest spirits.

“What good fun that woman is; such a lot of ‘go’ in her,” said one of the men who had left the place to another as they walked home together. “I don’t like to hear her,” said the other, a man whose ideals were somewhat higher, though his habits of life were even more irregular than those of most men on the Diamond Fields. “She is such a good little woman—a deal too good to talk as she does.”

These men would have been surprised if they had seen the woman they were talking about whom they had left in such high spirits. The place was empty, she was leaning with her elbows on the bar and her shapely hands covering her face, sobbing as if her heart would break. Yes, she thought, she was a fool to have cared anything for him or any other man. Were they not all either hard, selfish, and heartless, or reckless, prodigal, and hopeless?

With all her knowledge of the world she lived in, she had made what her experience told her was the most hopeless of mistakes a woman can commit, for she had let herself care a great deal too much for Jack, the ne’er-do-well and loafer, whose fate his old friends had been discussing. What they had said was probably true, she thought; it was no use doing anything for him. She had tried to help him. She had found some money to send him on a prospecting trip down the Vaal—not because she believed in the new mine he was prospecting, but because she thought it would be a good thing for him to get away from Kimberley—but here he was, having left his work to look after itself, back again in the camp at Kimberley, enjoying its pleasures such as they were. Yes, they were right, there was not much chance for him: his associates were about the worst lot in the camp. He seemed to be going the road which has taken so many a Kimberley man to the prison, yet she couldn’t leave him to travel it. Ah, what a fool she was, she thought. She had forgotten to call her boy to shut the place up though it was late, and she hears a step at the door. At once she wipes her eyes and looks herself again.

He was a man of about five-and-twenty. Once he must have been very good-looking, and even then his face had some of its old grace about it. Now, however, it told a very ugly story plainly enough. It was haggard and worn with drink and dissipation, and he had a reckless, defiant expression as if he refused to show a shame he felt. Even for the Diamond Fields his dress was rather careless. One of his eyes was discoloured, while on his cheek he had marks of a more recent cut. Any one who knew colonial life could sum him up. An Englishman well-born, who has gone to the bad; a type of man to be met with all over the colonies, the man who has been sent abroad so that he should not disgrace his people at home. There are openings for such men abroad, so their kind friends at home say, and so there are;—canteen-doors, the gates of divers colonial jails, and then one six feet by two, not made too deep, the job being badly paid for.

Staggering up to the bar he asked Kitty how she was, and called for a drink. There was rather a sharper tone than usual in her voice as she told him that it was too late and that she was going to close. “You had better go back to the ‘Corner Bar,’ that is more in your line than this place, isn’t it?” she added.

“All right,” he said, “I will clear out. I suppose I am not good enough for this shanty. So good night.”

“Stop,” she said, changing her mind as he turned to go away; “you needn’t be in such a hurry; I want to ask you something. What are you doing—where are you staying now?”

“Staying? Oh, anywhere. I slept on the veldt last night; I am going to sleep at old Sloeman’s place to-night. He is a good sort, is old Sloeman—don’t turn his back on a man because he is down on his luck. I am going to work with him.”

Mr Sloeman was the owner of some claims in one of the mines which nobody else had ever made pay, but in which, without doing much work, he professed to have found a great many diamonds. He also was the proprietor of a canteen of more than shady reputation, and had an interest in one or two Kaffir stores. Some people were unkind enough to suggest that the diamonds he professed to find in his claims were bought at his canteen, or at his stores, from Kaffirs who had stolen them from their masters’ claims. Mr Sloeman was notorious for the kindly interest he took in likely young men who were out of work. He gave them a billet in one of his stores, or in his canteen, or as an overseer to work in those wonderful claims. Curiously enough a large proportion of those young men had attracted the attention of the detective police, and had found their way to the prison charged with buying stolen diamonds; but Mr Sloeman himself prospered.

“Stop, Jack, you are not going up there to-ight. One of my rooms is empty, you can have that. I wouldn’t go up there to-night,” said Kitty.

Jack said he would go—he was expected there.

“Stop, Jack, you’re not so bad that you can’t talk sense. You know what old Sloeman means, and what his game is. You have always been straight, whatever they can say of you. Don’t have anything to do with that old thief!”

“Yes, and a lot of good being straight has done me. Old Sloeman is a good deal better than the lot who turn their backs on me, and, thief or not, I am going to work with him?” Jack said as he turned to leave the place.

Kitty gave a look at him as he lurched to the door, and then determined that she would have her way.

“Well, Jack, have a drink before you go. I am sorry for what I said just now. We will have a drink together,” said Kitty, as she took down a bottle of whiskey and some soda-water. Jack did not refuse—he seldom did refuse such an offer.

“Well, that will about finish him. It seems a shame, but he shan’t go up there to-night, and that will settle it,” she thought to herself as she more than half filled a tumbler with whiskey.

“That is rather a stiffish drink,” he said as he finished it. Then he had another, and forgot all about going up to Sloeman’s, and Kitty called her Kaffir boy to shut up the place and put Jack to bed in the spare room.

The next morning, when she was at her breakfast, her Kaffir servant came running and showing his white teeth. “The baas I put to bed last night, him plenty bad this morning, Missis.”

“Take him this, he will get all right,” said Kitty, giving him some brandy in a glass and a bottle of soda-water. “That won’t hurt him, though he will have to knock it off and pull himself together, for this child is going to look after him,” she added to herself.

Very soon the Kaffir came back. “The baas he drink the brandy and throw de soda at me. I think him going mad,” he said, rubbing his head.

Kitty was not much alarmed; she had seen a good deal of that sort of thing. She wondered whether it would be any good, if it were possible to persuade Jack to become a Good Templar. She felt afraid that it would not be very easy, and that he would shun the rejoicing there would be over him. He wanted some one to keep him straight, she thought, and woman-like, she began to believe that one of her sex could do it. After some time Jack came out of his room. He had a blank stare on his face and said nothing, but walked into the street without his hat on. He was evidently queer, very queer, Kitty thought, as she led him back to his room and then sent her boy for the doctor.

“He is in for a bad go of fever; rather a nasty case—typhoid symptoms; knocked his constitution to bits with drink,” said the doctor. “He will want a lot of looking after. He had better go to the hospital—the free ward—the paying wards are full; not that they would be much in his line if they were not,” he added.

“I think he had better stay here, doctor,” answered Kitty. “I will see after nursing him; you know, doctor, nursing is rather my forte.”

“No one can see after him better than you, my dear,” said the doctor, who knew Kitty well. “I fancy, however, he won’t be a very profitable boarder for you; but that’s your look out.”

“Oh, that is all right,” said Kitty. “Come and see him again soon, doctor; remember I sent for you.”

The doctor said he would come round again soon, and drove off—thinking what a good little woman Kitty was, and wondering whether there was anything more than pity in her feeling for that ne’er-do-weel Jack Douglas.

“I trust she don’t care for him, for I am afraid there would be only trouble in it for her, however it turned out,” he thought to himself.

The doctor was right; it turned out a very nasty case of fever, and for weeks it looked very black. For a time ‘The Frozen Bar’ lost its popularity. Kitty was always afraid that her customers were making too much noise, and in fact she showed that she would be more pleased if they had kept away from her establishment altogether. She was very seldom to be seen behind the bar, and when she was, there was none of her old brightness and fun about her. The old merry, almost reckless, look had left her, and there was a more tender and soft expression in her face. She spent most of her time in a room behind the house—the coolest and best bedroom she had. Its late tenant, one of her most solvent boarders, had been somewhat disturbed and a good deal affronted at being moved out of it, but Kitty was determined to have it for the sick man, who for weeks was tossing on the bed in delirium. For a long time he did not recognise her or know where he was; he was a boy at school or a cadet at Sandhurst again. Then the delirium left him and he knew her, though he hardly seemed to ask himself where he was or how she came to be looking after him. Perhaps the hours that poor little Kitty spent nursing him as he got better were some of the happiest in her life. Then he was never happy when she was away from him, and he used to watch her as a sick dog watches its master. He seemed so different, so much more like what he had been once, and so unlike what he had become on the Diamond Fields. When he grew stronger and able to talk about how he became ill, tears came into his eyes when he thanked her for her kindness. “If it had not been for you I should have gone up to old Sloeman’s place at the West End, and if I had not died there should have become one of his lot,” he said. “How good you have been to me!”

As he grew stronger she began to think that he knew her secret, and there was something in his face which seemed to tell her that he felt something more than gratitude for her. Then she hardly ever came near him. He did not want any more nursing, she thought. It was the first day he had got out of bed; she had been talking to him about himself in her old cheery manner, telling him that if he choose to pull himself together there was no reason why he should not succeed and do as well as any one else, when what she had been half expecting for some time came.

“Hers was the only influence,” he said, “which could keep him straight. He knew she cared for him. If she would marry him he would be able to keep away from drink.”

Then she told him the truth. Yes, she did care for him, and would marry if he wished it. But first of all he must show her that he could reform; he must swear off drink, and what was more to the point, keep off it too. She wasn’t any great shakes, she knew, but she wasn’t going to marry a man who was always on the drink. She knew too much to do that, she said.

He promised that he would reform, and it was agreed that they were to wait for a year and then they were to be married and leave the Diamond Fields, and go to some other colony. He was no great prize, this shattered invalid, who was far more likely than not to return to his old ways. But Kitty, for all that, had a hard struggle with herself not to take him as he was, instead of waiting and perhaps losing him altogether. “No, she would not marry him there, it wouldn’t be fair to him,” she said; “she would wait till he was the man he was before he ever took to drink, and then if he cared to marry her she would be the proudest woman in the world.”

Then she talked over a plan she had for him. She had bought some claims in the Dutoitspan mine, and he must work them for her. She said she was sure the ground would turn out well, and they would make lots of money.

He promised that he would turn over a new leaf, and he said and thought too that she was the kindest-hearted and dearest little woman in the world; and he felt eager to begin work, and show her what a splendid specimen of the reformed character he was going to become.

That is how Jack Douglas, who had utterly gone to the bad in the opinion of most men who knew him, got a start again.

Of course their claims ought to have turned out well, and they ought to have found a big diamond which would have made their fortune all at once. But Kitty’s belief in the claims proved to be rather unfounded: some weeks they paid expenses, some they did not. Jack Douglas ought at once to have become a reformed character, but he did not. More than once work was at a standstill in their claims for days, and he had to come to Kitty, shamefaced and haggard, with a sad story of transgression to tell. But she persuaded him to try again, and did her best to keep him straight, and at last he became stronger and better. Men began to think that he had some chance, he had been steady for a long time. Kitty was going to succeed in making something of him. He began to take some pride in himself, and at the end of twelve months he was a better man than he had been for years.

At that time there was an outbreak of Kaffirs and Griquas on the border of the province, and troops were raised on the Diamond Fields. There was plenty of military enthusiasm. Times were bad, and the Diamond Fields answered to the call for men to serve their country at five shillings a day. Store-keepers who could supply uniforms, and transport-riders who had waggons and oxen, came forward to help their country in its hour of need at a considerable profit to themselves. For Douglas, the chance was just what he longed for.

Kitty did not try to prevent him from going out, for she thought it was the best thing he could do. She knew all his history now. How he had got into some trouble at Sandhurst, and had been sent abroad by his stern old uncle, who had determined not to leave the family acres to one who, he thought, was certain only to bring disgrace upon his family. She thought it only natural that he should wish to volunteer and take the chance of showing that there was something in him. When the Diamond Field Horse left the camp she went out to see them off, and felt proud of her lover, as she saw him ride away in his troop. “He won’t come back a trooper,” she said to herself, “if there is much fighting to be done.”

She was right about his not coming back a trooper. When there was any work to be done, he was in the thick of it, and he had some opportunities of showing that soldiering was a trade he was fit for. Promotion, such as it is, comes quickly in a colonial corps, and when he came back he had a commission. He came back a new man, proud of and confident in himself. For years his life had been all down the hill, and until Kitty had stretched out her kind little hand to help him, every one had been content to speculate as to how long it would take him to get to the bottom. Perhaps he would have hardly cared to think how much she had done for him. She was so fond of him and proud of him, it was only natural, he thought, but still it was gratifying. He was very pleased to see her again, and her bright little face and cheery manner were very charming to him.

He, of course, was conscious that he was going to marry beneath him. Still he had a notion that he would get on better with Kitty than any one else he had ever met. Though he was a gentleman of very excellent family, he was not a very refined person, and Kitty’s peculiarities of manner were not drawbacks in his opinion.

The day for the wedding had been almost settled when the troubles in Zululand began. Jack must needs go to it. It was too good a chance to miss, and Kitty had to make up her mind to wait. So she said good-bye to him, and he went off to join a corps of Irregular Colonial Horse as a Captain. She stopped at Kimberley and looked after the ‘Frozen Bar.’ She was terribly anxious when the first bad news came from Zululand, and until she heard that he was all right. But she tried to be brave and be thankful that he was having a chance of distinguishing himself.

She prospered fairly well, though she began to encourage a class of custom which was not very remunerative. The warriors who had served with Jack in the Diamond Field Horse took to frequenting the bar. They found that if they only talked enough about Jack, and told stories that redounded to his credit, Kitty would take the cards they signed for drinks in lieu of ready money without murmuring, and she would listen to these stories, somewhat to the neglect of gentlemen of the diamond market who, if their lives were less romantic, paid with greater regularity for what they had to drink.

There was a good deal to do in Zululand for the Irregular Horse, and when there was anything to be done, Jack was in his right place. He was on the Zlobani Hill on that fatal day on which so many of the Light Horse were killed. There were a good many brave deeds done that day, comrade risking life to save comrade in that wild rush from the Kaffirs who had again out-manoeuvred their white foes. Jack was cool and collected on that day, as he usually was in danger. As he rode down the hill for his life he heard a shout behind him. A young Guardsman, who had come out on special service, had come to grief; his horse had been killed and the Kaffirs were almost upon him. How Jack got through the Kaffirs and managed to get away with the man he took up he hardly knows, but he did, and he brought him back to safety.

It happened that the youngster whom Jack saved was the son of a great English statesman, and heir to half a county; and this was all the better for him, for nothing now-a-days gets much of a price unless it is well advertised: and the brave deeds of soldiers (as some men have learnt to their profit) are no exceptions to this rule.

As it was, Jack’s deed was much written about by special correspondents, and when the news came home, much talked about in London drawing-rooms; and in time the news came out to South Africa, that Jack was to be made a V.C.

When the news came to Kimberley, some one lent Kitty a packet of English papers so that she could read what they were saying about Jack at home. She had taken them and one of Jack’s letters and had gone up the Garden, as a desolate bit of land was called where some trees had been planted, and some feeble attempt at gardening had been made; she wanted to be by herself to think it all over.

She read all about Jack in the papers, and learnt that he was the nephew of the General Douglas, who was a distinguished officer in the Crimea. The report said he had been at Harrow, but was silent about his career at Sandhurst.

The papers were full of him, and every one at home seemed to be proud of the brave young colonial soldier, who at the peril of his life had saved the high-born boy, about whom everybody was glad to have an excuse for talking and writing. His picture was in two of the illustrated papers. There was a leader about him in one of the dailies. Of course Kitty thought the latter a very beautiful piece of writing, and wondered what all the classical quotations meant, and who the long-named persons to whom Jack was compared were. And this was the man who loved her—this hero, this brave soldier. How she wished she was different from what she was!—a lady who would be fit for him, not a poor half-taught woman, who had lived a hard life amongst rough, coarse people, and had got the little education she had from the bits of plays she had learnt and the novels she had read, and the queer side of society which she had seen. Well, if she was the finest lady in the world, she thought, she would not be worthy of him. Cynical little Kitty, who was so well able to sum any one up at their right value, and whose estimates were seldom too favourable, had at last set up an idol which she bowed down before and worshipped none the less reverently because her experience ought to have taught her that it was made of rather poor clay. She had been sitting some time thinking over her past, and wondering what her future would be, torturing herself by doubting whether he really did care for her, or could care for her, and reading over his letter again and again, when she heard Jack Douglas’s name spoken by some one. She was sitting on a bench by a cactus hedge; there were two men on the other side who were talking about him, as a good many people in Kimberley were. “I know all about him,” one man said; “he comes from the same part of the country that I do. He would have had his uncle, General Douglas’s property, only he got into some row at Sandhurst, and his uncle said he had disgraced himself, and turned him adrift. My people tell me that the General intends to have him back again and forgive him, he is so pleased at his getting the V.C. So he’d be all right, only he has been fool enough to have got engaged to some woman out here. What’s her name? That woman who keeps ‘The Frozen Bar.’

“By George, what a fool! Not that she isn’t a jolly little woman in her way, but one wouldn’t care to introduce her to one’s people at home as one’s wife,” said the other.

“Yes; I spoke to him about it when he was here last, but he didn’t take what I said over well. I fancy he knew he was making a fool of himself and was sick of it, though it didn’t matter then, as there wasn’t much chance of his uncle ever making it up with him,” the other man said, and then they began talking about something else, little knowing who had overheard, and what a nasty wound their words had made.

Kitty sat still where she was, listening to the two men’s voices. For some minutes she felt numb and stupid, knowing that she was wounded terribly, without knowing how or why. Then she began to realise what the scrap of conversation she had overheard meant. “He was making a fool of himself, he could not get out of it,” that is what his friends were saying about him, she thought to herself, and it was true enough too, at least the first proposition was, she told herself. He had talked of his early life to her once or twice, but always as something that was past and gone, and which had nothing to do with him as he was then. Now, however, she knew that he could go back to it if it were not for her. He had got to choose between giving up his chance of returning to it and giving her up; that was all. She could remember something in his manner when she last saw him which she did not quite understand then; now she knew what it meant—he knew he was making a fool of himself.

Now, when he had distinguished himself he would feel this all the more. She alone was keeping him from the life he was born for. Now when he knew what he was giving up, what would he do? Would he come back to her out of pity or duty or a sense of honour, or would he desert her? No, he never should do that; she would never give him the chance. If he married her how often he would repent it!—how often he would think of what he had given up for her! “Yes,” she thought to herself, as she walked back to her house with all the gaiety and happiness taken out of her life, “she saw her way.”

Some weeks after Ulundi had been fought and the war was over, Jack Douglas was sitting in an arm-chair at the Crown Hotel at Maritzburg, reading a letter from England. It was from his uncle, the General, and was to the point, as the old gentleman’s letters usually were. He had heard of Jack’s gallant conduct, and was very pleased. He was content to let bygones be bygones and receive him again. He was to come back and live at the Hall, and he would have the place eventually. The General went on to say that he had met with some one who knew of Jack at Kimberley, and had heard an absurd story of his intending to make a disgraceful marriage with a barmaid. If he intended to do that he need not answer the letter; otherwise he had better come home as soon as the war was over. Jack read the letter over and over again with a troubled expression on his face. He did not like to give Kitty up. He was bound not to. He remembered, and it was not a very pleasant memory, all she had done for him, and what he probably would have been if she had not again and again helped him up after he had slipped down. If it had not been for her a broad arrow would as likely as not have been the decoration which he would have gained. Then what a jolly, cheery, bright little woman she was, and how devoted she was to him! He wouldn’t give her up, be hanged if he would; he had plenty of money in his pocket, was thoroughly pleased with himself, and every one thought him a very fine fellow, so he would do what he liked. He would write the General a fine, manly letter, full of generous feeling, telling him that he would not give up the woman who had done so much for him.

He sat down and wrote away, and then read his letter over. There was a little too much tall talk in it; it was the sort of thing that would make his uncle very angry. Jack tore it up. Then as he began to write another letter he seemed to see the other side of the question. How much he was giving up—a fine old place, as good a position as a man could want, and instead of that he was to end his days in South Africa or in some other colony. His V.C. would not be much good to him unless he stuck to colonial soldiering, which was a poor life. No; he would put off writing the letter. Then he remembered that he had not heard from Kitty for some time. She used to send him every week a funny, ill-spelt letter, in which all the gossip and news of Kimberley which found its way to ‘The Frozen Bar’—and there was very little that did not—was told very humorously. He would walk to the Post Office. On his way he met several men he knew who were in high spirits because they were going home. “Wasn’t Jack going home too?” they asked. “What, going to stop in that forsaken country! By Jove it seemed a pity too, after he had scored so.” However, they were too full of their own affairs and the good time they intended to have, to trouble themselves much about him. Jack, as he parted with them, felt he wished he was going with them. It was useless to try not to regret it. He was giving up a great deal for Kitty. He was a fine fellow, and as an honourable man there was no other course for him to take, but it was a thousand pities things did not arrange themselves better. There was a letter from Kitty: but curiously enough it was dated from Capetown. At first, as he read it, he hardly could understand it.

“Dear Jack,—

“It is all a mistake there being anything between you and me. We don’t suit. Your people would have nothing to do with me, and you had better go home to them, now that every one must be proud of you. You would break down as a returned prodigal if you had to answer for me as well as yourself. Don’t answer this letter, for I am sick of the country, and before you get this shall have cleared. Kitty.”

It would be difficult to describe Jack’s feelings as he read this letter again and again. At first he felt mortified to think that Kitty could have persuaded herself to give him up. Then through the matter-of-fact wording of the letter he saw the real state of the case, and knew that she was giving him up, as she thought, for his good. He would follow her, and tell her that he refused to be released from their engagement, and tell her that after all she had done he cared more for her than he did for England, or position, or anything else. Yes, that would be the right thing to do, he told himself, only he remembered that he did not know where she was, so he could not answer her letter or go to her. Well, it was not his fault; if she would give him up he could not help it. After all, the strongest feeling he experienced was one of relief. He had got out of it. He would answer his uncle’s letter and say nothing about Kitty. What a lucky thing it was that he had put off writing!

He did not, however, write by that mail. He went home by it himself, instead. When he got home he was welcomed most cordially. His uncle considered that he had atoned for the disgrace he had got into, and felt that he could once more take a pride in his nephew, and think with pleasure of his representing their family, and owning the old place when he was gone.

Every one in the county agreed with the old General, and Jack was made much of and looked upon as a hero. His uncle gave him some horses, and he had plenty of hunting and shooting, and generally had a good time of it. Of course he sometimes thought about Kitty, but when he did he half confessed to himself that not for her or any one else would he give up the life he was enjoying so much, and go back to South Africa. Besides, he did not know where she was. He might have found out, however, for she was at Kimberley, and was still the proprietress of ‘The Frozen Bar.’ She had never gone farther than Capetown; something told her that she would not have much difficulty in defeating any attempt Jack might make to find out where she had gone to. A list of passengers of a steamer bound for home told her that she need not take any more trouble on that score. He had taken her at her word, and had wasted very little time in making up his mind to do so. Then she went back to ‘The Frozen Bar,’ for the treaty she was making for its sale was not concluded—and she is there still. She has made a good deal of money, and lost the greater part of it speculating in shares. And it is to her bad luck that some people on the Diamond Fields attribute her being a little more hard and bitter than she was. Still, she is good-natured and kind-hearted, and ready to help people who are in trouble, though she is not likely to have a more tender feeling than pity for any one. The other day she saw Jack’s wedding in an English paper. He married a lady of good family and some property, who was fascinated by his good looks and his reputation as a hero. He is prosperous and respected, and he has almost forgotten all about the days when he seemed to be such a hopeless ne’er-do-well.

Story 3.

Diamond Cut Diamond.

It was a delightfully cool evening, after a hot dusty day on the Diamond Fields, and Mr Moses Moss, attorney-at-law of Kimberley, South Africa, was sitting under the verandah of his house, smoking a cigar, and sipping a cool drink as it was his custom to do before turning in for the night. As he smoked his thoughts turned to his prospects and his position, and on the whole they were of a somewhat cheerful and self-satisfied character. It was only a few years since he had hurried away from England a broken man. He had found the temptations to overstep the boundary which separates sharp from malpractice too much for him, and his conduct had attracted the meddlesome attentions of the Incorporated Law Society, who had made itself very disagreeable indeed to him. The time he had spent on the Diamond Fields, however, had done wonders. He was worth a nice little sum of money; and as an attorney and money-lender he had got together a very lucrative connection.

On the Diamond Fields he had remembered his English experiences. They had taught him the good old maxim, that honesty was the best policy, and this had been the golden rule of his life, which he had always acted upon so far as compatible with the practice of an attorney whose clients happen, as a matter of fact, to be men of somewhat shady characters.

However, he kept always on the windy side of the law, although the temptations to go just a little crooked were very strong. There were at that time many diamonds to be bought, for very reasonable prices, by persons who were content to buy under circumstances which the law punished with great severity. Mr Moss had come to the conclusion, however, that dealing in stolen diamonds was too risky a business to follow. He used to make it his boast that he hardly knew a rough diamond when he saw one, and he said that he never wished to have any dealings in them. Indirectly, of course, he—like every one else on the Diamond Fields—lived by diamonds. His clients as a rule were in what was called the illicit. But he could not help that, he said. Of course he was happy enough to defend any one who had got into trouble for buying stolen diamonds. Then if any one came to him to borrow money it was not his business to ask questions as to what the money was wanted for. The money was generally wanted at once, and gold rather than notes or cheques was in request. But those circumstances did not suggest anything to Mr Moss, or if they did, he kept his thoughts to himself. He was too busy in considering the large percentage he could charge and the security he could get to bother himself about matters that did not concern him. He did not wish to be told anything about what his clients thought of doing with the money they came to him hurriedly to borrow. When on one occasion a man who wanted a hundred pounds in gold at once was indiscreet enough to blurt out something about having a chance to get hold of a ‘big un’ for that sum which was worth ten times the money, Mr Moss was very much hurt at being asked to share any such guilty knowledge. He certainly did not go so far as to refuse to entertain the loan, but he took care to ease his conscience by charging an extra twenty per cent.

Some people said that Mr Moss in a way avenged the claimholders who suffered from the depredations of the illicit diamond-buyers, and that he preyed upon them as they preyed on the mining interest, and there is no doubt a good share of the price of many a stolen diamond got into his clutches. It was characteristic of the sources from which he acquired his money, that the very house in which he lived should have once belonged to one Ike Hart, who in his day had been a very notorious buyer of stolen diamonds, and had flourished wonderfully until he bought one diamond too many, which happened to have been sent him by the police. He had had the advantage of Mr Moss’s professional assistance at his trial and advice about his private affairs. Mr Hart had been convicted, and had been sent to do a sentence of hard labour on the Capetown Breakwater, and Mr Moss had become possessed of his house. Ike Hart was said to have sworn that he would be even with Moss, and to have declared that he had been robbed. However, Mr Moss felt satisfied, as he reviewed his career, that he had never done anything that the law could take hold of. If in one or two cases he had grabbed somewhat greedily at his clients’ property, those clients were out of the way of harming him, and there was not the slightest chance of his being made to disgorge any of the plunder he had got together.

Mr Moss’s house stood back from the road in a good-sized garden—if you could call a place a garden in which nothing grew but a few cacti and a mass of straggling tobacco-trees—which was separated from the road by a high, corrugated-iron fence.

As Mr Moss smoked in his verandah, he began to think that amongst the bushes at the end of the garden he could distinguish a form of a man stooping over the ground. At first he felt nervous; then he became curious, as he made the figure out more clearly. It certainly was the figure of a man, and he seemed to be digging for something. “What was he after? What could he hope to find?” Mr Moss asked himself.

He would find out that for himself, he determined. So he got up, and slinking along very quietly in the shade of the fence, he crept up close to the man who, for reasons best known to himself, had visited his compound at night. The man went on working without noticing him. He was digging into the ground with a broken bit of spade, and seemed to be very intent upon what he was about.

Close to where the man was digging there was a water-barrel, and Mr Moss got behind it, and watched his visitor with considerable interest. When Mr Moss called to mind who the former owner of the premises was, he began to have a suspicion of what his visitor was looking for. He remembered that there had been some talk of Ike Hart’s having several big diamonds hidden away when he was arrested. The man dug for some time, then scratched about with his hands in the hole, then measured from the wall with a tape-measure, and then set to work again. All of a sudden he threw down the spade and picked something up.

Mr Moss’s heart gave a jump when he saw this. The man had picked up a bundle of rag in which something seemed to be wrapped. The stranger unfolded it, and as he did so Mr Moss sprang from behind the water-barrel, and placed his hand on his shoulder.

“Who are you? and what’s that you have found in my garden? Come, drop it, or I will call the police,” Mr Moss said, for the other was an undersized, slight man, and he did not feel very much afraid of him.

“Leave me alone! keep your hands off, or I will make a hole in yer!” the man answered. As he spoke the attorney saw that he had something in his hand which glistened rather nastily in the moonlight.

“Put up that knife, or I will shout out; there is a policeman at the corner of the road, most likely, and they can hear me at the house across the road,” he said.

“Leave me alone, then, and I will clear out. I don’t want to have nothing to do with you,” the man said; and he gave a wriggle away.

“Give me what you have just taken from my garden, then,” said Mr Moss; “it belongs to me—I saw you pick up the—”

“Hush! you fool!” the man said, interrupting him. “Maybe there is a peeler outside in the road, and they would hear that word if they were within half a mile of us.”

“Look here, my man, you don’t think I’m going to let you take away what you have just found—you haven’t got a prospecting licence to look for diamonds in my garden, so just give it up, and I will say nothing about what I caught you at.”

“You bet you won’t, but it happens the diamond is mine. The party who planted it there left it me; that party was poor Ike Hart, who died the other day in Capetown jail, that’s where I’ve just come from. When poor old Ike saw he weren’t going to live to get out, he manages to tell me about this. He was a pal of mine, was Ike, and he thought he’d do me a good turn. I’ve tramped up here from Capetown to get this big ’un.”

“See here, my man,” said Mr Moss, “I don’t want to be hard on you. You say you have a right to the diamond because Ike Hart gave it you—I say it’s mine because it’s in my garden. Suppose we compromise the matter; come into my house, and we will talk it quietly over.”

“I don’t mind going into your house, gov’ner, but keep your hands off me, or you’ll have more than you like,” the little man said, emphasising his remarks with a gesture with the knife, which made the attorney feel uncomfortable.

“Now, gov’ner, what’s yer game? If you won’t speak first, I will. Come, you’ve got into this by seeing what you have seen, and I don’t mind speaking out fair. What do you say to halves?” the man said, after he had sat down in a chair in Mr Moss’s sitting-room. “There’s enough for us both, seems to me. Ike Hart told me he could easily have got eight thou, for it, and he intended to have taken it home if he hadn’t been run in.”

“Eight thousand! You’re talking nonsense. Hart was not such a fool as to think that; but let’s have a look at it,” Mr Moss said, as he got a glance at the stone which the other held in his hand.

“No, you don’t, gov’ner,” the man said, as Mr Moss stretched out his hand for the diamond.

The attorney thought for a minute or two. For a second the idea flashed across his mind that it might be a police trap. He had never bought a diamond illegally before, and the laws against having rough diamonds in your possession unless you could account for them, and were either a licensed dealer or buyer, were very strict. If he kept the diamond in his possession, instead of giving it up to the Crown, he would be committing a criminal offence, for which he would be liable to a severe punishment. He did not believe that the police would try to trap him. Besides, he was impressed with his visitor’s manner, and thought that he seemed to be anxious to keep the diamond. Moss looked at the diamond, and thought that it was the biggest stone he had ever seen, and he began to long to get it into his possession. He did not, as he said, know much about diamonds, but no one could have lived a few months on the Diamond Fields without knowing that such a stone as the one he saw was worth a great deal of money. Ike Hart was probably right; it was likely enough that he could have got eight thousand for it, and that it was really worth much more. As Mr Moss looked at it, a reckless greed came over him, and he determined that he would have it.

“Well, I suppose we needn’t quarrel; your offer is a fair one, we will go halves; and as you know me and I don’t know you, I will have the diamond and will give you your share when I sell it; I dare say I can dispose of it more advantageously than you can,” he said, smiling blandly at his visitor.

“Dare say you can, gov’ner; but I sticks to it till I get the pieces for it,” was the answer. And nothing that the attorney could urge would shake his determination.

Mr Moss generally had in a safe in his house a large sum of money in notes and gold. The people who came to borrow from him often preferred money to cheques on bankers, and they would often pay well for change. At that time it happened that he had a thousand sovereigns tied up in canvas bags in his safe, which he had procured for a customer whom he had reason to believe would come to him the next day. So after he had in vain tried to persuade the other to trust him with the diamond, he determined that he would then and there buy him out; and he hoped that the sight of the gold would be more than the other could stand, and that he would be induced to sell very cheap.

Mr Moss opened the safe, eyeing his visitor somewhat mistrustfully as he did so.

“Well, it happens I can buy the stone from you at once. I happen to have a hundred pounds—it’s a good bit of money to pay for one’s own property, for that diamond is my property; but there, it’s your luck. Now hand it over, and let’s have a look,” Moss said, as he held out his hand for the stone.

The little man put the stone down on a piece of white paper on the table. “Hands off, gov’ner,” he said, emphasising his words with a motion with the knife; “put down the pieces alongside, and we will say if it’s a deal.”

Moss got out a bag containing a hundred sovereigns, and opening it he put it down on the table.

“It ain’t a deal, gov’ner, it wants a lot more than that lot to buy my diamond. Bless yer, Ike Hart told me what it was worth. It’s worth twenty times that to me, and a lot more to a gent like you,” the little man said, but Moss noticed that his eyes glistened at the sight of the gold, and he looked at it hungrily. However, when Moss declared he had no more money, the man put the diamond back in his pocket and made as if he intended to go away. Moss determined that he would get hold of the diamond. What did a hundred pounds more or less matter? that stone was worth a fortune. He determined he would not miss it. If he could only summon up courage to snatch up a revolver that was on the top of his safe, he might get hold of the diamond without paying for it.

The little man’s eyes followed his. “Look ’ere, gov’ner, don’t yer try that game on. If yer was to reach, I shall have to stick this into yer, and may be we would be both sorry when it was too late,” he said.

Moss knew that he daren’t carry out the little idea that had come into his mind. If he got the diamond he would have to pay for it, so he took down another bag; then he shut up the safe to show that no more money was forthcoming. But it was no good.

“Four thousand sovereigns Ike said any of the big illicit buyers would give me for it,” the little man said.

Moss began to think that they probably would, and he began to feel afraid that the prize was going to slip away from him. Then he took down another bag, and after that another, and another, until he had offered all the money he had. Then at last the man seemed to be unable to stand the sight of so much money.

“Well, it’s cruel to let a stone like this go for that lot; but there, if you’ve no more pieces, and ’olds to your claim to the diamond, anythink for a quiet life. It’s a bargain—lend me something to put the stuff in.” There was a black travelling-bag in the room, and into this the contents of the canvas bags were poured. The cheerful clinking of the sovereigns was anything but grateful music to Mr Moss; it seemed like giving away the money, for if he had only chanced to find the diamond first it would have been his for nothing. His visitor, however, listened as if the sound was a pleasing novelty to him. For all that, as he slouched out with the bag in his hand, he grumbled out something about having thrown away a fortune, and it was enough to make Ike Hart turn in his grave for him to have let the stone go so cheap.

When he was left alone Mr Moss thought that under the circumstances he might indulge in the luxury of another cigar, and another glass of Hollands. As he smoked he thought of the wonderful diamond he had bought, and what he could do with it. It was a wonderful stone indeed, he had never seen a bigger, and the colour seemed good enough. A thousand pounds was a good lot of money to venture in a business a man knew so little about as Mess did about diamonds; still he felt very confident that there was a good deal more to be made out of it. The worst of it was that the law would prove a terrible stumbling-block to him. He began to feel quite nervous when he thought that if the police only knew of his having the diamond in his possession, they could seize it, and haul him off to the jail. For the first time he had gone wrong about a diamond, and laid himself open to the very stringent penalties which are imposed upon the unlawful possession of diamonds. He knew that by the ordinance he would be bound to give up to the police the diamond that had been found in his garden. However, he thought he knew a trick worth two of that. After he had smoked for some time a plan came into his head, which, as he thought over it, seemed to be excellent. He invented a history for the diamond that had come into his possession, which would enable him to deal with it boldly and openly. It should make him famous as the man who found the great Moss Diamond. The newspapers should all write about him, and he would show his wonderful gem at Windsor Castle.

Then the money that he would sell it for—that was the pleasantest thought of all, and Mr Moss wove all sorts of blissful visions of the future as he looked into the smoke of his cigar.

Jobling’s Sell is a not over prosperous digging on the banks of the Vaal River. Who Jobling was, and what his Sell might have been, are now rather matters of legend than history, so long ago do the days seem when the place was first rushed, though, as a matter of fact, it is considerably less than twenty years ago. The story goes that Jobling was a wily speculator in strong drinks, and other necessaries, who, having laid in a stock of brandy and groceries, repaired to the spot afterwards named after him, and managed to promote a rush to it by spreading false news of many diamonds having been found there. It is said that Jobling got into rather hot water for this, and was sentenced by a jury of diggers to be dragged through the river as a punishment for having created a bogus rush. But just at the critical moment when the sentence was going to be executed some one found a diamond. Then several other good diamonds were found, and it turned out that Jobling, whatever his intentions might have been, really had been a great benefactor. It is certainly a matter of history that Jobling’s Sell was a wonderfully paying place in its palmy day, before it was more or less worked out. Old Hawkins, who had wandered all over the world as a gold-digger, but had for some reason or other taken root at Jobling’s, was the only digger who remained on there from the old days.

The rest of its population were men who went there for a spell, after having tried other digging on the river, and soon gave it up. Hawkins liked to talk of the big diamonds he had seen found there. Or he would walk along the banks and point out where the big hotel used to be, and where the gambling saloons stood in the days when Jobling’s Sell boasted of all the properties of a prosperous mining camp. Those days were over, and the thirty or so diggers who formed the camp only made enough to live on. One Saturday afternoon a knot of them were collected at the solitary canteen which supplied the wants of Jobling’s Sell. They were not drinking more than was good for them, for money was scarce, and the host, though he swaggered to strangers much about the future in store for ‘Jobling’s,’ did not back up his faith by showing any willingness to score up drinks to its present population.

“Say, boys, have you heard about old Mick Hawkins’s luck?” said a big man with a black beard, Jack Austin by name, who was lounging at the bar.

“No,—what? Has he found anything big?” asked another man.

“Well, he has found a man who is flat enough to give him a ten-pound note for his claim. It is a Kimberley Jew who has made that investment,” answered Austin.

“Never met with that sort of Jew, and I have seen a good bit of them in one country or another,” said another man, who was believed to have had a very varied experience of life, before he found himself digging on the banks of the Vaal River.

“Well, it’s a solid fact; Hawkins showed me the ten-pound note, and he would be here now spending it, only the new proprietor of that claim of his has promised him five pounds a week to work for him.”

“Things are looking up at last, boys,” said the proprietor of the canteen. “I told you they would soon recognise the splendid openings for investment there are down the river. What will you take, boys? Have a drink with me just for luck.”

No one refused the offer, though the enthusiasm the landlord expressed was not shared by the others.

After they had emptied their glasses, some one suggested that they should go round to Hawkins’s claim, and with that intention they lounged out of the canteen, and strolled along the bank in that direction.

“Stop, boys, and watch ’em; why it makes quite a picture. Did you ever see such a fool?” said Austin, holding up his hand and pointing to an opening in the thorn trees and underwood, through which they could get a view of the Hawkins’s claim.

The claim was one which had been almost worked out in the days when the place was first rushed. Hawkins, a grizzled old fellow, was seated with a pipe in his mouth, watching two Kaffirs picking away at the side of the claim, filling buckets with the gravel, which another Kaffir was carrying across to the sorting-table, at which the new proprietor of the claim was seated. That person was no other than our old friend, Mr Moses Moss. He was got up as a digger, wearing a red flannel shirt, and a very broad-brimmed hat, and he had put on, though there was no particular use for them, a pair of long boots.

“Looks as though he was going to find a diamond every minute; he will tire a bit of the game before long,” Jack Austin said, as he watched the new arrival on the river. “The doctor ordered him an open-air life, so he gave up his practice. He was a lawyer in Kimberley, and down he comes here to dig. Did any one ever hear of such a thing?”

“Hullo, by God, what’s his game now? What’s he up to? Blessed if I don’t believe he has found!” another digger said, as to their surprise Moss suddenly threw his hat into the air with a tremendous shout of triumph.

“Hullo, mate, what are you up to now? what do yer think you have got hold of?” growled out old Hawkins, as he came up with his pipe in his mouth.

“A diamond!—a wopping big diamond! Oh, hurrah! hurrah!” Mr Moss cried, executing a dance of triumph.

The other men crowded round Moss, eager to see what he had found.

Hawkins looked rather mortified. It was somewhat annoying that a diamond should have been found in his claim the day after he sold it. His expression, however, changed a good deal when the other handed him the diamond.

“Say, did you find this just now; it’s a mighty rum thing to find in a claim; why—” Hawkins was grumbling out, when Austin gave him a kick, and motioned to him to keep quiet.

“Magnificent diamond, sir; the finest stone that ever has been found. Did ever man see such luck? Here you come down just for a lark, and find a fortune; but there, luck is one of the queerest things out!” Jack Austin said.

“Well, I am lucky, I don’t mind owning it; but there, boys, come and have a drink, every blessed one of you, to celebrate the biggest diamond that ever has been found down the river, which you just saw me find,” Mr Moss said, and the diggers seemed to fall in with his humour willingly enough, following him without any more pressing to the canteen.

Jack Austin might have been noticed to wink slightly at the proprietor of the canteen, before the diamond was shown to the latter. His enthusiasm when he saw it was unbounded.

“Knocks the Komnoor into a cocked hat. I always said we would show ’em all the way, some day. What’s it to be, sir, champagne—I’ve got a case in stock?” he said, and in a few second she was opening a case, and getting out some bottles.

The wine was some which the canteen-keeper had bought at a sale in Kimberley. It was a remnant which had failed to please the not over critical taste of the Fields. He had bought it very cheap, and had kept it by him, knowing that on any extraordinary occasion, when a demand arose for it on the river, its want of quality would not matter. As the wine was being got out, Jack Austin touched the lucky digger on the shoulder.

“Beg pardon, sir, but about old Hawkins; what are you going to do for him? It’s a bit hard on him, seeing a stone like this found after he has just sold his claim.”

“Hard! bless me no—a bargain is a bargain. I bought the claim for good or bad.”

“Well, that’s true enough; but he might make himself a bit nasty about it. You see it’s rather a rum start your finding a stone like that in the ground you were working, and Hawkins might get talking, and people are apt to be a bit uncharitable.”

Mr Moss looked a little uncomfortable. The man was right. Hawkins ought to be put into a good temper, and after some little talk he took out a cheque-book and wrote out a cheque for fifty pounds, for Austin had suggested that it would be as well to give it to Hawkins at once, before he began to talk.

Hawkins took the cheque, looking very stolid. Soon after he got it he hurried away, and might have been seen tramping across the veldt towards Kimberley, where he changed it.

When the glasses were filled, Jack Austin called to the company to drink to the health of Mr Moss, the lucky digger, who had just found the big diamond.