Luck at the Diamond Fields Part 9

"Well, we are going our piles on it, eh, partner?" said Hardman as they drove back to Kimberley; "but I don't mind owning that I feel pretty confident. Lord! I am sorry for the Kimberley people; it will just about bust up their mine when we open ours."

Chapter Three.

Mr Ziederman arrived at Kimberley on the appointed day. Transfer was duly given, and the ten thousand pounds were paid over to him. Timson could not help feeling rather a twinge as he parted with his money. It did not leave him more than a few hundred pounds, still he was very pleased with his bargain; he had bought the farm, he hoped, for very much less than one hundredth of its value, and had got the best of Mr Hardman, who would only have a fifth share. The next day the news was all over the camp. It created a good deal of excitement, and at eleven in the forenoon, an hour when splits and other drinks, long and short, are in much request, quite a crowd of the leading citizens of Kimberley dropped into the bar of the Queen's Hotel, where Mr Timson was to be found at that hour, reading the local morning paper and criticising the manners and customs of the place. On this occasion there was a look of unusual importance about him, and he was laying down the law more authoritatively than he generally did. He had just been discussing the value of claims in the Kimberley mine, and chuckling to himself as he thought how startled the claimholders would be when they heard of his discovery.

"Well, Mr Timson, so I hear you have been speculating in farms," said a man who was standing at the bar.

"I don't know why people should interest themselves in my affairs so much," answered Timson; "but I don't mind owning that I have bought a farm called Boschfontein."

"You're going to make your fortune farming?" said the first speaker, a digger who had dropped in on his way from the mine to get a drink and to interview Timson.

"I don't know about farming, but I don't think I shall do so badly with Boschfontein," answered Timson, who, now that he owned the property, thought there was no reason why he should not have the pleasure of bragging about his wonderfully good bargain. He noticed that his listeners were not impressed, there was something like a smile on their faces.

"How much did you give Bill Hardman for Boschfontein?" asked the first speaker.

"Bill Hardman! I never bought from Bill Hardman, I bought with him, he has a small share in the speculation. So he has been telling you about it, has he? Well, I suppose he won't make less than four or five hundred thousand pounds, though he only has one-fifth of it. Yes, you may laugh, but you won't laugh when the place up there is shut up, as it will be when I work the diamond mine on Boschfontein."

"Here, barman, drinks; open some champagne for Mr Timson; he has gone in for a spec with Bill Hardman, and they have got a diamond mine on Boschfontein which will shut the Kimberley mine," cried the first speaker.

Mr Timson was no admirer of the prevailing custom, a survival from the early days of the diamond-digging, which demanded that good fortune of any sort should be celebrated by a reckless expenditure in champagne.

Still he felt that the occasion was a special one, and after having in vain tried to catch the barman's eye, and prevent him opening more than one bottle, he made no remonstrance. "Well, gentlemen, we will drink to the health of the Boschfontein mine," he said, "though I am afraid it will prove rather a bad business for some of my friends here. Three carats of diamonds to a load is a pretty good average, and the mine is as big as Kimberley; it will revolutionise diamond mining, our mine will."

"Bill Hardman found that mine, I'd bet," said another man who had just come in and stood listening to Timson. "Why, Boschfontein's looking up.

It wasn't as rich as that last time."

"Look here," said the digger, taking up a dice-box which lay on the bar, "we will throw for this wine, and Mr Timson shall stand out. No, it's a shame letting him in, he has been let in enough. How much did you pay for Boschfontein?"

"What do you mean?" asked Timson, who began to feel nervous and uncomfortable. "Let in! some of you will only wish that you had been let in in the same way when we begin to work the new mine. Bill Hardman ain't the sort of man to be taken in so easy." Then he told them how he had learnt the secret about the mine and became possessed of the Farm Boschfontein.

The others listened to every word of his narrative, no one ordered drinks nor even lifted their gla.s.ses to their mouths while he spoke.

When he had told them all, and described the finding of the diamonds and the subsequent purchase of the farm Boschfontein, there was a burst of noise, every one beginning to shout or laugh, expressing with much vigour of language their admiration for the smartness of Bill.

"Look here, what was the prospector like? wasn't he a tall man with a long beard, and a scar across the left side of his face, and a droop in one eye?" asked the digger.

"Yes, that's the man," answered Timson.

"I'd have sworn it; it's Tom Raven; he was in camp the other day. Now, look here, young man, you'd better try and find your friend, Bill Hardman, not that there's much chance of your coming across him; now that they have got your money they'd be off. I dare say you never heard of Raven's Rush, that was on Boschfontein. There isn't a show of a mine there; but Tom Raven and Bill Hardman, who have always been more or less partners, won it at cards off a Dutchman. It's about as bad a farm as there is in the country; but they meant working it off somehow, so they started a mine there, any one to have a claim for two pounds down. It took for a bit; but as no one could find diamonds there except Bill and Tom Raven, people cooled off it, and there was some talk of starting a prosecution for fraud, as some one split as to where they got the diamonds from they found there, and that's why Raven, against whom there was most of a case, cleared off. Ziederman is a long, stolid-looking Dutchman; he is not such a fool as he looks, is that Dutchman--'Slim Pete' they call him--he has always been more or less in with the firm of Hardman and Raven."

"Look here, you're trying to fool me, ain't you? You don't mean to tell me that the man who told me how his wife ran away and how he killed her wasn't genuine!" said Timson.

"Genuine! it was a pretty bit of play-acting, made up by the two of 'em.

Tom was always clever at a yarn."

Mr Timson did not say another word. Something seemed to tell him that the suspicions of the others were well founded; anyhow he would interview his partner and do his best to get back some of his money.

However, Hardman was not so easily to be found. He was not at the hotel where he boarded, nor at the billiard-room he usually patronised, nor at any of his other haunts, and none of his a.s.sociates had seen him. All day long Mr Timson was making fruitless inquiries; but though he could hear nothing about Hardman, every one could tell him a good deal about the Farm Boschfontein. Every one laughed when they heard his story, and with the exception of one or two men who had formed little plans for the disposal of his fortune, no one sympathised very much with him. There was no doubt about it that he had a case against Mr Hardman and the men who helped to swindle him; but he might just as well have had a case against the man in the moon. For some time Mr Timson cherished a faint hope that the mine might be a genuine one, so he spent a little more money in having it well tested. But the charm was gone when Mr Hardman had vanished. There was no appearance of diamond bearing ground on the Farm Boschfontein, so experts declared; and what was more to the point, there was no appearance of diamonds.

Mr Timson is still the owner of the property, and has not found it very remunerative. The only consolation he has is, that many of the men who laughed at him when he made his unfortunate purchase, invested their money in speculations which seemed at the time very hopeful, but resulted in their becoming the owners of nicely-engraved diamond-mining scrip which, though useful for papering a spare room with, is now even less marketable than that desirable property, the Farm Boschfontein.

Story 5.

LUCK--AN EPISODE IN A DIGGER'S LIFE.

There are few more hideous parts of the world than the country known as Griqualand West, celebrated, as the school books have it, for its diamonds. In that weary land the traveller may go on day by day outspanning at evening in just the same dreary waste of veldt in which he inspanned at morning, until he almost forgets that the world is not one endless series of rolling, burnt-up flats with ridges of table-topped hills in the distance, the last just like the one before it. Still there are spots on the banks of the Vaal River which runs through this territory that have a soft beauty of their own, all the more fascinating because of their contrast with the desert ugliness of the country--places where the traveller longs to settle down and live the rest of his days doing some slight work well paid by kind nature, forgetting the troublesome, distant world. Moonlight Rush is perhaps the fairest of these silent river nooks. There a wooded gulley, gay with flowering bushes, and shadowed by wide-spreading trees, runs down to the waters of the Vaal River. One can rest under the shade of those trees and forget how cruelly the sun beats down on the veldt, and as one looks at the Vaal, which flows at one's feet in a n.o.ble reach, one no longer thinks of the arid discomfort of the plains. The place is quiet enough now, but once it had its day. The night it was rushed will be always remembered by those who came to seek their fortunes on the banks of the Vaal in the early days of diamond-digging. To this day men talk of how the news about the quant.i.ties of diamonds that had been found at a new place spread like wild-fire around the river camps, and how diggers, as soon as they heard it, s.n.a.t.c.hed up their picks and shovels and rough provision for a meal or two, and left their camp fires, eager to get a claim in the new diggings, where they were at last to strike a fortune. Its history was like that of other river camps, only the diamonds found there at first were more plentiful, and are said to have been of better average quality; but they became fewer and fewer, and the diggers, party by party, either left for the new dry digging, which afterwards became the wonderful diamond mines of South Africa, or wandered away to other river camps. And at last the place was quite deserted, and the rock hares sported over the gra.s.s-grown claims, and the snakes, who had found the place too lively for them, sneaked back to make their homes in the ruined hovels put up by sanguine diggers who had believed in the future of Moonlight, and had shown their faith by plunging into building to the extent of houses built with boulders and thatched with rushes. Still, from time to time diggers, who had found well at Moonlight in its palmy days, or had heard of the wonderful stones which had been found there, came back to try their luck either in sorting the _debris_ for the gems which the greedy diggers in those good flush times threw away in their haste, or in working the less promising ground which was left untouched. But since those old days no one had done much. Diggers had lingered on there, and persuaded themselves into believing in it because they liked the place; for the charm of nature has a strange influence over many a rough mind which knows little of culture or art jargon. But most of them, after working for months, had to tell the diggers' oft-told tale of "we are not making tucker, let alone wages," and had to drag their small stock-in-trade of tools off to some other digging, or had given up the river as a bad game, and had gone to work as overseers for wages in the mines.

One night, a year or two ago, there were only two tents there--almost hidden in the bushes by the river-bank. Though it was long past the time when men who have to work hard all day and to be up betimes are usually asleep, it was lit up. Its tenant was stretched across the tent on a mattress. By his side there were several tattered, well-read volumes--'Vanity Fair,' 'Elia,' some of Bret Harte's books; and Whyte Melville's 'Bones and I,' and in his hand he had a crumpled home letter.

His name was Charlie Lumsden, and he was about thirty years old. For the last ten years, more or less, he had belonged to the n.o.ble army of diggers who are recruited from all cla.s.ses of society, and form a distinct cla.s.s of their own. He was also an English gentleman of good birth and gentle breeding, as any one would guess from a first glance at him, and be sure of after a few minutes' conversation. He was not reading, though it was so late, but thinking, and had been thinking for some time, far more seriously than he often did. It was perhaps an orthodox occasion for a little self-retrospection, for it happened to be the last night of the old year. Charlie, by chance, for he had been living a solitary life in which men are apt to forget dates, had remembered this, and he was seeing the New Year in, as many a man may well do, thinking over the years of his life he had lived, and what he had managed to do with them. He has not much reason to be satisfied with the past, or to be over sanguine about the future. Where will he be this time next year, and what sort of a year will it be for him? he wonders. Well, pretty much the same as the last year or two. Last year he was at 'Bad Hope,' digging with his old chum, Jack Heathcote, who has just left him, and given up the off-chance of the river for the certainty of some pay in the Mounted Police. They were finding fairly well, but their finds melted away before the claim was worked out, at least most of them did, though there would have been something left if they had not been fools and had that spree at Kimberley Races. Last New Year's Day he was up-country hunting for gold near the Crocodile River.

He found pretty well too, and would not have done so badly if his mates had not gone down with fever. Maybe he will have another turn at it.

After all, it wouldn't much matter, he thinks, if next time he is tempted to trespa.s.s on Tom Tiddler's ground fever should catch him, and keep him as it caught his chums. Yes, now he sees what a mess he has made of his life. Ten years before he had just left school, and was going up to Cambridge, where it was hoped that he would do wonders in the way of taking honours and getting fellows.h.i.+ps. Now he was a digger, just like old David Miller who worked near him, though he was not half as good with a pick and shovel as the old man who could hardly read and write.

Then he remembered the year he had spent at Cambridge. Well, he had a jolly time enough there; but what a young fool he was to have run up all those ticks, and to have got into those sc.r.a.pes, which when he looks back to them seem so childish. What a mistake he had made in living with the fast, noisy lot instead of the steady-going set, who were just as good fellows after all. How well he remembers that supper party which was so fatal to him. It had been in a rich fellow-commoner's room, and a good many bottles had been emptied, and they were just ripe for mischief, when one of the party suggested the brilliant idea of having songs, and a camp fire on the college gra.s.s plot.

They had proceeded at once to carry out the suggestion; their host, who was placidly intoxicated, blandly approving, at the sacrifice of his household G.o.ds in defiance of college discipline, when it was proposed that his chairs should be used for firewood. The fire was lit, and the fun round it was fast and furious until the college tutor made his appearance, as he naturally did.

The dons were only too glad to make a clean sweep of the rowdy lot in the college, and about ten of them were sent down the next morning.

Some of them got over their misfortune very easily. The man who suggested the bonfire is a popular preacher, and the giver of the supper party is a county member. Poor Charlie unfortunately was the earthern pot between the brazen ones, and that college row ended in his leaving England for South Africa, with his pa.s.sage paid and fifty pounds in his pocket. Well, and he would have had a good chance on the fields if he had only been wise. What a lot of diamonds he used to get in that half-claim of his, in number five road. The other day it was sold for over ten thousand; but he had been sold up and had to let it go for a few hundreds after he struck a bad layer. He would have been able to have worked through the bad layer though if he had saved the money he made first, instead of throwing it away playing faro in those gambling saloons that were so fatal to many a digger's fortunes.

After he sold his claim in the mine he lived the roving hand-to-mouth life of a river-digger, with very little capital beyond his pick and shovel, and his reputation with the store-keepers of being a straight man, who would always pay when he found. Not a bad life either he would think at any other time, for the Bohemianism of a digger is ingrained in him. He liked the free and easy life, the absence from restraint or dependence on any one else. But he was out of spirits. He had not found for months; he missed his old partner, and he had no boys working for him. In fact he would find it very difficult to pay them any wages if he had, so he can get through but very little work. That night, memories of the old days and his old life came crowding into his mind, and he longed to be in England again, and to see well-remembered places and faces.

The crumpled letter by his side was from home--from his sister in England. She told him that she had been staying at the little village in Somersets.h.i.+re, where he once went with a reading party, and that she had met the parson's daughter there, who had asked so much after him.

How well he remembered that reading party. Does the message in his sister's letter mean that she still cares for him? She has not married yet then. That boy and girl engagement was perfectly absurd of course, but he knows that they were quite in earnest while it lasted, and after all if he had taken his degree instead of being sent down in disgrace, they probably would have been married. For a minute or two he pictures himself as a staid curate or vicar dressed in decent black garment, instead of in moleskin and a flannel s.h.i.+rt--with a vicarage house to live in, instead of a tent.

Probably she got over it as easily as he did. He was broken-hearted when he got her sad little letter, saying that it must all come to an end, and that her father would not hear of it. He got over it wonderfully soon though. With his sea-sickness his love-trouble left him in the bay. She probably had got over it too, and could laugh at it as he did. But as he smokes and thinks, he realises how much happier his life might have been. How wanting it is in real happiness; why how long is it since he has spoken to any woman more refined than the barmaid of the Vaal Hotel? Should he ever shake the dust of Africa off his boots and go home, or should he be buried there as many a chum of his had been. It is no good going home dead beat to loaf on his relations; no, it would be better to stay in the country for ever, or to land without a sixpence in some other colony. What bad luck he has always had. The men who make money may say what they like, but it is almost all luck after all, he thinks, as he contrasts his position with that of many another man, just as thoughtless and reckless as he, who has made a fortune and gone home with it. Maybe the very next shovel full of gravel he washes may turn his luck, and he thinks of all the big diamonds that have at one time or the other been found down the river.

"Bosh, what's the use of thinking," he said to himself as the end of the candle, which has been growing shorter and shorter, fell down to the bottom of the bottle into which he had stuck it, and he was left in the dark to knock out the ashes of his pipe and to curl himself up in his blanket.

It was still enough at Moonlight Rush, and in a few minutes he was asleep and dreaming a queer medley of English and Diamond-Field scenes.

As he slept and dreamt he heard a cry for help, repeated again and again. At first it seemed to fit in with what he was dreaming about.

But he heard it again after he woke up, and then he formed a pretty notion as to what it meant. "It's poor old David come to grief," he said to himself, as he sprang up and ran out of his tent.

Old David Miller, who lived in the other tent at Moonlight Rush, was a taciturn old fellow, who always worked by himself and seemed to look upon the world in general with surly indifference. He had been digging all over the world since gold was first discovered in Australia, and had spent a good many years on the banks of the Vaal. He dug by himself without employing Kaffirs, but he got through a fair amount of work, as the high bank of boulders which he had broken up and dragged out of claim at Moonlight bore witness to.

So far as Charlie knew he had found little enough to recompense him for his toil. He was not, however, much given to talk about his own affairs, though for him he was very friendly with Charlie--often coming round to his claim and growling about South Africa and its inhabitants, and contrasting the country with others in which it had been his lot to live. He was owner of a rickety little tub of a boat, in which, on the rare occasions on which he yearned for more of society and civilisation than he could get at Moonlight, he would cross over to the other side.

The object of these voyages was a canteen that was some miles down the river. Old David, a sober man enough as a rule, used at intervals to go on the drink somewhat seriously. He believed, as a good many men of his cla.s.s do believe, that an occasional bout of drinking was good for the system, and brightened a man up for his work like a change of air.

Besides, he probably liked it. So now and then he used to indulge in one of these bouts. At other times he took nothing but tea--looking upon strong drink as a medicine that was wasted if not taken in large quant.i.ties. Sometimes these bouts would last for days, sometimes for a much shorter time. When he had taken what he considered was enough, or as more often was the case spent all his money, he would start off from the canteen, stagger off to the river, and get into his little tub of a boat and navigate himself across in it. The voyage always seemed beset with considerable danger, as the little boat, which the old man had made himself, was a very crank craft, certainly not fit to carry old David after he himself had taken in such a large cargo of whiskey. Charlie knew that the old man had started on one of his expeditions that afternoon, for he had come to his claim and asked him to come with him, showing an amount of hospitality and a wish for society which was unlike him. It was likely enough that he had gone to grief and got swamped.

The river was swollen with recent floods, and flowing rather strongly; so Charlie looked forward to rather a longish job, particularly as he remembered that the old man had told him he could not swim a stroke.

It was a dark night for South Africa. Again and again, as he ran along the bank peering into the river, he thought he saw something in the water, but the object turned out to be a snag, or a ma.s.s of weed. At last he made out a paddle floating down; then he came to an upturned boat, and then he saw, or thought he saw something rise and sink again.

In a second he was in the water, and when he got about to the spot where he thought he saw the object sink he dived for it. As he dived he felt himself caught in a ma.s.s of Vaal river-weed, which clung round him like a net, and seemed to drag him down in its deadly grip. At first he struggled wildly to get free, and the more he struggled the more entangled he got. After a little time, however, and before it was too late, his presence of mind came back, and humouring the weed rather than struggling against it, he managed to get free. Then he reached the body he had dived for, and came up with it to the top of the water. He had hard work enough to get it to land, and he began to feel terribly done with his struggles to drag it along through the weeds, and to keep free from them himself. At last he got it up the bank, dragging a tangled ma.s.s of weeds out with it. Then he lay exhausted and out of breath for some seconds before he was sure what it was that he had fished out from the bottom of the river, and recognised old David Miller in the object covered with weed and slime by his side. He remembered that he had a bottle of Cape smoke in his tent, so he went and got it, and having taken a pull at it himself, he tried to force some down the old man's throat. A dozen conflicting directions for recovering half-drowned persons occurred to him, and without being sure of whether he was doing the right thing or not he did his best to bring back life to the body he had rescued. He felt fearfully alone, for he and the old man were the only inhabitants of Red Jacket, and even the nearest Kaffir huts were some miles off. The old man must have been for some time in the water before he got him out, and Charlie soon began to see that his help had come too late. The heart did not beat, and the life was not to come back, and when the sun rose its grey light lit up poor old David's dead body.

"Poor old chap! he has growled his last growl at South Africa, and seen his last year out in the country," Charlie said to himself, as he looked at him.

Then he carried the body into the tent, and lit a fire. He had always thought that poor old David would come to grief some day in that little boat of his. Well, the old fellow hadn't much to live for. Charlie thought that if any of the Kaffirs came down to the river in the morning he would get them to watch by the body, and that he would walk down to one of the larger river camps where there was a magistrate, and report the death. Before, however, he left the place he ought to see what property old David had when he died. There would be little enough most likely--a few tools, and some blankets and perhaps a diamond or two, as a result of all the work he had done. Maybe a few coins, but there were not likely to be many after his visit to the canteen.

Charlie did not find much in the tent. The body was clothed in a pair of cord trousers and a woollen s.h.i.+rt. Round his waist there was a digger's belt. Charlie took it off, and opened it. There was a purse in the belt, in which there were two small all-coloured diamonds, worth a pound or two, but no money. There was something else in the belt besides the purse--something tied up in a piece of a handkerchief.

Charlie gave a start as he felt, and when he undid it and saw what it was, he stood holding it in his hand and staring at it in a dazed, stupid way. It was a diamond--such a diamond as diggers may dream of, but few have ever seen. It was about the finest stone he had ever seen, he thought.

"What luck--what queer luck," he said to himself, as he looked at the dead man and then at the diamond. "It was just like luck giving poor old David a turn like that. Poor old fellow! he has never wanted more than a few pounds, and has often enough been without them; and just before his death he had come across this splendid prize." No wonder the old man had looked rather queer that afternoon before, when he had come round to Charlie's claims and asked him to come over the river to the canteen, and have a drink with him; Charlie had wondered at this unwonted hospitality, though he had refused it. The diamond explained it, however; there was plenty of occasion for it.