ROSFIELD looked across the camp fire at his friend Norton with the light of battle gleaming in his eyes. They were away up there on the veldt, not a hundred miles from Kimberley, and the fruits of three years' unremitting toil lay in the hollow of Crosfield's hand. To the untutored eye they represented no more than half a dozen round stones like big marbles, but an expert would have had no difficulty in recognising the fact that those pebbles were diamonds of the purest quality—six bits of glorified glass that represented a king's ransom.
To all practical purposes these were the absolute property of the partners, though lawyers and people of that kind learned in the mysteries and devious ways of legislation might have held a contrary opinion. At any rate, there they were, and between them they represented a fortune of something on the outside of a hundred thousand pounds. They represented something more than that—they stood for the entire worldly wealth of those men, they stood for three years' unremitting toil and danger, thirty-six sweating, blistering months endured under a tropical sun and accompanied by every hardship and danger that is known in the vocabulary of the pioneer. Those dull stones meant peace and happiness in England, home and friends, and everything that those two had set out to win for themselves. And yet there was much to be done before Crosfield and Norton found themselves on the high seas in search of English woods and meadows and all that life holds most dear. Hence the hard glitter in the eyes of the two men, hence the fact that they were discussing the future in whispers with the air of conspirators against the law.
"What do you suppose they are worth?" Norton asked.
"Well, there ought to be fifty thousand pounds for us each here," Crosfield replied; "and, by every moral law, these stones belong to us."
"It isn't moral law we've got against us," Norton said dryly. "You may depend upon it that that rascal Blatter won't leave a stone unturned to get those diamonds back. He knows by this time that they are in our possession—in fact, he told me so last night. When D'Jin came here and sold us our own stones, we ought to have kept him and taken him down to Cape Town with us. It is fatal to have paid him before we had booked our passages."
"What's the boy been up to?" Crosfield asked.
"Well, you paid him fifty pounds for smuggling those stones through, didn't you—fifty pounds to a greasy nigger boy who has never previously seen a gold coin in his life? And what does D'Jin do? Bought himself a couple of wives and a bunch of cattle, and set up as a local magnate. Of course, Blatter was on him like a shot. He guessed at once that D'Jin had been handling diamonds, and he laid out for that conceited nigger. As far as I could gather, D'Jin gave the whole show away, and, when you were out after springbok this morning, Blatter came over here, foaming with rage, and asked for his stones back."
"They are our stones right enough," Crosfield said, "and if D'Jin did find them, they were on our land."
"Yes, but Blatter is prepared to swear that when he took this holding off our hands, we sold him the patch of blue ground as well. And he has got some sort of a map to prove his claim, and he is prepared to swear that the blue ground that runs from Hodder's Spruit to Hagfontein is part of his purchase. He says he bought all the land that Jan van Beers trekked in 1874, and that slim Dutchman is ready to back him up. There's only one thing to be done."
Crosfield's lips tightened ominously. They had sunk every penny they had there, and it was only quite lately that they had found traces of diamonds on that hitherto despised patch of ground of theirs; and this corner of the property they had reserved when, sick at heart and in desperate need of money, they had sold their holding to the wily Karl Blatter. But that slim German had known what he was doing, and he had laid his plans accordingly.
"So that's the game, is it?" Crosfield said, when he had heard everything his partner had to say. "Old man, I am not going to fight that fat blackguard in the local courts, and I am not going to give up those stones, either. They are as much my property and yours as the rifle that I hold in my hand. If we made this a legal matter, I can see that we are done. We shall never be able to stand up before all those perjured witnesses, and, so far as I can see, we have got everything in the way of diamonds that the blue clay yonder is likely to yield us. I can see the little place I'm after at home in my mind's eye as I sit here now, and you've got a girl over yonder, and I've got a girl yonder, and—well, I needn't say any more."