"It was so quick," he muttered. "Yesterday evening he ran to meet the cart, and rode home on my shoulder."
He took a swallow of the dark liquor and shuddered. His voice was husky as he went on. "He was so light. No meat on his little bones."
They drank in unison.
"There was a jinx on me from the moment I drove my first peg on these bloody claims." Jock shook his great shaggy head. "I should have stayed on the river-diggings, like Alice told me."
outside the single lace-covered window the sun was already setting, a lurid red show through the dust clouds; and as the gloom gathered in the room, Alice Danby came through and placed a smoky hurricane lantern on the table between them and followed it with two bowls of Boer-meal porridge swimming in a thin and oily mutton stew. Then she disappeared silently into the back room and, from time to time during the long night, Zouga heard her gentle sobs through the thin dividing wall. In the dawn Jock Danby lolled in the green velvet armchair, his shirt open to the navel and his hairy stomach bulging out of it. The third bottle was half empty.
"You are a gentleman," Jock slurred unevenly. "I don't mean a swell or a toff but a bloody gentleman, that's what you are."
Zouga sat upright, grave and attentive; except for a slight reddening of his eyes he seemed totally unaffected by the night's drinking.
"I wouldn't want to wish the Devil's Own on a gentleman like you." Zouga said quietly, "If you're going, you have to sell to someone."
"They're jinxed, those two claims," mumbled Jock.
"They've killed five men already, they've broken me, they've given me the worst year of my life. I've seen men on each side of me pull big stones; I've seen them become rich, while me --" he made a drunken gesture that encompassed the sordid little shack, "look at me."
The canvas that screened the connecting doorway was jerked aside and Alice Danby stood bareheaded beside her husband. It was evident by her drawn grey features that she had not slept either.
"Sell them," she said. "I cannot stay here another day.
Sell them, sell everything, let's go, Jock, let's get away from this dreadful place. I cannot bear to spend another night here."
The mining commissioner was a dour little magistrate appointed by President Brand of the fledgling Boer Free State, who laid claim to the diggings.
Brand was not the only one to have done so. Old Waterboer, the chief of the Griqua Bastaards, made cross claim to the and plains where his people had lived for fifty years and more. In London, Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, had only just awakened to the potential wealth of the diamond diggings, and for the first time was listening attentively to the pleas of the Imperialists to support old Nicholaas Waterboer's claim and take Griqualand into the sphere of British influence.
In the meantime the Free State mining commissioner was trying, with only qualified success, to maintain some order over the unruly diggers. just as his roadways were crumbling into the surrounding pits on Colesberg kopje, so his authority was eroding before the onrush of events with the gathering of national interests and the emergence from obscurity of the first powerful figures as the financial aristocracy of the fields.
Zouga and Jock Danby found the commissioner bewailing his task over a liquid breakfast in the bar of the London Hotel and, supporting him by each elbow, they escorted him back across Market Square to his office.
By midmorning that day, the commissioner had copied the details of the Devil's Own, claims Nos 141 and 142 held under perpetual quit-rent letter, from J. A. Danby, Esq. to Major M. Z. Ballantyne, and noted payment in full in the sum of 2,000 pounds by cheque drawn on the Standard Bank.
An hour after noon, Zouga stood at the corner of Market Square, and watched the cart piled high with the green velvet armchairs and the brass bedstead pull away towards the northern corner of the square. Jock Danby led the team, and his wife sat thin and erect upon the load.
Neither of them looked back at Zouga, and the moment they disappeared into the maze of narrow alleys and shanties Zouga turned towards the kopie.
Despite the night of sleep that he had missed, he felt no fatigue, and his step was so light that he almost ran out along the narrow causeway that intersected the jumble of claims and workings.
The Devil's Own were deserted, two forlorn patches of raw yellow earth, neatly squared off and littered with abandoned equipment. Jock Danby's black workers had gone, for there was always a desperate shortage of labourers on the diggings. When Jock had not mustered them the previous dawn they had simply wandered away to take daily hire with one of the other diggers.
Most of the mining gear left on the claims seemed worn out, the buckets on the point of bursting and the ropes furry as fat yellow caterpillars. Zouga would not trust them with his own weight.
Gingerly he climbed down the swaying ladder, his cautious movements alerting the diggers on the neighbouring claims that he was an outsider.
"Those are Jock Danby's briefies, man," one of them shouted a challenge. "You breaking the diggers" law.
That's private ground. You better clear out, and bloody quick, at that."
"I bought Jock out," Zouga shouted back. "He left town an hour ago."
"How do I know that?"
"Why don't you go up to the commissioner's office?" Zouga asked. The challenger scowled up at him uncertainly, the level of his claim twenty feet below the Devil's Own.
Men had stopped work along the length of the irregular pit, others had lined the causeway high above, and there was an ugly mood on all of them, that was broken by a clear young voice speaking in the cadence and intonation of a refined English gentleman.
"Major Ballantyne, that is you, is it not!"And, peering up at thecauseway, Zouga recognized Neville Pickering, his drinking companion from the first day in the London Hotel.
"It is indeed, mister Pickering."
"That's all right, fellows. I'll vouch for Major Ballantyne. He is the famous elephant hunter, don't you know?"
Almost immediately they lost interest and turned away to become absorbed once more in their own race to get the buckets of gravelly yellow stuff to the surface.
"Thank you," Zouga called up to the man on the causeway above him.
"My pleasure, sir." Pickering flashed a brilliant smile, touched the brim of his hat and sauntered away, a slim and elegant figure in the press of bearded dust-caked diggers.
Zouga was left alone, as alone in spirit as he had ever been in any of his wanderings across the vast African continent. He had spent almost the last penny he owned on these few square feet of yellow earth at the bottom of this hot and dusty pit. He had no men to help him work it, no experience, no capital, and he doubted that he would recognize an uncut diamond if he held one in the palm of his hand.
As suddenly as it had descended upon him, the gambler's elation, the premonition of good fortune that awaited him here evaporated. He was instantly overwhelmed by his own presumption and by the enormity of the gamble he was taking.
He had risked it all on claims that so far had not yielded a single good stone, the price of diamonds was plummeting, the "pool goods", small splints of half a carat or less which formed the vast bulk of stones recovered, were fetching only five shillings each.
It was a wild chance, and his stomach slid sickeningly as he faced the consequences of failure.
The sun was almost directly overhead, burning down into the bottom of the workings; the air around him wavered with the heat and it came up through the leather of his boots to scorch the soles of his feet. He felt as though he were suffocating, as though he could not bear it another moment, as though he must scramble up out of this loathsome pit to where the air was cooler and sweeter.
He knew then he was afraid. It was an emotion to which he was not accustomed. He had stood down the charge of a wounded bull elephant, and taken his chance , man to man, steel to steel, on the frontiers of India and in the wild border wars of the Cape.