Luck at the Diamond Fields Part 3

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 inst.i.tutions 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-a.s.surance 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 a.s.sociates 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 n.o.body 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.