ey left the spot, walking in
silence. Then Laurence went on:

"Now we are on the subject, I don't know that you would have come out
any the better had we left you behind at Johannesburg. For you were
going the wrong way. You were a precious sight too fond of hanging
around bars, and that sort of thing grows. In fact, you were more than
once a trifle--shall we say 'muddled.' Not to put too fine a point upon
it, you were on your way to the deuce. I know it, for I've seen it so
often before, and you know it too."

"I believe you're right there," assented Holmes.

"Well, then, we owe our first duty to ourselves; wherefore, my
soft-hearted young friend, it is better to spend a year or two raking in
a fortune and ameliorating the lot of humanity, than to die in a state
of soak, and a disused shaft, on or around the Rand, even as did Pulman
the day before we left."

"I don't believe that same fortune will do us any good," urged Holmes
gloomily. "There is the curse of blood upon it."

"The curse of my grandmother," laughed the other.

There was no affectation about Laurence Stanninghame's indifference. It
was perfectly genuine. Strong-nerved constitutionally, callous,
hard-hearted through stress of circumstances, such sights as that just
witnessed told not one atom upon him. In the sufferings of the miserable
wretches he saw only a lurid alternative--his own. In them, toiling
along, wearily, dejectedly, beneath the chain or yoke, he saw himself,
toiling, grinding, at some sordid and utterly repellent form of labour,
for a miserable pittance; no ray of light, no redeeming rest or
enjoyment to sweeten life until that life should end. In them, cowering,
writhing, beneath the driver's brutal lash, he saw himself, ever lashed
and stung by the torturing consciousness of what might have been, by the
recollection of what had been. Or did they fall exhausted, fainting, to
die, or to undergo decapitation to insure that such exhaustion should
not open even a feeble possibility of escape, there too, he saw himself
sinking, borne down by the sheer blank hopelessness of fate, taking
refuge in the Dark Unknown, his end the grave of the suicide. It was
himself or them, and he preferred that it should be them. Preyer or
preyed upon--such was the iron immutable law of life, from man in his
highest development to the minutest of insects; and with this law he was
but complying, not in wanton cruelty, but in cold, passive ruthlessness.

Fur