ilar to that of old Baas Jacobs, the
Boer who found the first great South African diamond on his farm near
Hopetown, and threw it down beside the door, with other pretty shining
pebbles, for his child to play with. The child's mother tossed it to Van
Niekirk as a worthless gift. Van Niekirk passed it on to J. O'Reilly. When
the English Government mineralogist pronounced the stone a diamond, and
the Colonial Secretary and the French Consul sent it to the Paris
Exhibition, and the Governor of the Colony bought the jewel, old Baas
Jacobs must have felt mighty sick. All the world hungering, and admiring,
and coveting the beautiful thing he had thrown down on the ground....
Small wonder that to the end of his days he had talked as a robbed man.

The jewel Bough had left on the veld had belonged to him once. Well, it
should be his again. He swore that with a blasphemous oath. Thenceforward
he proceeded warily, feeling his way, formulating his plan, a human
tarantula, evil-eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leap upon
its prey; an adder coiled, waiting the moment to strike....

XLIV

Saxham was shooting on the veld, north of the Clayfields, in a ginger-hued
dust-wind and a grilling sun. Upon his right showed the raw red ridge of
the earthworks, where two ancient seven-pounders were entrenched in charge
of a handful of Cape Police. The pits of the sniping riflemen scarred
across the river-bed some fifty yards in advance. Upon his left, some two
hundred yards farther north, the recently resurrected ship's gun, twelve
feet of honeycombed metal, stamped on the flank "No. 6 Port," and casting
solid shot of eighteenth-century pattern, projected a long black nose from
Fort Ellerslie, and every time the venerable weapon went off without
bursting, the Town Guards occupying the Fort and manning the eastern
entrenchments raised a cheer.

Saxham, emptying and filling the magazine with cool, methodical
regularity, kept changing his position with a restlessness and
recklessness puzzling alike to friends and foes. Now he aimed and fired,
lying "doggo" behind his favourite stone, while bullets from the enemy's
trenches flattened themselves upon it, or buried themselves harmlessly in
the dry hot soil. Now he moved from cover, and shot squatting on his
heels, or sprawled lizard-like in the open, courting the King of Terrors
with a calm indifference that was commented upon by those who witnessed it
according to their lights.