posal?"

"That I shall be only too glad to accept your offer," Max replied. "The
arrangement will suit me admirably. And now tell me something of the
business in which you want my co-operation. You said, I think, that it
was connected with diamonds."

"It is very much connected with diamonds," the other answered. "Eight or
nine months ago I happened to be travelling in the diamond country, and
it so happened that on this particular field there was a half-witted old
lunatic who was everybody's butt. He was an extraordinary individual in
many ways, and was always spying about for diamonds, and never finding
them, in places where no sane man would dream of looking for them. He
had theories of his own, he used to say, though there was no evidence
that those theories ever turned up trumps. Every now and then he would
mouch off by himself into the wilds, be away for a month or six weeks,
and when he put in an appearance again, look as near starvation as a man
could well do and still live. But according to his own tale he had never
brought anything of value back with him. He had just returned from one
of these little expeditions when I tumbled across him. His friends in
the mining camp were making great game of him. I should say they got
more fun out of that poor old lunatic over that journey than they had
ever had from him before. He took it well, however.

"'You laugh at my diamonds,' he would cry, when they had gone a little
too far with him; 'well, never mind, Senors, mark my words, the time
will come when I shall find more diamonds than all the rest of you put
together.' Then he would take two or three old pebbles out of his pocket
and fall to polishing them as if he expected to improve their value. I
wouldn't have lived that old boy's life amongst those men for something.
The practical jokes they played upon him would have raised the temper of
a mummy.

"Somehow, I had got the notion in my head that there was more in the old
boy than met the eye. He seemed to be sharp enough when there was nobody
about. In consequence, I kept my weather eye upon him. As doubtless you
know, some of those daft chaps have curious instincts, and, as I have
said before, seem able to find things in places where men with better
brains would never think of looking for them. I shouldn't have been at
all surprised to hear that the old chap had got a _cache_ hidden away
somewhere. Having come to this conclusion, I made up my mind as to the
part