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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
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