s and I, too, lay down and slept; the day
had been long and hard, and we were dog-tired. The dawn was cold; and
coatless, almost shirtless, as I was, I awoke early, very stiff and
sore. Du Plessis had a cord coat on; he yet slept soundly, and even
snored. But the figure across the fire seemed very still. I moved
quietly to it, touched it gently. It was stiff and cold. Spanish
Jack's troubles and agonies were over; his prospecting was done; and for
the blood upon his hands he would never answer upon this earth. Whether
he died from the excitement of the meeting; whether that last agonising
journey to the water had spent the remaining flicker of strength left
within him; whether the story he had told us of Tobias Steenkamp's death
was the true one, I cannot tell.

I roused Du Plessis. Together we went down towards the vlei and found
the pile of stones, where, surely enough, the bones of a tall man--
undoubtedly Tobias Steenkamp--lay. These we carefully replaced; then,
exploring up-hill from where we had come upon the prospector, we found a
cave or hollow in which the poor wretch had evidently made a home. Here
were Steenkamp's hat and hunting-knife, among other remnants; and here,
too, a pile of nuggets, no doubt collected by Spanish Jack. These
nuggets, with a small skin bag partly full of gold-dust, washed, no
doubt, from the sands of the vlei--a small tin digger's pan of Spanish
Jack's showed us that--we took with us. After that, we buried the dead
prospector as well as we could, piled big stones above his rude grave,
and quitted the place.

We had no wish to tarry there, fair as was the spot. Rather the grim
associations of the vlei, the deed of blood enacted there, and the
melancholy death we had been witnesses of, impelled us away from it.

After much toil, we safely reached our wagons late that afternoon, worn
and famished. We had, somehow, no wish to bequeath to others the secret
of the vlei. Having safely descended by the rope, therefore, we set
about destroying our traces. Two of our boys were waiting for us at the
bottom of the ravine. With these we took a united haul at the rope.
The strain was great; the rope parted, as we had expected, far up the
cliff, where the hide riems joined the rope itself, and no vestige of
our means of descent remained to searchers from below. Next day we
trekked from the neighbourhood. The gold we had found realised, some
months later, seven hundred pounds, whi