leave, and the fact that the river was rising—Miss Gray turned the conversation to the subject that had interested them both.

“Who are those men working at the court-house,—the white men I mean?” she asked, as Johnstone thought, with considerable interest.

“They are gentlemen who are working for her gracious Majesty without pay, and receiving their board and lodging gratis.”

“You mean they are convicts. What sort of offences do you suppose they have committed, and where do they come from?”

“They have come from Kimberley, and they may have committed any offence, but it’s long odds that they have bought diamonds—that’s their special weakness on the fields.”

“Bought diamonds!—why I should have thought that was just what diamond-diggers wanted people to do.”

“Bought diamonds that the Kaffirs have stolen from their masters’ claims, I mean; those men, however, have probably made a mistake, and been caught by the police. When the police see that the wily illicit diamond-buyer is well on the feed they throw one of their flies, and send him a Kaffir with a diamond to sell. If the fish rises to the fly and buys, they strike, find the diamond, and haul the I.D.B. up before the court, when he gets five years. It’s a pretty sport is trapping I.D.B.’s, and these are most likely some of the many fish who have been caught.”

“What a wretched mean business it seems to be, but I’m sure he could not have been trapped.”

“Hallo, so you talk about him as ‘he,’ do you?” thought Johnstone. “You mean the tall convict; I was looking at him just now, and wondering what his history was. Well, if he has a long sentence, if I were he, I’d make a bolt for it. The convict-guards are always more or less asleep, and I’d chance their shooting straight. I suppose it would not be much good though, one could never get away across the veldt without a horse.”

“If he had a horse do you think he would get off? Where could he get to?”

“Sixty miles north he’d be out of the reach of the police, in Stellaland, where there is a lot of rough work going on, and any one who had plenty of pluck would find men who would welcome him as a comrade, and care very little whether he had a broad arrow stamped on his shirt or not.”

“Ah, well, perhaps he is used to being a convict, and does not care to escape,” Kate said, for she felt that perhaps she was unwise in showing so much interest in the convict’s fate.

“Perhaps he is; don’t know that it matters whether one is a convict or not, if one has to live in this country. Certainly, being in their infernal civil service is next door to it,” Johnstone answered, as he walked to the river-side with them. As he returned after seeing them cross, he wondered where Kate could have seen the convict before. That they had met he somehow felt certain. He was right; Kate had recognised George Darrell, her fellow-traveller in the coach, in the convict. He had had a run of bad luck since they had parted. First of all his old partner, Jim Brawnston, had been obliged to leave him, as one of his brothers had died, and he had been wanted on his father’s farm in Natal. Then for a long time he had found no diamonds.

After a bit, however, his luck seemed to have changed, and diamonds began to turn up on his sorting-table. The queer thing about those diamonds was, that they were unlike river stones, and much more of the appearance of the stones found in the mines. The diamond-buyers to whom he sold seemed, he thought, to look at them and him rather queerly when he brought them out to sell. He did not, however, trouble himself much about this. While he was working at his claim, not over rejoiced at the slight turn of luck he was experiencing, as he had hardly any ambition to make money, one day a conversation took place in the office of the head of the police in Kimberley, which would have opened his eyes if he had heard it. There had been a good deal of what is called illicit buying down the river for some time. Persons who had bought stolen diamonds, and wished to dispose of the diamonds advantageously, had taken to get men who pretended to be river-diggers, to profess to have found them in their claims, and sell them advantageously. Stolen diamonds are rather awkward property to dispose of, as dealers have to keep registers by which diamonds can be traced back to the diggers who first found them; so it was an advantage to give a diamond that had been stolen a fictitious history.

The head of the police had determined to put a stop to this practice, and had sent a man down the river to see what was going on. The information he had received had surprised him a good deal, and at first he hardly believed it. “What, Darrell of Red Shirt Rush in this? Why, I should have thought he was straight,” he was saying to one of the detectives, who had come in to see him with another man.

“It ain’t the first time, sir, you’ve thought that about a party we have found to be pretty deeply in the trade; now this man here sold Darrell as many as half-a-dozen diamonds which we can swear to, and which we can prove he has sold again; is not that so, Seers?” the detective said, turning to the ill-looking, undersized man who had come in with him.

“Yes, sir, he has bought ’em off me; he has been buying for this last twelve months to my knowledge, and working off illicit stuff from his claims,” the man answered, his eyes as he spoke wandering about furtively, looking anywhere except into the face of the person he spoke to.

“Well, I suppose there is no doubt about it. It’s high time some one was made an example of down the river; you and Sergeant Black had better go down and trap Darrell, with this man Seers,” the head of the police said after he had talked for some time. “Look here,” he added, calling the detective on one side, “that fellow is an infernal scoundrel, and are you sure he is not humbugging us?”

“Well, sir, white traps mostly are infernal scoundrels, but what he says is right enough about Darrell. What object should he have in telling us what was wrong?—besides, I don’t think he would try and fool me,” the detective said with a grin, which expressed considerable satisfaction with his own astuteness.

Two evenings after this conversation, the man Seers came into Darrell’s tent, pretending that a mate of his was ill, and he wanted to be given some brandy. Darrell knew the man by sight, having seen him lately hanging about the diggings, and had not been much prepossessed by his appearance. He was civil enough to him, however, telling him he had got no brandy, and listening to his description of his mate’s illness.

The man talked away for a few minutes, and then went to the opening of the tent, gave a shout, and then in a second, to Darrell’s astonishment, two men, one of whom he knew by sight as a Kimberley detective, made their appearance. In a twinkling they had handcuffed him, searched him and the tent, and found a diamond in a pannikin near his bed. Darrell’s protestations of his innocence went for very little, and in the course of another twenty-four hours he found himself a prisoner in Kimberley jail, awaiting a trial for buying a diamond illicitly.

On his trial it was proved that Seers had been searched before he went into the tent, and had no money upon him; when he came out he had ten sovereigns in his possession. The detectives were able to swear to the diamond found in Darrell’s possession as the one they had given Seers before he went into the tent. The case seemed to be exactly like the ordinary cases of trapping that come