near Kimberley; and after that
they found De Beers, and after that Kimberley itself."

Travers stopped, and looked around him.

"Ray made his fortune, I suppose?"

"No, Mr. Askew; the unfortunate feller made next to nothin'. He was one
of those fellers that never do any good for themselves."

"But what has all this to do with the war?"

Again Travers looked round, and more slowly than ever, said:

"Without that game of marbles, would there have been a
Moer-Klip--without the Moer-Klip, would there have been a
Kimberley--without Kimberley, would there have been a Rhodes--without a
Rhodes, would there have been a Raid--without a Raid, would the Boers
have started armin'--if the Boers hadn't armed, would there have been a
Transvaal War? And if there hadn't been the Transvaal War, would there
have been the incident of those two German ships we held up; and all the
general feelin' in Germany that gave the Kaiser the chance to start his
Navy programme in 1900? And if the Germans hadn't built their Navy,
would their heads have swelled till they challenged the world, and
should we have had this war?"

He slowly drew a hand from his pocket, and put it on the table. On the
little finger was blazing an enormous diamond.

"My father," he said, "bought it of the jeweller."

The mother-stone glittered and glowed, and the five Englishmen fixed
their eyes on it in silence. Some of them had been in the Boer War, and
three of them had sons in this. At last one of them said:

"Well, that's seeing God in a dew-drop with a vengeance. What about the
old Boer?"

Travers's little eyes twinkled.

"Well," he said, "Ray told me the old feller just looked at him as if he
thought he'd done a damn silly thing to give him a waggon; and he nodded
his old head, and said, laughin' in his beard: 'Wish you good luck,
brother, with your stone.' You couldn't humbug that old Boer; he knew
one stone was the same as another."

1914.

XII

POIROT AND BIDAN

A RECOLLECTION

Coming one dark December evening out of the hospital courtyard into the
corridor which led to my little workroom, I was conscious of two new
arrivals. There were several men round the stove, but these two were
sitting apart on a bench close to my door. We used to get men in all
stages of decrepitude, but I had never seen two who looked so completely
under the weather. They were the extremes--in age, in colouring, in
figure, in everything; and they sat there, not