crocodiles, mountain lions and other wild
animals.

In this barren spot Nature had concealed her treasures. A child's cry
of joy over a pretty pebble led to their discovery. The little son of
a Boer farmer was playing one day in the fields near the homestead when
his eye was attracted by something glittering at his feet. Stooping,
he picked up a stone unlike any other he had ever seen. Interested, he
began to look for others and found a number of them, which with great
glee he carried home to show his mother. The worthy woman paid little
heed to what, in her ignorance, she regarded merely as pretty stones,
but she happened to speak about them to a neighboring farmer, who asked
to look at them. Already tired of his new plaything, the child had
thrown the stones away, but one was found in the field close by, and
the neighbor, a shrewd Dutchman, who had heard of certain stones picked
up in that locality having a certain value, offered to buy it. The
good woman laughed at the idea of selling a stone, and made him a
present of it. The farmer took it to the nearest town, where experts
declared it to be a twenty-one carat diamond, worth $2,500. Round the
world the telegraph flashed this remarkable story, and the rush to
South Africa began. That was in 1870. In May of that year there were
about a hundred men at the diggings in the Vaal fields. Before the
next month had closed there were seven hundred. By April of the
following year five thousand men were digging frantically in the mud
along the Vaal and Orange rivers.

It was a rough, lawless gathering of men of every nationality under the
sun, the criminal and the vicious, the idle and the worthless. The
region being inside the border lines of the waste territory that lay
between the Boers and the Hottentots, it was therefore No Man's Land,
and beyond the pale of established law and order. The miners,
compelled, in self-protection, to institute laws of their own,
appointed committees to issue licenses, keep the peace, and punish
offenders. Natives were whipped; white men were banished, and from
this rough-and-ready justice there was no appeal.

When Handsome and Hickey arrived at the diggings, the fever was still
at its height, and having secured a claim, they went to work with a
will. Claims were thirty feet square, and to prevent speculation in
them the owner, in order to hold title, was compelled to toil
incessantly. It was hard work, harder work than