n something turning up just when things
looked their blackest, and he had literally no thought for the morrow,
until his hand, mechanically groping in his pocket for the wherewithal
to fill his pipe, advised him of the fact that even his "baccy" was
finished.

This was serious, for Dick's old battered briar rarely left his mouth;
and whilst the odoriferous Boer equivalent for the "divine weed" held
out, food and drink were but minor considerations. But something must
be done now, so, knocking out the ashes from his last whiff, and with
one more futile grope in his capacious pocket, he stuck his empty pipe
in his mouth, rose, stretched himself, and, glancing once more at the
pageant of the western sky, turned back towards the contemptible
collection of tin shanties, drinking saloons, empty beer-bottles, and
Germans, known as Luderitzbucht.

A few months back, the discovery of diamonds had brought fame to this
wind-swept wilderness, and fame had been immediately followed by the
choicest collection of cosmopolitan scoundreldom that a mining "rush"
had ever been responsible for.

Now Dick Sydney, though a man of variegated experience and a bit of a
"hard case," was still passing honest, and a gentleman; and he soon
found that he stood but little chance in Luderitzbucht. His modest
capital, which he had hoped to increase in this new Diamondopolis, had
vanished within a few weeks of his arrival, swallowed up by shares in
diamond-fields that existed only in the vivid imagination of the
swindling "company-promoters" or so-called "prospectors," who infested
the place; and when his illusions of easily-made wealth had vanished
also, and he had tried to obtain a billet, he had failed utterly.

His knock-about experiences had included several spells of gold-
prospecting and mining in California and other wild spots, and, being
as hard as nails, he was admirably suited to the life of a prospector,
and prospectors were being paid large salaries in those early days of
the diamond rush in German South-West Africa. But, unfortunately for
himself, Dick possessed a constitutional but at times embarrassing
prejudice against lying, and in his numerous applications about
prospecting jobs had made no secret of the fact that his prospecting
had never been for diamonds.

And as a result he had had to stand aside and see all sorts of gentry
taken on for the numerous expeditions that were constantly being
arranged: runaway seamen, cooks, ste