one to the last penny,
and so were the diamonds.

Faint and sick, he dragged himself into his room and bathed his aching
head; and now he saw, too, that all his belongings had been ransacked.
"They waited for me, here," he thought, and he groaned in bitterness of
spirit as he realized that as far as the diamonds were concerned it was
useless to try and obtain redress legally, he had had no right to their
possession!

The professor had gone, there was no one he could turn to, yes, there
was Solly.

And as soon as it was light he went and found him of course still in
bed!

"Ah," he said, "I heard you was having a thick night, and you look like
it. Blued your cheque, I suppose?"

"Not all," said Dick, "but it's gone!" And he told him everything.

"Blazes!" exclaimed the little man, leaping from his bed and beginning
to dress in mad haste. "You fathead, you've done a fine thing. Why, you
let me believe the fields were salted!"

"They were," said Dick, "but the real stones were there all the same!"

"But, you loony, I should have known this at once! Why, I went straight
and wired to the people who must know these things; the people who make
or break all diamond ventures! My people!"

"The Johannesburg Company that sent the professor?" asked Dick, in his
innocence.

"Johannesburg, the professor! I don't think!" said Solly with the
greatest scorn. "No, the people that control diamonds are . . . a
little firm of tobacconists in Kimberley!"

THE FOLLOWER

In a desolate and lonely spot near the wide expanse of mud-flats which
form the mouth of the Orange River there stands the roofless ruin of an
old farm-house. Its stone walls, of huge thickness, and the high stone
kraal with huge iron hinges only remaining where once swung a
formidable door, speak eloquently of the time when this remote part of
Klein Namaqualand, in common with the islands and lower reaches of the
Orange River, was infested with bands of Hottentot outlaws and robbers,
and when the daring white man who had ventured among them kept his
scant flocks and herds under lock and key, and guarded them with a
strong hand.

To the south, towards Port Nolloth, stretches seventy-odd miles of
desolate, waterless sand-scrub; eastward lie vast expanses of similarly
dreary, featureless, undulating scrub, beyond which rise the unknown
and mysterious mountains of the Richtersfeld and hundreds of miles of
uninhabited country; westward is the wide lonely