THE STOLEN DIAMOND.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CI, Issue 11900, 25 May 1899, Page 2

THE STOLEN DIAMOND.

(New York Sun.) The man from South Africa was smoking ia the'club and moralising. "I suppose,” said he, “that when these lynchers set out-to hang a man they usually get lie right man, but it must sometimes happen that they get the wfong.one —they are so dreadfully impetuous. I have a great deal of personal sympathy for any man who is in danger of lynching.” “ Personal sympathy?” “ Yes, downright fellow-feeling. !• have always the fear that he is the wrong man, and lynching is too positive a proceeding altogether. He ought to have a chance—a choice of pills, one of which is poisoned, or something like that, if there is any doubt, of comm” , “Trial by ordeal? Do you believe in the ordeal style of trial yourself?” “I do,” said the man from South Africa, emphatically, “ because I’ve seen it tested successfully.” ‘‘And what had you done to be tried?” , “ I bad been keeping bad company. One day I was trudging, along the trek in the north of the Transvaal, where farms are. far apart, towns unknown, and gold prospecting and prospectors’ camps never seen. My blanket roll was over my shoulder, my .billy swinging from it, and I was armed with only a stout stick. There was nothing to cook in the billy, for my provender had run out, and I was in fairly bad condition and looking for some friendly farmer for shelter and coffee. I was in' a horribly lonely part of the S.A.R. The Boer's up there spent the whole long year secluded each on his farm, rising before the sun, going to bed with it, and attending the nachtmaai, anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles away, perhaps twice a year. ■ For absolute ignorance of what was going on in the'big world they were worse than babies, and were happy in their ignorance. They did not want to know; they never read a newspaper, and the advent of a railway would have set them all to trekking further away into the wilderness. Their idea 'of duty was to hate the Uitlander and to read the Bible. “Now,a Boer is like a Calvinist; he gets more- satisfaction but of the Old Testament than the Now. What with his lonely life and . his study of the Mosaic law he is very superstitious, and believes iii witches and spooks, and the most direct interposition of Providence in daily life. These farmers refuse to destroy the locusts which eat up their crops, because they on them as a plague sent to punish them from heaven. You see they are better acquainted with the times of Moses and Pharaoh than their own. They are far from judges and law courts, and when such an unusual thing as crime occurs on a farm, the farmer is apt to be judge, and jury, and executioner, too, for they have a horror of cities and stamped papers, and red tape, and lawyers, and believe in the good old patriarchal system. Justice is swift, and.there are a few graves on these great and lonely farms which are filled with the skeletons of malefactors who were caught, tried, sentenced, and put out of the way within an hour or two of the commission of the deed which brought them into trouble. If the farmer is wrong in his judgment, he has little doubt that fire from heaven, or a plague, will speedily show him his mistake. “It was to one of these farms I was hopeful of being debtor for shelter. Along in the afternoon I came, at a drift, on two wallabers like myself, and I was well aware that it would be a gross insult to them not to answer their hail as I passed, and accept their hospitality, for they were making a meal of coffee and scones made of mealie flour and pumpkins mixed, and baked on the embers of a fire of buffalo chips. I was glad of the scones and coffee, although my entertainers were the toughest-looking men I had ever met. They turned out to be discharged soldiers from the English garrisons in Cape Colony, and, since their discharge, had wandered about - tire land. Now they were on one of their tramps, probably fresh frojtn .trcmk, and looking for work, or sup; posed to bo looking for work; of any kind! They said they were , on their ’way to the Barberton mines. Well, you cannot choose your company on the veldt. “ As they were going my way, and could talk ‘ taal,’ and were better able from experience to make a bargain with a Boer than I, who was a comparative greenhorn, I could not refuse to chum with them temporarily—it would not Lave been wallaby etiquette—-so we went on together until, toward evening, we struck a "rude waggon road which, led us to a big farmhouse. We walked up to the house, and met one of the finest-looking old men I ever saw—a man some six foot three, broad, with a great wMte beard, and the kind of d eep, unlaugh - ing eye winch commands a respectful greeting from the most presumptuous. He listened to our spokesman, whom, _as he spoke- taal, I could not understand, and, although he eyed us one after another with no very friendly look, he finally growled some kind of assent to the tramp s very earnest appeal, and with a nod of his head beckoned ns indoors. We followed him into a large room, sparely, but with comfort. There was a big table set out with supper things, and it seemed that the household had just SnhVd eating. The old boy was more generous than I had ever expected a Boer of that region to be to hated foreigners. He poured out «iT>-e, and we sat down and ate our fill ot boned beef and cabbage. While we w*ro eaiing, we saw none ’of the household, s'-ve ti e head of a girl peeping from an inner room, and a Kaffir who passed through on some’ errand. The former left us alone, and went into the room himself. “ Wo were enjoying our supper heartily, when, over the rim of my cotlca cup, my eyes lighted on a small raMe in a corner, and caught the glitter on it ol two stones, very small, but brilliant. They were restiav on a piece of print© 1 paper, and I recognised the form as cne of tlu.se shps which the Cape authorities give a man who is carrying on his person diamonds in Hie rough. It is one of provisions of the Illegal Diamond Buying Act, that you can be arrested and locked up, and Hied, if you are caught with cough diamonds > n vour person, and without one of these licenses to prove you got the stsu-a honestly, \ y cup paused at my bp, for I was fascinated by the sparkling pebbles, and I remained so long I suppose, in that position that I attracted the attention of the other fellows, whose backs were turned to the little table and who slewed round in their seats to see what I was staring at. When they turned back, their eyebrows were raised an( l—‘ Worth £SO ’ said one, and then the farmer came back. “ By the time we were through supper and the Boer had taken us to a barn where a couple of straw mattresses 1ay,.1 had torgotten all about the diamonds. My feet were sore from long walking, and I was dead tired, so that I unstrapped my blanket and lay down, at once. So did my companions, lighting their pipes, and they began to talk to each other. I thought it funny they should speak in taal, which was scarcely polite to me, but then I knew they were the kind of men who were likely to ■have things to talk of not for casual ears. One seemed to be arguing his chum into his view of some-matter, and the other to be not very willing to see it, whatever it was, in the same light. ' They were still. talking when I dropped off to deep. I knew absolutely nothing more until some hours later, when I was awakened by the door opening—the Boers, in these lonelier farmsteads, seldom lock up their houses—and somebody coming in through the dark and closing the door hastily behind him. Whoever it was was noiseless, after closing the door, and I sang 1 , out to the other fellows to know if it was one of them. I only heard for answer that the kind of gentle snore which might or might nob be assumed. “ In five minutes after that there was a noise of excited voices outside, and the farmer, with a lantern, and two big Kaffirs, with another Boer and a boy of fourteen or fifteen, rushed into the room and fell noon us. In the half-awakened condition ■iNvas in I could form no notion of what was", wrong, but fought them,, off,, pretty furiously. The other fellows, however, seemed to have -their wits and did not tight, but began to expostulate in a nild and surprised sort of way. The men bound all three of us with hide thongs, and were rough about it, too, seemingly terribly excited and angry. Then the Kaffirs lifted us

up and bore us into the sitting-room where we had supped. You can imagine I jumped when I saw there on the floor, propped m the arms of a woman, a big Zulu, bleeding from a great gash in the chest. W© were hauled in front of the man, and the farmer bent over him and seemed entreating and commanding him to look at ns to recognise us, but nothing could be understood from the poor wretch’s wandering looks. He gasped once or twice and fell hack dead, and then the Kaffirs gave a howl and seemed ready 1 to make short work of us. The farmer and the other Boer ordered them back, and the Dutchmen began to jabber away at a terrible rate. I asked my companions what the matter was, but they simply shrugged their shoulders! I and remained silent. I was getting my wits back by this time, and when I remembered the man slipping into the barnin the darkness and not answering me when I spoke, I was filled with a horrid suspicion, and almost unconsciously I drew off from the other two and stood apart from them. ’ ’ “ The Boers began questioning us, but always speaking taal,- so that I was kept in impatient ignorance of the suljject matter, until the. farmer, at last noticing that I didnot seem to understand, spoke to me in English. He asked me who I was and how long I bad known the others. I told him, and asked him to look at my pocket-book for papers showing who 1 was. That mattered - nothing. In the-first place, I doubted if he could read English, though ho spoke it fairly well, and, in the second, if I had been travelling with passports from ad the crowned heads of Europe they would have meant nothing to Iris mind. If 1 had had a pocket Bible he might have been more favourably influenced —and, perhaps, not unreasonably so. However, he told me what the matter was. No one slept in the sitting-room, and it seemed the farmer had been roused from his sleep in another chamber by a cry in the parlour. When he ran in he found the Kaffir wounded and' speechless. The only evidence of what bad occurred was the fact that these two-dia-monds I had noticed at supper were missing. The.presumption was.that the Kaffir, had seen someone enter the bouse and.was slain in defending his master’s property. You may think it strange . that two suchvaluable stones should be left lying loose, but the Boer, remember, only cares for land. Gold and diamonds are to him only offensive products, which bring the greedy Uitlanders to swarm upon his peaceful country, and it is quite conceivable that the old farmer having procured these by chance, thought little of them. If it had only been theft we were charged with the affair would have been different, but there was murder done, and, as the Boers told us again and. again, ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth, and life for life,’ was the law. “ They searched us and found no diamonds, and, save my own claspknife, clean,‘save for tobacco stains, no weapon. I remembered that one of my companions had used a big-bladed knife at our meal on the veldt, but I said nothing. Then they consulted together, and then they kneeled down, and the old man prayed. After that the farmer spoke to us again, and said that it was a moral certainty that one of us had done this thing, and that the others knew of it. He said very calmly that he only wanted one life, and begged the two innocent ones to give up the guilty party. I turned white when I began to realise that that Boer had no intention of turning us over to the authorities, before, I could have made for myself a good case, but was actually going to avenge his dead servant on the spot. If I had known*, I should most quickly have : pointed out the murderer, but I had no more proof than the farmer himself. The other two kept silent, almost apathetic. Once I caught an angry, reproachful look from one man at his chum, but that was all 'the evidence I had that they knew more than I did. “At last they prayed again, and after more consultation told us to make our peace, for we should all three be shot in the morning, lest * the guilty one should escape. At that I found words, .and it is wonderful how many good, earnest, forcible words a man can find in such a case. I told them I knew no more about the murder than they did, and I solemnly denounced themselves as murderers if they did such a thing. I pleaded bard for my life, for I felt sure they would do what they said, so ample, unaffected and sincere was their conviction that they had a perfect right to execute justice. My words had,weight; and they wavered, and once more the conEsnltations and prayers began, and were continued all night. When dawn came we were led out, and the farmer told us in English what they had decided, to do. I was speechless when I heard the plan, but the other two, who had lemained stolid all night, now that the <hing was settled broke into a torrent of hictoous oaths. They simply raved and foamed, but the Boers quite calm. Said the Boer, in effect: ‘Revenge is the Lord’s, and justice is his. He will see that it is done. We cannot tell which of you is guilty of blood-shedding, but one of you is. He will point out the one, and in His hands be it.’ Fanatics—superstitious? That old chap and his friend were survivals of the middle ages. They were going to give us the trial by ordeal—no less. “They made their unique preparations. A stretch of plain spread for five or-six hundred yards from the farmhouse to a downward slope. Two hundred yards from the nonr stood a. solitary big bush, a kind of scrub oak. The Boer made us draw straws. The longest straw holder was to start first, and run to that bush when he would be fired on, and if he were unhit, by, the time he reached the slope which would hide him, he could go his way in.peace. So the second; so the third. If the first were killed, or the second, the Lord, so they solemnly claimed, had pointed out the murderer, and the others, or other, might depart unharmed. We protested, as men, save at a lynching, never protested before, for we all knew what dead shots these Boers are, but the patriarch had made up his mind and we talked uselessly. “ The boy was brought out and a rifle was given to him. The farmer explained that be was young and an uncertain shot, and that the Vi-iorl of the Lord would be more clearly shown by directing straightly so unskilled a marksman. IThe lad seemed nervous, and I had a flicker of hope, but I trembled so much that I doubted if my legs would carry me to the bush. The younger of my companions drew the long straw, I . the second. The other two never ceased now to: revile the Boers, who not once heeded them. The men were, by their speech, low Londoners, and to hear the vilest of expressions, such as only London slums can produce, poured out on such an occasion from their foul lips, made me feel as I never felt before —as if I were mated with devils. “The word was given. It was a beautiful morning, and the veldt trembled with dewdrops in the first sunbeams. The black mysterious mountains in the distance were shot ■ with shivering shafts of light as the sun touched their, rocky peaks. The cattle were straggling off .to feed. The , ducks were excitedly wabbling to the pond. It was a queer scene for an execution. “The-man walked to the tree,-turning every few yards to shake his fist - at his judges and never ceasing to revile them. Twenty yards from the tree he began to run, and at full speed, but zig-zagging from right to left in short, swift tacks, so that he was a hard mark to bit. The boy fired; the man ran on. The boy fired again; the man ran on. .The boy fired once more, and the man, with a cheer, disappeared from view. “I think that escape gave me courage, though—you would have felt the same—l should have felt some relief if the man had fallen, and saved us the ordeal. I ran slowly to the tree, and felt myself suddenly fit to run like a deer —desperation, I supCougns aud Cote:, are overcome. By Spencer Vincent/s.- Benjamin Gam. The cold weather is approaching, and precautions should be taken to ward off coughs and colds. This can be done with Spencer Vincent’s Benjamin Gum, a sure preventive and cure or coughs and colds. Price Is od and 2s Sd.

pose. I had sense-enough to dolibC the other fellow, and zig-zag. There was-such a roaring in my ears; I cannot tell howmany times the boy fired at me, or, indeed, if he fired at all. I found myself on the other side of the bluff: There was no-sign of the first runner; he had evidently decided to keep on and make' sure.: -As fen 1 me, Icollapsed in the grass and shook said, sobbed, “ I heard more firing, but never saw the other man came over the bluff. After a time I peeped back, and saw Kaffirs with spades digging a grave. “ Some months afterwards, I was in Johannesburg, and met the drawer of the long straw. He was looking tougher eb-- ever, but I had’to speak to him. I told him-how his drain had fallen. “‘Well,’ he said, with a half-laugh, ‘I fancy they -got tho right one. Honest, I know no more than you how it was, but after we lay v dowu that night, when we was speaking taal’s so’s you couldn t twig, he wanted me to jine him in a break for them stones. I wouldn’t, for the risk was too much. I went to sleep, and I suppose he kept thinldn’ itiover until he tried it himself, was cangqt by the Kaffir, killed the beggar, and, ’stead of bolting cross veldt, was so flustered he ran back to us. But they, got the right one; I know. Queer, now, blasted 1 queer, if you com© to think 0f... it. I’ve dreamed of it more’n once, and it was queer, blasted queer.’ “‘But the diamonds?’ ' , ‘“lf them Boers held a post-mortem, I guess they found ’em.’”