In twenty-four hours it was too late.  The place was rushed.  In other words, diggers swarmed to the spot, with no idea of law but digger’s law.

A thousand tents rose like mushrooms; and poor Bulteel stood smoking, and staring amazed, at his own door, and saw a veritable procession of wagons, Cape carts, and powdered travellers file past him to take possession of his hillocks.  Him, the proprietor, they simply ignored; they had a committee who were to deal with all obstructions, landlords and tenants included.  They themselves measured out Bulteel’s farm into thirty-foot claims, and went to work with shovel and pick.  They held Staines’s claim sacred—­that was diggers’ law; but they confined it strictly to thirty feet square.

Had the friends resisted, their brains would have been knocked out.  However, they gained this, that dealers poured in, and the market not being yet glutted, the price was good.  Staines sold a few of the small stones for two hundred pounds.  He showed one of the larger stones.  The dealer’s eye glittered, but he offered only three hundred pounds, and this was so wide of the ascending scale, on which a stone of that importance is priced, that Staines reserved it for sale at Cape Town.

Nevertheless, he afterwards doubted whether he had not better have taken it; for the multitude of diggers turned out such a prodigious number of diamonds at Bulteel’s pan, that a sort of panic fell on the market.

These dry diggings were a revelation to the world.  Men began to think the diamond perhaps was a commoner stone than any one had dreamed it to be.

As to the discovery of stones, Staines and Falcon lost nothing by being confined to a thirty-foot claim.  Compelled to dig deeper, they got into a rich strata, where they found garnets by the pint, and some small diamonds, and at last, one lucky day, their largest diamond.  It weighed thirty-seven carats, and was a rich yellow.  Now, when a diamond is clouded or off color, it is terribly depreciated; but a diamond with a positive color is called a fancy stone, and ranks with the purest stones.

“I wish I had this in Cape Town,” said Staines.

“Why, I’ll take it to Cape Town, if you like,” said the changeable Falcon.

“You will?” said Christopher, surprised.

“Why not?  I’m not much of a digger.  I can serve our interest better by selling.  I could get a thousand pounds for this at Cape Town.”

“We will talk of that quietly,” said Christopher.

Now, the fact is, Falcon, as a digger, was not worth a pin.  He could not sort.  His eyes would not bear the blinding glare of a tropical sun upon lime and dazzling bits of mica, quartz, crystal, white topaz, etc., in the midst of which the true glint of the royal stone had to be caught in a moment.  He could not sort, and he had not the heart to dig.  The only way to make him earn his half was to turn him into the travelling and selling partner.