“Yes,” said the croupier of the saloon gambling table.  “If he’d waited for another deal he might have held every trump.  He was always a soft chap, was Jim, and he was saying last night as how this spoiled the last chance he was ever like to have of seeing his wife and childer in England.  He’s blowed a fine clean hole in himself.  Would you like to see it, Mr. Girdlestone?” The fellow was about to remove the blood-stained handkerchief which covered the dead man’s face, but Ezra recoiled in horror.

“Mr. Girdlestone looks faint like,” some one observed.

“Yes,” said Ezra, who was white to his very lips.  “This has upset me rather.  I’ll have a drop of brandy.”  As he walked back to the hut, he wondered inwardly whether the incident would have discomposed his father.

“I suppose he would call it part of our commercial finesse,” he said bitterly to himself.  “However, we have put our hands to the plough, and we must not let homicide stop us.”  So saying, he steadied his nerves with a draught of brandy, and prepared for the labours of the day.

CHAPTER XXI.

AN UNEXPECTED BLOW.

The crisis at the African fields was even more acute than had been anticipated by the conspirators.  Nothing approaching to it had ever been known in South Africa before.  Diamonds went steadily down in value until they were selling at a price which no dealer would have believed possible, and the sale of claims reached such a climax that men were glad to get rid of them for the mere price of the plant and machinery erected at them.  The offices of the various dealers at Kimberley were besieged night and day by an importunate crowd of miners, who were willing to sell at any price in order to save something from the general ruin which they imagined was about to come upon the industry.  Some, more long-headed or more desperate than their neighbours, continued to work their claims and to keep the stones which they found until prices might be better.  As fresh mails came from the Cape, however, each confirming and amplifying the ominous news, these independent workers grew fewer and more faint-hearted, for their boys had to be paid each week, and where was the money to come from with which to pay them?  The dealers, too, began to take the alarm, and the most tempting offers would hardly induce them to give hard cash in exchange for stones which might prove to be a drug in the market.  Everywhere there was misery and stagnation.

Ezra Girdlestone was not slow to take advantage of this state of things, but he was too cunning to do so in a manner which might call attention to himself or his movements.  In his wanderings he had come across an outcast named Farintosh, a man who had once been a clergyman and a master of arts of Trinity College, Dublin, but who was now a broken-down gambler with a slender purse and a still more slender conscience.  He still retained a plausible manner and an engaging address, and these qualities first recommended him to the notice of the young merchant.  A couple of days after the receipt of the news from Europe, Ezra sent for this fellow and sat with him for some time on the verandah of the hotel, talking over the situation.