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It was the same with the second, a Texan—Kimberley adventurer, up-country hunter, who dreamed in millions, though to-day broken in boots—he had all but fixed-up with Rolls, but then cooled off, and when he suddenly began to throw money about, Rolls understood that this one, too, had been soaped.

"They're at us again," Rolls said, when Cobby got back from a trip to a vlei up north, whither two mining-engineers had taken him to shoot veldt-duck and antelope. "They reckon I'm too wide-awake and chock-full of six-shooters to be knocked out from a corner over here, where I'm a cock in my own yard; but they aim now to make us a pair of lone hands among a crowd of blacks——"

"It doesn't seem to me of great importance," Cobby remarked.

"Blacks do such things as mutiny, don't they?" Rolls demanded.

"Well, there are still three days to try in. If you come across any possible man, strike hands with him on the spot, then send him out of the town beyond temptation."

Which was what Cobby himself did on the following evening; for, as he was smoking on his hotel stoep, the light of day then dying out, a man appeared before him—the man whom he had seen at the dock in England, and then on the liner; and said the man: "Here we are again, sir! I got it from a certain party that you are after a white for up-country trekking, and I'm in it, if you'll have me—stones, gold, ivory, makes no matter to me."