Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/137

 was plenty of it, apparently, under the whole river bed; plenty, no doubt, to wash out the diamondiferous earth; perhaps even enough with proper management to run a little crushing mill if ever they should come to hard "blue."

There is no miracle so great as the change that a drink of sweet, fresh water will make in a man who is dying with thirst. If the Elixir of Life had been discovered it could have made no greater change in a man at the point of death. Madness becomes sanity, agony becomes a delight of physical existence, and the desert that was a Hell before seems a Paradise in those first few minutes of new life.

In less than half-an-hour after he had staggered into the valley, Tom Burrows was sitting on a boulder with a tin pannikin of water in one hand and a strip of biltong in the other, enjoying himself thoroughly. The mule