Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/20

 I.

THE DIAMOND DOG.

might go far afield before you found two more queerly associated knights of industry than the Jew of Whitechapel and the Celestial of Singapore, who were sitting together over a bottle of brandy in a little back room behind a tin coolie store in Old De Beers Road, Kimberley, late one night in the early eighties. Yet it was no very uncommon thing here, in this vortex of cosmopolitan villainy into which the magical glitter of the diamond, more fatal in its fascination