Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/25

 You know me, Loo, and we've done business together before now, and I've always treated you fair and square, haven't I? If it's a likely lay, it's worth twenty, no, I'll make it fifty, there, fifty down to let me into it, and the usual terms afterwards. That's good enough, ain't it? I can't speak no fairer than that, can I, Loo, old pal?"

The Jew spoke eagerly, almost caressingly, to the yellow heathen whom he would have passed by without a wink in Main Street. There he was Augustus Löwenfeldt, licensed diamond broker, stock and share dealer, and all the rest of it, a man with a reputation to lose, as reputations went then in Kimberley, and with a future before him; but here in Loo Chai's back sitting-room he was just what the heathen was, neither better nor worse, an I.D.B., a "fence," as they would have called him in his native Whitechapel, and, like him, a potential felon, and so there