Page:Knaves of Diamonds.pdf/71

 not coming back to Kimberley till I've done my business down in Port Elizabeth. Chin chin!"

It took all the inspector's self-control to enable him to rise to the occasion, but he did it. He took his licking like a man and a sportsman, and his subordinates and the Cape boy just grinned and drank their liquors, for, after all, I.D.B. is but a gamble, and the gods look sometimes this way and sometimes that. The game had been smartly played, and they looked upon the winner rather with admiration than with enmity.

That round of drinks was drunk, and then another and another, and then—alas for the weakness of the best-balanced human nature, Mr. Seth Salter, with a confidence born of the fulness of his triumph, left the bar-room with the diamonds in his pocket, and went out into the night to see his discomfited friends off on their homeward journey. Exactly