district;
although Jacobs considered his father well-to-do, the farmers were,
from our point of view, a rather poverty-stricken lot, and they had
worked out a mutual-aid system. Jacobs, Mr. Beet complained, had been
known to tell the story of the find differently; according to the
variant account, Van Niekerk had asked Mrs. Jacobs to keep an eye out
for pretty stones, the boy had turned the pebble over to her, and she
had popped it into her workbox and then given it to her neighbor as a
matter of course.
"What's the difference?" I asked. "One story is as good as the other."
Mr.
Beet snorted. "All the difference in the world," he said. "We don't
know whether Van Niekerk was actually on the lookout for diamonds or
whether a pretty stone just happened to catch his eye. And that
business about scratching a window-pane—that's really exasperating. It
would indicate that Van Niekerk knew he had a diamond. But if he did,
why did he go and sell it to O'Reilly for only a few pounds?"
Jack
O'Reilly was a peddler. He lived in the settlement of Colesberg, a
hundred miles or so southeast of the De Kalk farm, and traveled a
regular route, making a circuit of the farms in the district. He hunted
a little on the side—mostly lions—and was a famous shot. Whether or not
Van Niekerk knew he was selling a diamond, O'Reilly was convinced he
was buying one. He wrote his name on a windowpane with the stone, and
then he sent it to Dr. W. Guybon Atherstone, a mineralogist in
Grahamstown, a town down near the coast, for an expert opinion.
Atherstone, in his turn, seems to have consulted various people,
including the Catholic Bishop Richards, who wrote his name on a windowpane with the stone. The mineralogist and
