The covenant - James A. Michener [591]
'I'm a diamond man,' Pik explained, and if anyone pointed out that he was working emeralds, he would apologize: 'Right now I'm gathering capital, because I got me eye on a stream up north . . .' He would hesitate, turn his rheumy eyes upon the stranger, and ask, 'Would you maybe want to back me? I know where there's diamonds for certain.'
In this way, in the summer of 1977, Pik found his fifth partner, a commercial traveler from Johannesburg who had always wanted to participate in the diamond madness. They had met in a bar, and when Pik displayed his Digger's Certificate with its endless renewals, the man said, 'I been looking for a fellow just like you. How much do you need?'
In the excited discussion which ensued, the Johannesburg man had the good sense to ask, 'By the way, has anyone else staked you? I mean, would there be outstanding claims ahead of mine?'
For Pik Prinsloo to lie about his diamond business was impossible: 'I owe four men ahead of you.' Then, grabbing the stranger's arm, he added quickly, 'But they was long ago. Maybe twenty years.'
The Johannesburg man drew back, looked at the old digger, and hesitated. But then he saw that wizened face, the lips without teeth, so that nose and chin almost met, the torn undershirt, the sockless feet and the deep fire burning inside the watery eyes, and he knew that if he intended gambling on some self-deceived diamond man, this was the kind he had been seeking.
'How much would you need to move north?' he asked quietly.
Without hesitation, for he had been calculating such problems for fifty years, Pik replied, 'Three hundred and fifty rand.'
'You have it,' the man said, and that was how in the New Year of 1978, Prinsloo and his nagging sister drove their donkeys north to the Swartstroom, parked their house-wagon in a field some miles north of Sannie's Tits, and started their prospecting.
Old Pik had been attracted to this particular stream by signs he had seen many years before, the harbingers of diamonds: agates and flecks of reddish garnet mixed in with ilmenite, the jet-black rock which had first been identified and named at the Ilmen Mountains in Russia. The more he studied the stream in those days, the more convinced he had become that it must be diamantiferous. 'The bantoms are heavy and black,' he told his sister in their filthy wagon. 'There's got to be diamonds here.'
'If there was,' she grumbled, 'somebody else would've noticed.'
'Maybe somebody else wasn't as smart as me,' he said, but when weeks passed without a find, she insisted that he head south to sites which had been proclaimed.
Now he still had more than three hundred rand, enough, counting his state pension, to live on for three years at the frugal rate at which he and his sister ate. One huge can of baked beans, the top knocked off by a dulled opener, a pot of mealie meal and some scraggy mutton would suffice for three days, bent forks scraping over the tin plates. 'Ek se vir jou, Netje. [I'm telling you, Netje.] There's diamonds this time, and I'm the one to find the damned things.'
Jamming his beaten hat with its torn wide brim onto his uncombed head, he hunched up his shoulders as if marching to war, and went forth to probe the Swartstroom.
Fortunately, the level of the stream was low, so that he could concentrate on the meanders of this remnant of the mighty rivers which had cut away the earth. He worked only the inside of the bends, for there the water slowed and dropped whatever heavy objects it might be carrying. If there were diamonds, they would be hiding here, so day after day he dug the gravel and passed it through his sieves. When he eliminated the larger rocks, which