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'Sold!' Pik cried with exultation. But when he reached the car his partner berated him: 'You damned fool! Adams and Feinstein offered you six thousand. Cash in hand. What in hell are you doing?'

'I want to act like a gentleman,' Pik said. 'I like to deal with them. You should know that. When you offered to back me, there in the bardid I haggle over terms?' The Johannesburg man made no reply, so Pik finished: 'Tomorrow you and me find the others. Give them their share. Then we divide a fortune.'

'If you're going to be rich,' the partner said, 'would you consider taking a bath?' Pik said nothing. He was imagining the look on Netje's face when he told her that he had walked right into H. Steyn's office and demanded six thousand rand . . . and almost got it.

News of the Swartstroom find flashed across South Africa, and before nightfall was known in Tel Aviv, Amsterdam and New York. It alerted geologists at the Anglo-American offices on Main Street in Johannesburg, and especially the officials at Amalgamated Mines in Pretoria.

'This is our chance,' the president told the executive board that convened in special session on Saturday morning. 'What do we know about the Swartstroom?'

His men knew a great deal: 'Little stream flowing into Mozambique. Researched many times. Negative. It does lie in the general vicinity of the Premier Mine, but doesn't seem to be connected in any way. No logical pipe areas near it, and remember that it's cut off from Premier by those low mountains.'

'You think Prinsloo's find was an accidental?'

'No find is ever accidental, if it's been honestly reported.'

'What do we know about Prinsloo?'

'For over fifty years he's always prospected the possible streams. Never wasted his time where there were no signals.'

'What signals could he have seen?'

'Damned if I know. I've been up and down that stream six times. Never even saw garnets.'

'Well, he saw something. And we'd better go back.'

There was much discussion as to whom to send, and the geologist who made the earlier six explorations eagerly wanted another crack at it, but the president said, 'There's that American who's being expelled from our mines in Vwarda. Isn't he exceptionally good?'

When the young man's file was produced, the man from personnel summarized it rapidly: 'Born Ypsilanti 1948. University of Michigan. Graduate work at Colorado School of Mines in Golden. Worked at Broken Hill in Australia. Supervisor at Mount Isa. We offered him a job on the strong recommendation of all his professors and superiors. He worked at our place in Sierra Leone, then to Botswana, and finally as field manager in Vwarda.'

'His expulsion from Vwarda?' the president asked. 'Did it reflect on him. Morally, I mean?'

'Certainly not from our end. He did a splendid job for us.'

'I mean, was there a public scandal? Would we be hurt if . . .'

'Sir,' the personnel man said in a tired voice, 'it was the usual. I have the whole nonsense, too damned dismal to repeat. After independence he was kept on at our mines. When Richardson was fired on that trumped-up currency charge he became chief. Did a first-class job for us and for Vwarda. One of the few white men accepted by the new regime. But one day a committee went to the prime minister and accused him of racism. And he was expelled.'

'Is he racist? These southern Americans, you know.'

'I think Michigan is in the north. When Richardson was kicked out, the government insisted upon placing in all the second echelons Vwardians who could scarcely read or write. But they were cousins of the prime minister. So one day, when the entire operation threatened to collapse, our man fired them all. Said he had to have someone in command who could manage without coming to work at eleven in the morning in a Mercedes-Benz.'

'And those men,' the chairman suggested, 'formed the committee that charged him with racism.'

'The same,' the personnel man said.

'What's our chap's name again?'

'Philip Saltwood.'

'Related to that Saltwood woman who keeps provoking the government?'