“I put it in my pocket with the concession and went on searching, but found nothing more. I was going down the hill towards the valley when it struck me that perhaps this man had found gold, and the excuse for getting the concession was a bit of artfulness. I sent a boy back to the camp for a pick, a hammer and a spade, and when he returned I began to make a cutting in the side of the hill. There was nothing to guide me—no outcrop, such as you usually find near a true reef—but I hadn’t been digging for an hour before I struck the richest bed of conglomerate I’ve ever seen. I was either dreaming, or my good angel had at last led me to the one place in the hill where gold could be found. I had previously sent the boys back to the camp and told them to wait for me, because, if I did strike metal, I did not want the fact advertised all over Angola, where they’ve been looking for gold for years.
“Understand, it was not a reef in the ordinary sense of the word, it was all conglomerate, and the wider I made my cutting, the wider the bed appeared. I took the pick to another part of the hill and dug again, with the same result—conglomerate. It was as though nature had thrown up a huge golden hump on the earth. I covered both cuttings late that night and went back to camp. (I was stalked by a leopard in the low bush, but managed to get him.)
“Early next morning, I started off and tried another spot, and with the same result; first three feet of earth, then about six inches of shale, and then conglomerate. I tried to work through the bed, thinking that it might be just a skin, but I was saved much exertion by coming upon a deep rift in the hill about twenty feet wide at the top and tapering down to about fifty feet below the ground level. This gave me a section to work on, and as near as I can judge, the conglomerate bed is something over fifty feet thick and I’m not so sure that it doesn’t occur again after an interval of twenty feet or more, for I dug more shale and had a showing of conglomerate at the very bottom of the ravine.
“What does this mean, Johnny? It means that we have found a hill of gold; not solid gold, as in the storybooks, but gold that pays ounces and probably pounds to the ton. How the prospectors have missed it all these years I can’t understand, unless it is that they’ve made their cuttings on the north side of the hill, where they have found nothing but slate and sandstone. The little river in the valley must be feet deep in alluvial, for I panned the bed and got eight ounces of pure gold in an hour—and that was by rough and ready methods. I had to be careful not to make the boys too curious, and I am breaking camp tomorrow, and I want you to cable or send me £500 to Mossamedes. The statuette I’m bringing home is worth all that. I would bring more, only I can’t trust these Angola boys; a lot of them are mission boys and can read Portuguese, and they’re too friendly with a half-breed called Villa, who is an agent of Oberzohn & Smitts; the traders and I know these people to be the most unscrupulous scoundrels on the coast.
“I shall be at Mossamedes about three weeks after you get this letter, but I don’t want to get back to the coast in a hurry, otherwise people are going to suspect I have made a strike.”
Leon put the letter down.
“There is the story in a nutshell, gentlemen,” he said. “I don’t, for one moment, believe that Mr. Barberton showed Villa the letter. It is more likely that one of the educated natives he speaks about saw it and reported it to Oberzohn’s agent. Portuguese is the lingua franca of that part of the coast. Barberton was killed to prevent his meeting the girl and telling her of his find—incidentally, of warning her to apply for a renewal of the concession. It wasn’t even necessary that they should search his belongings to recover the letter, because once they knew of its existence and the date which Barberton had apparently confounded with the date the letter was written, their work was simply to present an application to the Colonial Office at Lisbon. It was quite different after Barberton was killed, when they learnt or guessed that the letter was in Mr. Lee’s possession.”
Meadows agreed.
“That was the idea behind Oberzohn’s engagement of Mirabelle Leicester?”
“Exactly, and it was also behind the attack upon Heavytree Farm. To secure this property they must get her away and keep her hidden either until it is too late for her to apply for a renewal, or until she has been bullied or forced into appointing a nominee.”
“Or married,” said Leon briskly. “Did that idea occur to you? Our tailor-made friend, Monty Newton, may have had matrimonial intentions. It would have been quite a good stroke of business to secure a wife and a large and
