He awakened in a small, bare room three days later, naked except for the bandages that covered his body. The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was a buxom, middle-aged woman seated at the side of his cot.
“Wh—?” His voice was a croak. He could not get the words out.
“Easy, dear. You’ve been sick.” She gently lifted his swathed head and gave him a sip of water from a tin cup.
Jamie managed to prop himself up on one elbow. “Where—?” He swallowed and tried again. “Where am I?”
“You’re in Magerdam. I’m Alice Jardine. This is my boarding house. You’re going to be fine. You just need a good rest. Now lie back.”
Jamie remembered the strangers who tried to take his backpack away, and he was filled with panic. “My things, where—?” He tried to rise from the cot, but the woman’s gentle voice stopped him.
“Everything’s safe. Not to worry, son.” She pointed to his backpack in a corner of the room.
Jamie lay back on the clean white sheets. I got here. I made it. Everything is going to be all right now.
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Alice Jardine was a blessing, not only to Jamie McGregor, but to half of Magerdam. In that mining town filled with adventurers, all sharing the same dream, she fed them, nursed them, encouraged them. She was an Englishwoman who had come to South Africa with her husband, when he decided to give up his teaching job in Leeds and join the diamond rush. He had died of fever three weeks after they arrived, but she had decided to stay on. The miners had become the children she never had.
She kept Jamie in bed for four more days, feeding him, changing his bandages and helping him regain his strength. By the fifth day, Jamie was ready to get up.
“I want you to know how grateful I am to you, Mrs. Jardine. I can’t pay you anything. Not yet. But you’ll have a big diamond from me one day soon. That’s a promise from Jamie McGregor.”
She smiled at the intensity of the handsome young boy. He was still twenty pounds too thin, and his gray eyes were filled with the horror he had been through, but there was a strength about him, a determination that was awesome. He’s different from the others, Mrs. Jardine thought.
Jamie, dressed in his freshly washed clothes, went out to explore the town. It was Klipdrift on a smaller scale. There were the same tents and wagons and dusty streets, the flimsily built shops and the crowds of prospectors. As Jamie passed a saloon, he heard a roar from inside and entered. A noisy crowd had gathered around a red-shirted Irishman.
“What’s going on?” Jamie asked.
“He’s going to wet his find.”
“He’s what?”
“He struck it rich today, so he stands treat for the whole saloon. He pays for as much liquor as a saloon-full of thirsty men can swallow.”
Jamie joined in a conversation with several disgruntled diggers sitting at a round table.
“Where you from, McGregor?”
“Scotland.”
“Well, I don’t know what horseshit they fed you in Scotland, but there ain’t enough diamonds in this fuckin’ country to pay expenses.”
They talked of other camps: Gong Gong, Forlorn Hope, Delports, Poormans Kopje, Sixpenny Rush…
The diggers all told the same story—of months doing the backbreaking work of moving boulders, digging into the hard soil and squatting over the riverbank sifting the dirt for diamonds. Each day a few diamonds were found; not enough to make a man rich, but enough to keep his dreams alive. The mood of the town was a strange mixture of optimism and pessimism. The optimists were arriving; the pessimists were leaving.
Jamie knew which side he was on.
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He approached the red-shirted Irishman, now bleary-eyed with drink, and showed him Van der Merwe’s map.
The man glanced at it and tossed it back to Jamie. “Worthless. That whole area’s been picked over. If I was you, I’d try Bad Hope.”
Jamie could not believe it. Van der Merwe’s map was what had brought him there, the lodestar that was going to make him rich.