The Edgar Wallace Reader Of Mystery And Adventure by Edgar Wallace

Author:Edgar Wallace [Wallace, Edgar]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Short Stories
Publisher: Roy Glashan's Library
Published: 2013-01-25T23:00:00+00:00

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9. THE TREASURE OF THE KALAHARI

Romance may come on the heels of tragedy.

So it came to Mirabelle Maynard at Red Cot farm in Sussex; for when the shock of her brother’s death had passed, she found a certain tender interest in the letters which arrived, sometimes from Bulawayo, sometimes from Kimberley, but as often as not bearing the postmark of the mail- sorting van. They were well expressed letters in a crabbed handwriting, and they told her of things that left her a little breathless; and when she had read them through she would sit down and indite epistles almost as voluminous, and these she addressed to the Rev. George Smith at a little store in Mafeking. She did not know that it was a little store, but the Reverend George very kindly told her so.

He did not tell her that it was a Kaffir store, and that the letters, by arrangement, were sent on to him, since his own addresses were uncertain and shifting. But he did hint that he was young and single and that he was good-looking. He said, amongst other things, that he had left the ministry and was devoting his life and energy to securing justice for her and punishment for the venal officials who were endeavoring to rob her of her inheritance.

Upon a certain day, Mirabelle Maynard mortgaged and let her farm, booked a first-class passage to Capetown on the Dover Castle, and disappeared from England. She was destined never to meet the romantic clergyman whose summons brought her feet to the corridors of adventure…

There was a time, in the queer days following the rising and the subsequent rush to the diamond diggings westward of Fourteen Streams, when the citizens of a certain Bechuanaland town decided that one Walter Vellors, who was awaiting execution at the fine and new stone gaol for the murder of a storekeeper, was not really a bad fellow as fellows went; and anyway, these damned storekeepers… Peruvian Jews most of them… too bad that a fellow like Walter… or was it Jim…? should swing, eh, boys?

They got up a petition, and they had a meeting, and they telegraphed the legislature at Capetown, and finally they held up Zeederberg’s coach eighteen miles outside of Geelow, and took therefrom the official and only hangman the country possessed. Him they made so gloriously drunk that his name appears first of the signatories to another petition, which begins:

“We free men of Bechuanaland, holding capital punishment in abhorrence—etc.,” and may be seen to this day framed in the office of the Minister of Justice.

Then the same free men seduced from their lofty duty the chief warder (who was Governor) and three common warders (two half-colored), so that the Governor and warders and condemned prisoner fraternized in maudlin fashion.

Into this electric atmosphere rode Captain Bill Stark, a lean, brown, expectant man.

He came into Adderley Street (so they had christened a strip of dust that divided one line of tin shanties from the other),

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