The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 58

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"Like a mole in the earth's gut Bazo found the secret way-" The first verse of the song commemorated the impi's assault on the mountain stronghold of Pemba, the wizard, when so long ago Bazo, had climbed the subterranean passage to the top of the cliff. It was as a reward for this feat that Lobengula had promoted Bazo to and una had given him the head ring and allowed him to "go in to the women and choose Tanase as his wife.

Dancing alone in the forest, Bazo sang the other verses. Each of them had been composed after a famous victory, all except the last.

That verse was the only one that had never been sung by the full regiment in battle array. It was the verse for the last charge of the Moles, when with Bazo at their head, they had run onto the laager on the banks of the Shangani river. Bazo had composed it himself, as he lay in the cave of the Matopos, near unto death with the mortification of the bullet wounds in his body.

"Why do you weep, widows of Shangani, When the three-legged guns laugh so loudly?

Why do you weep, little sons of the Moles, When your fathers did the king's bidding?" Now suddenly there was another verse. It came into Bazo's head complete and perfect, as though it had been sung ten thousand times before.

"The Moles are beneath the earth, "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane. Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" And Bazo, the Axe, shouted it to the ms asa trees in their soft mantles of red leaves, and the trees bowed slightly to the east wind, as though they, too, were listening.

Ralph Ballantyne stopped at King's Lynn. He threw the reins to Jan Cheroot, the old Hottentot hunter.

R'Water them, old man, and fill the grain bags for me. I will be away again in an hour." Then he ran up onto the veranda of the sprawling thatched homestead, and his stepmother came out to meet him, her consternation turning to delight, when she recognized him.

"Oh Ralph, you startled me "Where is my father?" Ralph demanded, as he kissed her cheek, and Louise's expression changed to match the gravity of his.

"In the north section, they are branding the calves but what is it, Ralph? I haven't seen you like this." He ignored the question.

"The north section, that's six hours" ride. I cannot spare the time to go to him." "It's serious," she decided. "Don't torture me, Ralph."

"I'm sorry." He laid his hand on her arm. "There is some dreadful murrain sweeping down out of the north. It hit my cattle on the Gwaai river, and we lost them all, over one hundred head in twelve hours."

Louise stared at him. "Perhaps-" she whispered, but he cut across her brusquely.

"It's killing everything, giraffe and buffalo and oxen, only the horses have not been touched yet. But, by God, Louise, I saw buffalo lying dead and stinking on each side of the track as I rode southwards yesterday. Animals that had been strong and healthy the day before."

"What must we do, Ralph?" "Sell," he answered. "Sell all the cattle at any price, before it reaches us." He turned and shouted to Jan Cheroot.

"Bring the notebook from my saddlebag." While he scribbled a note for his father, Louise asked, "When did you last eat?" "I cannot remember."

He ate the slabs of cold venison and raw onion and strong cheese on slices of stone-ground bread, and washed it down with a jug of beer, while he gave Jan Cheroot his instructions. "Speak to nobody else but my father. Tell nobody else of this thing. Go swiftly, Jan Cheroot."

But Ralph was up in the saddle and away before the little Hottentot was ready to ride.

Ralph circled wide of the town of Bulawayo, to avoid meeting an acquaintance and to reach the telegraph line at a lonely place, well away from the main road. Ralph's own construction gangs had laid the telegraph line, so he knew every mile of it, every vulnerable point and how most effectively to cut off Bulawayo and Matabeleland from Kimberley and the rest of the world.

He tethered his horses at the foot of one of the telegraph poles and shinned up it to the cluster of porcelain insulators and the gleaming copper wires. He used a magnus hitch on a leather thong to hold the ends of the wire from falling to earth, and then cut between the knots. The wire parted with a singing twang, but the thong held, and when he climbed down to the horses and looked up, he knew it would need a skilled linesman to detect the break.

He flung himself back into the saddle, and booted the horse into a gallop. At noon he intersected the road and turned southwards along it. He changed horses every hour, and rode until it was too dark to see the tracks. Then he knee-haltered the horses, and slept like a dead man on the hard ground. Before dawn, he ate a hunk of cheese and a slice of the rough bread Louise had put into his saddlebag, and was away again with the first softening of the eastern sky.

At midmorning, he turned out of the track, and found the telegraph line where it ran behind a flat-topped kopje. He knew the Company linesmen hunting for the first break in the line would be getting close to it by now, and there may be somebody in the telegraph office in Bulawayo anxious to send a report to Mr. Rhodes about the terrible plague that was ravaging the herds.

Ralph cut the line in two places and went on. In the late afternoon, one of his horses broke down. It had been ridden too hard, and he turned it loose beside the road. If a lion did not get it, then perhaps one of his drivers would recognize the brand.

The next day, fifty miles from the Shashi river, he met one of his own convoys coming up from the south. There were twenty-six wagons in the charge of a white overseer. Ralph stopped only long enough to commandeer the man's horses, leave his own exhausted animals with him, and then he rode on. He cut the telegraph lines twice more, once on each side of the Shashi river, before he reached the railhead.

He came upon his surveyer first, a red-haired Scot. With a gang of blacks, they were working five miles ahead of the main crews, and cutting the lines for the rails. Ralph did not even dismount.

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