Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 12

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The two men drew the blanket up over him and turned to the other cot.

Jordan's long thick lashes fluttered like the wings of a beautiful butterfly, and he whimpered pitifully, unresisting as they stripped and sponged him. His little body was as sweetly formed as his features, but clad still in its puppy-fat so that his buttocks were round as apples and plump as a girl's; but his limbs were delicately boned and shapely, his feet and hands long and narrow and graceful.

"Mama," he whimpered. "I want my Mama."

The two men nursed the boys, taking turns day and night, everything else neglected or forgotten, an hour snatched here to water and tend the horses, another hour for a hurried journey into the camp to purchase patent medicine from a transport rider or scramble for the few vegetables offered for sale on the farmers" carts. But diamonds were forgotten, never mentioned in the hot little tent where the struggle for life went on, and the Devil's Own claims were abandoned and deserted.

In forty-eight hours Ralph had regained consciousness, in three days he was sitting up unaided and wolfing his food, in six days they could no longer keep him in his cot.

Jordan rallied briefly on the second day, becoming lucid and demanding his mother fretfully, and then remembered that she was gone, began weeping again and immediately began to sink. His life teetered, the pendulum swinging erratically back and forth, but each time he fell back the presence of death grew stronger in the baking canvas tent, until its stench overpowered the odour of fever.

The flesh melted from his body, burned away by the fever, and his skin took on a pearly translucent sheen, so that it seemed in that uncertain light of dusk and early dawn that the very outline of the delicate bonestructure showed through.

Jan Cheroot and Zouga nursed him in turns, one sleeping while the other watched, or, when neither could sleep, sitting together, seeking comfort and companionship from each other, trying to discount their helplessness in the face of onrushing death.

"He's young and strong," they told each other. "He will be all right also."

And day after day Jordan sank lower, his cheekbones rising up out of his flesh, and his eyes receding into deep cavities the colour of old bruises.

Exhausted with guilt and sorrow, with helpless worry, Zouga left the tent each dawn before sunrise to be the first at Market Square, perhaps there was a transport rider freshly arrived with medicines in his chests, and certainly there would be Boer farmers with cabbages and onions and, if he was lucky, a few wizened and halfgreen tomatoes, all of which would be sold half an hour after dawn.

On the tenth morning, as Zouga hurried back to the tent, he paused for a moment at the entrance, frowning angrily. The falcon statue had been dragged from the tent, and there was a long furrow scraped by its base in the loose dust. It stood now at a careless angle, leaning against the trunk of the scraggy camel-thorn tree that gave meagre shade to the camp.

The branches of the tree were festooned with black ribbons of dried springbuck meat, with saddlery and trek gear, so that the statue seemed to be part of this litter.

There was one of the camp's brown hens perched on the falcon's head, and it had dropped a long chalky smear of liquid excrement down the stone figure.

Still frowning, Zouga ducked into the tent. Jan Cheroot squatted beside Ralph's cot, and the two of them were deeply involved in a game of five stones, using polished pebbles of agate and quartz for the counters.

Jordan lay very still and pale, so that Zouga felt a lurch of dismay under his ribs. It was only when he stooped over the cot that he saw the rise and fall of Jordan's chest and caught the faint whisper of his breathing.

"Did you move the stone falcon?"

Jan Cheroot grunted without looking up from the shiny stones. "It seemed to trouble Jordie. He woke up crying again, and kept calling to it."

Zouga would have taken it further, but suddenly it did not seem worth the effort. He was so tired and dispirited.

He would bring the statue back into the tent later, he decided.

"There are a few sweet potatoes, nothing else," he grunted as he took up the vigil beside Jordan's cot.

Jan Cheroot made a stew of dried beans and mutton, and mashed this with the boiled potatoes. It was an unappetizing mess, but that evening, for the first time, Jordan did not roll his head away from the proffered spoon, and after that his recovery was startlingly swift.

He asked only once more after Aletta, when he and Zouga were alone in the tent.

"Has she gone to heaven, Papa?"

"Yes." The certainty in Zouga's tone seemed to reassure him.

"Will she be one of God's angels?"

"Yes, Jordie, and from now on she will always be there , watching over you."

The child thought about that seriously and then nodded contentedly, and the next day he seemed strong enough for Zouga to leave him in Ralph's charge while he and Jan Cheroot went up to the kopje and walked out along number 6 Roadway to look down on the Devil's Own claims.

All the mining equipment, shovels and picks, buckets and ropes, sheave wheels and pulleys had been stolen.

At the prices the transport riders were charging it would cost a hundred guineas to replace them.

"We will need men," Zouga said.

"What will you do when you have them?" Jan Cheroot asked.

"Dig the stuff out."

"And then?" the little Hottentot demanded with a malicious gleam in his dark eyes, his features wrinkled as a sour windfallen apple. "What do you then?" he insisted.

"I intend to find out," Zouga replied grimly. "We have wasted enough time here already."

"My dear fellow," Neville Pickering gave him that charming smile. "I'm delighted that you asked. Had you not, then I should have offered. It's always a little problematic for a new chum to find his feet," he coughed deferentially, and went on quickly, "not that you are a new chum, by any means, " That was a term usually reserved for the fresh-faced hopefuls newly arrived on the boat from "home". "Home' was England, even those who were colonial-born referred to it as "home".

"I'd bet a fiver to a pinch of giraffe dung that you know more about this country than any of us here."

"African born," Zouga admitted, "on the Zouga river up north in Khama's land; accounts for the odd name Zouga."

"By jove, didn't realize that, I must say!"

"Don't hold it against me." Zouga smiled lightly, but he knew that there were many who would. Home born was vastly superior to colonial born. It was for that reason that he had insisted that Aletta should make the long sea voyage with him when it seemed that her pregnancies would reach full term. Both Ralph and Jordan had been born in the same house in south London, and both had arrived back at Good Hope before they were weaned. They were home-born, that was his first gift to them.

Pickering glossed over the remark tactfully. He did not have to declare his own birth. He was an English gentleman, and nobody would ever mistake that.

"There are many parts of your book that fascinated me.

I'll teach you what I know about sparklers if you'll answer my questions. Bargain?"

Over the days that followed they bombarded each other with questions, Zouga demanding every detail of the process of raising and sorting the yellow gravel from the deepening pit, while Pickering kept turning the conversation back to the land to the north, asking about the tribes and the gold reefs, about the rivers and mountains and the wild animals that swarmed upon the plains and in the lonely forests that Zouga had conjured up so vividly in Hunter's Odyssey.

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