Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 61

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The lump of stone was a dull ugly mottled thing across which the steel tools had left paler weals and furrows.

"Sixteen of us," Ralph went on. "We worked on it all morning." He opened his hands, and showed them palms upwards. The horny yellow calluses had been torn open, the raw flesh beneath was mushy and caked with dust and earth. "All morning we broke our hearts and our picks on it, and that bloody little chip weighs less than half a ton."

Slowly Zouga stooped over the edge of the skip and touched the stone. it was as cold as his heart felt, and its colour was dark mottled blue.

"The blue," Ralph confirmed quietly. "We have hit the blue."

"Dynamite or blasting gelatine," Ralph said. "That's the only way we'll ever move it."

He was stripped to the waist, a polish of sweat on his arms, and little drops of it hanging like dew in the thick hair of his chest.

The tombstone of blue marble lay at his feet, and Ralph rested on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The blows he had swung at the rock had raised bursts of sparks and tiny puffs of white dust that stung their nostrils like pepper, but had not cracked the rock through.

"We cannot blast in the pit," Zouga said tiredly. "Can you imagine two hundred diggers firing away dynamite, every one doing it when and how he wanted?" He shook his head.

"There is no other way," Ralph said. "No other way to get it out."

"And if you do get it out? Jordan asked from the verandah where he had stood without speaking for the past hour.

"What do you mean?" Zouga demanded. He could hear the strain in his own voice, and knew how close, his anger and frustration were to the surface.

"What will you do with it when you do get it out?

Jordan persisted, and they all stared at the awful blue lump.

"There are no diamonds in that stuff." Jordan said it for them.

"How do we know that?" Ralph snapped at him, his voice rough and ugly with the same tension that gripped Zouga.

"I know it," Jordan said flatly. "I can sense it, just look at it. It's hard and bleak and bare."

Nobody replied to that, and Jordan shook his curls.regretfully. "Even if there were diamonds in it, how would you free them from the blue? You can't smash them out with sledgehammers. You'd end up with diamond dust."

"Ralph," Zouga turned away from Jordan, "this stuff, this blue, it's only on the east face, isn't it?"

"So far." Ralph nodded. "But, "

"I want you to cover up the east face," Zouga told him bluntly. "Shovel gravel over the exposed rock. Nobody else must see it. Nobody else must know."

Ralph nodded, and Zouga went on, "We will keep on raising the yellow gravel from the other sections as though nothing has happened; and nobody, not one of you, is to say a word about, about Us having struck the blue." He looked directly at Jordan. "Do you understand, not a word to anybody."

Zouga sat easily in the saddle, riding with the long stirrups of a Boer hunter or of a born colonial.

He knew that Rhodes was leaving in the next few weeks, to keep his term at Oxford University. Perhaps his imminent departure would make his judgement hasty.

"Let's hope so, anyway." And his mount flicked his ears back to listen to his voice.

Steady, old man." Zouga touched his withers, feeling a quick twist of guilt at his intentions. He knew he was going to try and sell faulty goods, and he steeled himself against his own conscience.

He touched his mount's flank with his knee and turned him off the rutted dusty track through the break in the milkwood fence and into Rhodes" camp.

Rhodes sat with his back to the mud wall of the shack, a mug in his hand, the big shaggy leonine head cocked to something that Pickering was saying.

The talk of the diggings was that he was already a multimillionaire, at least on paper, and Zouga had seen the champagne bucket of uncut diamonds poured out onto his lunch table. Yet here Rhodes was sitting on a soap box in the dusty yard, dressed in shabby ill-fitting clothes, drinking from a chipped enamel mug.

Zouga dropped his reins and his horse stopped obediently, and when he slipped off its back there was no need for him to tether it. It would stand as long as Zouga wanted it to.

He crossed the yard towards the small group of men, and Zouga smiled to himself. Rhodes mug might be chipped, but it contained a twenty-year-old cognac. Rhodes' seat might be a soapbox, but he sat it as though it were a throne, and the men that sat around him like courtiers or supplicants were all rich and powerful men, the new aristocracy of the diggings.

One of these rose now and came to meet Zouga, laughing lightly and brandishing a rolled newspaper.

"By god, Major, they say you need only speak of the devil." He clapped Zouga's shoulder. "I hope you are taking this assault on our masculine pride as seriously as we are, and have come to offer to champion our cause."

"I don't understand." Zouga's protest was lost in the laughter and friendly pummelling as they came to crowd around him. Only Rhodes had not left his seat against the wall, but even he was smiling.

"Let him read it for himself, Pickling," Rhodes suggested mildly, and Pickering handed Zouga the news sheet with a flourish.

It was a copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser, so newly printed that the ink smudged beneath Zouga's fingers.

"Front page," said Pickering gleefully. "The headline."

GAUNTLET THROWN DOWN LADY INSULTED SEEKS SATISFACTION This morning your editor was privileged to receive a visit from a beautiful and distinguished visitor to Kimberley. missis Louise Sint John is the wife of a hero of the American Civil War, and in her own right a noted equestrienne.

Her stallion "Shooting Star" is a remarkable example of the recently developed American breed known as Palqminumber He is a former Louisiana champion of breed, and quite one of the most magnificent animals ever to be seen on the Diamond Fields.

missis Sint John attempted to enter her mount in the regular point-to-point meetings organized by the Kimberley Sporting Club, but was informed by Major Ballantyne, the Club President, that she was barred from riding Zouga skipped quickly over the next few paragraphs: "Simply because I happen to be a woman... insufferable masculine arrogance."

He smiled and shook his head.

,"Challenge the good major to ride against me over any course of his choice for any purse he stipulates."

Now Zouga laughed delightedly, and tossed the paper back to Pickering.

"The lady has good bottom", he admitted, "in both senses of the word."

"I will lend you King Chaka,"Beit promised. He was a strong hunter, English and Arab blood, from one of the famous Cape studs. Beit had paid three hundred guineas for him.

Zouga shook his head and shot an affectionate glance at his own hunting horse standing across " the yard. "That won't be necessary, I shan't be riding."

There was a howl of jovial protest from them all.

"By God, Ballantyne, you can't let us down."

"This damned vixen will say you funked it, old man."

"My wife will crow for a week, you'll ruin my marriage."

Zouga held up his hands. "I'm sorry, gentlemen. This is merely a bit of female nonsense, and you can quote me.

You won't ride, then?"

"Certainly not." Zouga was smiling, but his voice had a brittle edge. "I have more serious matters to concern me.

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