Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 67

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Jordan led the mules out into the rutted road and swung them towards the settlement. He walked bareheaded in the sunlight. He was tall and slim and he moved with a peculiar grace, stepping lightly and lithely in the soft red dust. His chin was up, his eyes focused far ahead, with the dreaming, yet all-seeing, gaze of a poet.

Men and women, especially women, looked after him as he passed and their expressions softened, but Jordan walked on as though he were alone on a deserted street.

Though his lips never moved, the words of the invocation to the goddess Panes kept running through his mind.

"- Why did you run away? You would have been better with us -" So many times he had called to the goddess, the words were part of his very existence. "Will you not come back to us, great Panes?"

The goddess was going, and Jordan did not believe he could support the agony of it. Statue, goddess and mother were all one in his mind, his last link with Aletta. Aletta who had become Panes.

He felt desolate, bereaved as though of his dearest love, and when he reached the milkwood fence of Rhodes' camp, he stopped and wild fancies seized him. He would take the goddess, run with her into the wilderness, hide her in some distant cave. His heart bounded. No, he would take her back to the ancient ruined city from which she had come, that far place in the north from which his father had stolen her, where she would be safe.

Then with a plunge of his spirits and a slide of despair in his guts he knew that these were childish dreamings and that he was no longer a child.

With a light touch on the lead mule's bridle, he guided her into the camp, and Rhodes was standing at the front door of his bungalow, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves. He was talking quietly, urgently to a man below the stoep.

Jordan recognized him as one of the Central Diamond Company overseers.

When Rhodes looked up and saw Jordan, he dismissed the overseer with a curt word and a nod.

jordan," Rhodes" greeting was grave, perhaps he sensed the mood of the young man before him, "you have brought it?"

When Jordan nodded, he turned back to the waiting overseer.

"Bring four of your best men," he ordered. "I want this cart unloaded, and carefully. It's a valuable work of art."

He watched keenly as they untied the ropes that held the tarpaulin in place, but cocked the large curly head when Jordan spoke.

"If we have to lose it, then I'm glad it's you that it goes to, mister Rhodes."

"The bird means something to you also, Jordan?"

"Everything," Jordan said simply, and then caught himself; that sounded ridiculous. mister Rhodes would think him strange. "I mean, it has been in my family since before I was born. I don't really know what it will be like without that goddess. I don't really want to think about losing it."

"You don't have to lose it, Jordan."

Jordan looked at him, unable to bring himself to ask the meaning.

"You can follow the goddess, Jordan."

"Please don't tease me, mister Rhodes."

1you are bright and willing, you have studied Pitman's shorthand, and you have an excellent pen," Rhodes said.

"I need a secretary, somebody who knows and loves diamonds as I do. Somebody whom I feel easy with.

Somebody I know and whom I like. Somebody I can trust. Jordan felt a vast soaring rush of joy, something sharper, brighter and more poignant than he had ever known before. He could not speak; he stood rooted and stared into the pale blue and beautiful eyes of the man whom he had worshipped for so many years.

"Well, Jordan, I am offering you the position. Do you want it?"

"Yes," Jordan said softly. "More than anything on earth, mister Rhodes."

"Good, then your first task is to find a place to set up the bird."

The white overseer had pulled the tarpaulin aside to expose the statue, and the sheet hung down over the side of the cart.

"Easy now," he shouted at the gang of black labourers.

"Get a rope on it. Don't drop it. Watch that end, damn YOU.

They swarmed over the statue, too many of them for the job, getting in one another's way, and Jordan's heady joy at Rhodes" offer was submerged in a quick stab of concern for the safety of the bird.

He started forward to set the ropes himself, but at that moment there was the clatter of hooves and Neville Pickering rode into the yard. He was astride his mare, a highly bred and finely mettled bay, and he reined her down to a walk.

He shot a glance at Jordan, and his face clouded for an instant, a quick show of irritation, or of something else.

With a sudden intuitive flash Jordan realized that Pickering resented his presence here.

Then as quickly as it had come the shadow passed from Pickering's handsome features and he smiled that sunny charming smile of his and looked down at the statue in the cart.

"What have we here?" His tone was gay, his manner carefree and relaxed. As always he was elegantly dressed, the drape of broadcloth showing off his broad shoulders, the tooled leather belt emphasizing his narrow waist, as the polished half boots did the length and shape of his legs. The low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat was cocked forward over one eye, and he was smiling.

"Oh, the bird." He looked up at Rhodes on the stoep of the bungalow. "So you have it at last, as you said you would. I should congratulate you."

The day had been still and too hot, it would change soon. The wind would-come out of the south and the temperature would plunge, but until then the only movements of air were the sudden little dust devils that sprang out of nowhere, small but violent whirlwinds that lifted a high churning vortex of dust and dry grass and dead leaves a hundred or more feet into the still sky as they sped in a wildly erratic course across the plain, and then just as suddenly collapsed and disintegrated into nothingness again.

One of these dust devils rose now, on the open ground beyond the milkwood hedge. It tore a dense red cloud of spinning dust off the surface of the road, then swerved abruptly and raced into the yard of Rhodes" camp. Jordan felt his heart gripped in a cold vice of superstitious dread.

"Panes!" The cry was silent in his head. "Great Panes!"

He knew what that wind was " he knew the presence of the goddess, for how many times had she come to his invocation? Suddenly the whole yard was filled with the swirling torrents of dust, and the wind battered them. It flew into Jordan's face, so that he must slit his eyes against it. It flung his soft shiny curls into his face, and it flattened his shirt against his chest and his lean flat belly.

The broad-brimmed hat sailed from Pickering's head, the tails of his coat flogged into the small of his back and he lifted one hand to protect his face from the stinging sand and sharp pieces of twig and grass.

Then the wind got under the ragged old tarpaulin, and filled it with a crack like a ship's mainsail gybing onto the ovvosite tack.

The harsh canvas lashed the bay mare's head, and she reared up on her back legs, whinnying shrilly with panic.

So high she went that Jordan thought she would go over on her back, and through the red raging curtain of dust, he jumped to catch her head; but he was an instant too late. Pickering had one hand to his face, and the mare's leap took him off balance; he went over backwards out of the saddle, and he hit hard earth with the back of his neck and one shoulder.

The rushing sound of the whirlwind, the grunt of air driven from Pickering's lungs and the meaty thump of his fall almost covered the tiny snapping sound of bone breaking somewhere deep in his body.

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