The Dark of the Sun - Smith Wilbur - Страница 66

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for Shermaine and the others.

In his mind he saw again the two children lying where Hendry had shot

them. The smear of mingled blood and chocolate across the boy's cheek.

He deserves to die, prayed Bruce, so please don't let it rain.

As long as the night had been, that quickly came the dawn. A grey dawn,

gloomy with low cloud.

"Will it go?" Bruce asked for the twentieth time, and this time

Jacque looked up from where he knelt beside the spoor.

"We can try now." They moved off slowly with Jacque leading, doubled

over to peer shortsightedly at the earth and Bruce close behind him,

bedevilled by his impatience and anxiety, lifting his head every dozen

paces to the dirty grey roof of cloud.

The light strengthened and the circle of their vision opened from

six feet to as many yards, to a hundred, so they could make out the tops

of the ivory palms, shaggy against the grey cloud.

Jacque broke into a trot and ahead of them was the end of the clearing

and the beginning of the forest. Two hundred yards beyond rose the

massive pile of the kopie, in the early light looking more than ever

like a castle, turreted and sheer. There was something formidable in its

outline. It seemed to brood above them and Bruce looked away from it

uneasily.

Cold and with enough weight behind it to sting, the first raindrop

splashed against Bruce's cheek.

"Oh, no!" he protested, and stopped. Jacque straightened up from the

spoor and he too looked at the sky.

"It is finished. In five minutes there will be nothing to follow."

Another drop hit Bruce's upturned face and he blinked back the tears of

anger and frustration that pricked the rims of his eyelids.

Faster now, tapping on his helmet, plopping on to his shoulders and

face, the rain fell.

Quickly," cried Bruce. "Follow as long as you can." Jacque opened his

mouth to speak, but before a word came out he was flung-backwards,

punched over as though by an invisible fist, his helmet flying from his

head as he fell and his rifle clattering on the earth.

Simultaneously Bruce felt the bullet pass him, disrupting the air, so

the wind of it flattened his shirt against his chest, cracking viciously

in his ears, leaving him dazedly looking down at Sergeant

Jacque's body.

It lay with arms thrown wide, the jaw and the side of the head below the

ear torn away; white bone and blood bubbling over it. The trunk twitched

convulsively and the hands fluttered like trapped birds.

Then flat-sounding through the rain he heard the report of the rifle.

The kopje, screamed Bruce's brain, he's lying in the kopie!

And Bruce moved, twisting sideways, starting to run.

Wally Hendry lay on his stomach on the flat top of the turret. His body

was stiff and chilled from the cold of the night and the rock was harsh

under him, but the discomfort hardly penetrated the fringe of his mind.

He had built a low parapet with loose flakes of granite, and he had

screened the front of it with the thick bushy stems of broom bush.

His rifle was propped on the parapet in front of him and at his elbow

were the spare ammunition clips.

He had lain in this ambush for a long time now - since early the

preceding afternoon. Now it was dawn and the darkness was drawing back;

in a few minutes he would be able to see the whole of the clearing below

him.

I coulda been across the river already, he thought, coulda been fifty

miles away. He did not attempt to analyse the impulse that had made him

lie here unmoving for almost twenty hours.

Man, I knew old Curry would have to come. I knew he would only bring one

nigger tracker with him. These educated Johnnies got their own rules -

man to man stuff, and he chuckled as he remembered the two minute

figures that he had seen come out of the forest in the fading light of

the previous evening.

The bastard spent the night down there in the clearing. Saw him light a

match and have hisself a smoke in the night - well, I hope he enjoyed

it, his last.

Wally peered anxiously out into the gradually gathering dawn.

They'll be moving now, coming up the clearing. Must get them before they

reach the trees again. Below him the clearing showed as a paleness, a

leprous blotch, on the dark forest.

The bastard! Without preliminaries Hendry's hatred returned to him. This

time he don't get to make no fancy speeches - This time he don't get no

chance to be hoity-toity.

The light was stronger now. He could see the clumps of ivory palms

against the pale brown grass of the clearing.

"Ha!" Hendry exclaimed.

There they were, like two little ants, dark specks moving up the middle

of the clearing. The tip of Hendry's tongue slipped out between his lips

and he flattened down behind his rifle.

Man, I've waited for this. Six months now I've thought about this, and

when it's finished I'll go down and take his ears. He slipped the safety

catch; it made a satisfying mechanical click.

Nigger's leading, that's Curry behind him. Have to wait they turn, don't

want the nigger to get it first. Curry first, then the nigger.

He picked them up in his sights, breathing quicker now, the thrill of it

so intense that he had to swallow and it caught in his throat like dry

bread.

A raindrop hit the back of his neck. It startled him. He looked up

quickly at the sky and saw it coming.

"Goddam it," he groaned, and looked back at the clearing.

Curry and nigger were standing together, a single dark blob in the

half-light. There was no chance of separating them.

The rain fell faster, and suddenly Hendry was overwhelmed by the old

familiar feeling of inferiority; of knowing that everything, even the

elements, conspired against him; the knowledge that he could never win,

not even this once.

They, God and the rest of the world.

The ones who had given him a drunk for a father.

A squalid cottage for a home and a mother with cancer of the throat.

The ones who had sent him to reform school, had fired him from two dozen

jobs, had pushed him, laughed at him, gaoled him twice - They, all of

them (and Bruce Curry who was their figurehead), they were going

to win again. Not even this once, not even ever.

"Goddarn it," he cursed in hopeless, wordless anger against them all.

"Goddam it, goddam it to hell," and he fired at the dark blob in his

sights.

As he ran Bruce looked across a hundred yards of open ground to the edge

of the forest.

He felt the wind of the next bullet as it cracked past him.

If he uses rapid fire he'll get me even at three hundred yards

And Bruce jinked his run like a jack-rabbit. The blood roaring in his

ears, fear driving his feet.

Then all around him the air burst asunder, buffeting him so he

staggered; the vicious whip-whip whip of bullets filled his head.

I can't make it Seventy yards to the shelter of the trees.

Seventy yards of open meadowlands and above him the commanding mass of

the kopje.

The next burst is for me - it must come, now!

And he flung himself to one side so violently that he nearly fell.

Again the air was ripping to tatters close beside him.

I can't last! He must get me!

In his path was an ant-heap, a low pile of clay, a pimple on the open

expanse of earth. Bruce dived for it, hitting the ground so hard that

the wind was forced from his lungs out through his open mouth.

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