Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

In the morning Ralph had whistled with excitement.

It's so big so many men, so much equipment" Can you do it, Ralph?"

"You want me to tender for a price to recruit the men, buy the equipment and assemble it here at Kimberley, provide the wagons and oxen to carry it all, horses for the men, rifles and ammunition, machine-guns, a steam engine to power a searchlight; then you want me to tender to build a road to get it all to a map reference, a place which you call Mount Hampden, somewhere in the wilderness, and you want it all to be ready to leave in nine months?"

"You have grasped it fairly," Zouga smiled. "Can you do it?

"Give me a week," Ralph said, and five days later he was back.

"It's too big for me, I'm afraid, Papa," he said, and then grinned mischievously at Zouga's expression of disappointment. "I had to take in a partner, Frank Johnson."

Johnson was another young man in a hurry, and, like Ralph, had already acquired a reputation for being able to get things done.

"Have you and young Johnson worked out a price?"

"We'll do it for eighty-eight thousand two hundred and fifty-five pounds and ten shillings." Ralph handed him ei the signed tender and Zouga studied it in silence. When at last he looked up he asked: "Tell me, Ralph, what is that ten shillings on the end for?"

Why, Papa? Ralph widened his eyes disarmingly.

"That is our profit on the deal."

Zouga had cabled the tender price to Rhodes at Claridge's Hotel in London, and the following day Rhodes had cabled back his acceptance in principle.

All that was still needed was Lobengula's ratification of the consolidated concessions, and Zouga was under Rhodes" orders to go immediately to Gubulawayo and find out from Rudd the reasons for the delay.

Ralph had immediately elected to ride with Zouga.

"Once mister Rhodes gives us the word to go, there will be no time for anything else. I have some unfinished business in Matabeleland, at Khami Mission and beyond -" And an uncharacteristic dreamy look had come into Ralph's eyes. "This is the time to do it. While I still have the chance."

So now, side by side, Zouga and Ralph spurred their mounts up the bank of the Shashi river and rode into Matabeleland.

"We will outspan here for a few days, Papa," Ralph said; it was still strange for Zouga to have his son make decisions without deferring to him. "The grazing is good and sweet, and we will rest the oxen and do a little hunting; there is still plenty of game up near the confluence of the Tati river."

At the beginning of this long journey together, Zouga had been disconcerted by his son's competitive spirit that turned even the most mundane task into a contest.

He had forgotten this trait of Ralph's in the time they had been separated but found now that it had grown stronger and fiercer during that period.

His energy daunted Zouga, who found that on this journey, for lack of other opposition, he was a foil for his son's need to compete.

They shot bird, on foot in heavy cover, guinea-fowl and francolin, Ralph counted the bag and scowled when Zouga outgunned him. They sat late at each outspan over the ivory dice, or the greasy dog-eared pack of cards, and Ralph glowed when he won a shilling, and growled when he lost one.

So now, when he said, "We'll hunt together tomorrow, Papa," Zouga knew he was in for an early start, and a long hard day.

They rode out from the wagons an hour from first limmer of dawn.

"Old Tom is getting madala, he's getting old, but I have a sovereign that says he'll run rings around that fancy beast of yours," Ralph offered.

"I cannot afford that sort of money," Zouga told him.

He was hard and fit, his long professional hunting expeditions had kept him that way but the pace that Ralph set once he was aroused would be punishing.

There was something else that troubled Zouga. When Ralph hunted competitively, he could be murderous. if he were challenged, there was only one consideration for him, the size of the bag.

Zouga had been a hunter for the greater part of his life.

He had hunted for ivory, and for the peculiar fascination of the beautiful and noble animals he pursued. It was almost a form of love, that made a man want to study and understand and finally take the quarry irrevocably for his own.

These last seasons he had hunted, of necessity, with many men, but he had never yet met a man who hunted like his own son when his blood was up. It seemed as if the game were merely counters in another of Ralph's contests, the score all that counted. "I don't want to be a sportsman, Papa. I leave that to you. I just want to be a winner."

"I cannot afford that sort of money," Zouga repeated, trying lightly to defuse Ralph's escalating tension.

"You can't afford a sovereign?" Ralph threw back his darkly handsome head, and his green eyes flashed as he laughed delighted. "Papa, you have just sold that fat diamond of yours for thirty thousand pounds."

"Ralph, let's make an easy day of it. If we get one giraffe, or a buffalo, that's all we need."

"Papa, you are getting old. A sovereign. If you can't pay immediately, why then, your credit is always good! In midmorning they cut the spoor of a troop of giraffe, feeding slowly eastward along the river bank.

"I make out sixteen of them." Ralph leaned from the saddle to examine the huge double bean-shaped spoor in the sandy earth. "They'll not be an hour ahead of us."

And he put his heels into old Tom's flanks.

The forest alternated with open glades through which meandered little streams, draining the escarpment down to the Shashi river. They were dry at this season of the year, but that did not account for the paucity of game.

When Zouga had first travelled this road, going south from old King Mzilikazi's kraal, the herds had darkened every one of these open glades. In one day's ride he had counted over a hundred monstrous grey rhinoceros, but there had been no counting the silvery herds of fat zebra and clowning purple wildebeest.

In those days, after a man had fired a shot, the dust rising from the galloping herds had looked like the smoke from a bush fire, and yet this day they had ridden since dawn without seeing a single wild animal.

Zouga brooded on it as he rode stirrup for stirrup with his son. Of course, this area was on the direct road to Lobengula's kraal, over which steadily more and more wagons and travellers passed. There were still vast areas beyond where the herds were thick as the grass on which they grazed. But after the road they would cut into Mashonaland, and the railway line that would follow he wondered what would remain.

Perhaps one day his grandchildren would live in a land of which every corner was as barren as this. He did not envy them the prospect; and even as he thought that, his trained hunter's eye picked up the tiny speck just above the forest line, far ahead.

For a moment he was reluctant to call Ralph's attention to it. It was the head of a giraffe, raised inquisitively high above the mimosa tree on which it was feeding.

For the first time in the hunting veld Zouga felt sick to the gut at the slaughter he knew was about to follow and he thought to distract Ralph's attention from the herd of huge spotted animals in the mimosa forest ahead.

But at that moment Ralph shouted gaily: "There they are, I'll be damned! They are shy as blushing virgins, they are off already."

There had been a time when Zouga had been able to ride up to within two hundred yards of a herd before they took alarm. These were still a mile away and already galloping from the two horsemen.