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

"Come on, Papa. We'll catch them when they try to cross the Shashi," and they tore into the stand of flowering mimosa.

"Tally-ho!"yelled Ralph. His hat came off and, hanging on its thong, it slapped against his back; while his long dark hair fluttered in the wind of their gallop. "By God, Papa, you'll have to work to win your sovereign today," he warned laughingly.

They crashed out of the forest onto another level open lain. The entire herd of huge vulnerable animals were Spread before them: bulls and cows and calves, but that was not what caught Zouga's attention.

He pulled his horse down out of its gallop and swung his head away to the west.

"Ralph," he shouted, "let them go!"

Ralph looked back at him through the flying dust. His face was flushed with the hunter's fever.

"Warriors," Zouga shouted. "War party, Ralph. Close up!"

For a moment it seemed that Ralph would not obey but then his good sense prevailed. It would be reckless to separate when there was a war party out, and he broke back to Zouga's side and let the panic-driven giraffe tear away towards the river.

He reined Tom to a halt. "What do you make of them?" he asked, shading his eyes and peering through the heatdistorted air at the squiggly black line, like a shoal of tadpoles in the bottom of a rippling'pool, which moved across the far side of the open plain. "Kharna's men? Bamangweto raiders? We are only a few miles from the frontier."

"We won't take any chances until we know," Zouga told him grimly. "Let the horses blow. We may have to make a run But Ralph interrupted him. "Long shields! And they are red, those are the Moles, Bazo's fellows," Ralph urged Tom towards the approaching impi. "And I'll be damned if that isn't Bazo himself out front."

By the time Zouga came up, Ralph had dismounted and, leaving Tom to stand, had run to embrace his old comrade, and he was already joshing Bazo cruelly.

"Hau! the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain are returning from a raid without women or cattle. Did Khama's people give you the steel farewell?"

Bazo's delighted smile slid off his face at such levity, and he shook his plumes sternly.

"Not even in jest, Henshaw, do not talk like a giggling girl. If the king had sent us to Khama," and he stabbed the air with his assegai, "there would have been a beautiful killing." He broke off as he recognized Zouga.

"Baba!" he said. "Bakela, I see you, and my eyes are white with joy."

"It has been too long, Bazo but now you have the headring on your brow and an impi at your back, we shall shoot a beast and feast together this night."

"Ah Bakela, it grieves me, but I am on the king's business. I return to Gubulawayo in haste to report the woman's death to the king."

"Woman?" Zouga asked without real interest.

"A white woman. She ran from Gubulawayo without the king's word, and the king sent me after her-" Bazo broke off with an exclamation. "Hau! But you know this woman, Bakela."

"It is not Nomusa, my sister?" Zouga asked with quick concern. "Not one of her daughters?"

"No, not them."

"There are no other white women in Matabeleland."

"She is the woman of One-Bright-Eye. The same woman who raced her horse against yours at Kimberley and won. But now she is dead."

"Dead?" All the blood had drained from Zouga's face, leaving his tan muddy and yellow. "Dead?" he whispered, and swayed in the saddle so that, had he not grabbed at the pommel, he would have fallen.

"Louise, dead."

Zouga found the sycamore that Bazo described to him, merely by back-tracking the impi.

They had left a good wide spoor, and Zouga reached the tree in the middle of the afternoon.

He did not know why he tortured himself so. There could be no reasonable doubt that she was dead. Bazo had showed him the pathetic relics he had retrieved. The damaged rifle and bandolier, the empty water bottle, and the tatters of cloth and saddlery ripped and chewed by the omnivorous jaws of the hyena.

The ground under the sycamore was beaten and swept of all traces of Louise by the pads of jackal and hyena, by the fluttering wings and the talons of hundreds of feeding, squabbling vultures. It smelled like a chicken coop, smeared with vulture dung, and loose feathers blew aimlessly hither and thither on the soft dry breeze.

Except for a few splinters of bone and tufts of hair, every trace of animal carcasses and the human body had been devoured. The hyena would have gobbled up even the leather of Louise's boots and belt, and the few remaining shreds of blanket and cloth were bloodstained.

It was quite easy to reconstruct what had happened.

Louise had been set upon by a pride of lion. She had managed a single shot, there was an empty shell in the breech of the damaged rifle, and had killed one of the cats before being pulled off the mule.

Zouga could imagine every moment of her agony, almost hear her screams as the great jaws crunched through her bone and the yellow claws hooked into her flesh. It left him physically nauseated and weakened. He wanted to pray on the spot where she had died, but he did not seem to have the energy for even such small effort. It was as though the very force of life had gone out of him. Until that moment he had not realized what Louise's memory had meant to him, how the certainty that their lives were intertwined had sustained him while they were apart, how his belief in their eventual reunion had given his life purpose and direction. She had become part of his dream, and now it had been snuffed out on this wild and bloody patch of earth.

Twice he turned back to his horse to mount and leave, but each time he hesitated and then wandered back to sift through the reeking dust with his fingers for some last trace of her.

At last he looked at the sun. He could not reach the wagons before nightfall. He had told Ralph to leave Jan Cheroot and the spare horses at the drift of the Shashi when he went on with the wagons, so there was no urgency. There was no hurry. Without Louise there was no flavour in his life. Nothing really mattered any more, but he crossed to his horse, clinched the girth and mounted. He took one more lingering look at the trampled earth and then turned his horse's head back towards the Shashi and the wagons. He had not gone fifty yards when he found himself circling. It was not a conscious decision to begin casting for outgoing spoor. He knew it was futile, but his reluctance to leave the place dictated his actions.

once he circled the sycamore, leaning out of the saddle and examining the broken and stony earth, then he moved farther out and circled again, then again, each time opening the radius of the circle. Suddenly his heart leaped against his ribs, and new hope flooded his devastated soul, but he had to steel himself to lean from the saddle and examine the thorn twig, in case he was to be disappointed once again.

The white tear had caught his eye, the twig had been broken half-through and now hung from the main branch at the level of a man's waist. The soft green leaves had wilted, the break was two or three days" old, but that was not what made Zouga's fingers shake.

From one of the curved red-tipped thorns hung a fine red thread of spun cotton. Zouga lifted it reverently and then touched it to his lips as though it were a sacred relic.

He was to the west of the sycamore; he could just make out the top branches above the surrounding bush, which meant that Louise had left that thread on the grasping thorn after she had run from the tree. The height above ground showed she had been on foot, and the broken twig and shredded cloth were evidence of her haste.