Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗
Your loving husband, Ralph Ballantyne (Ex Major B.S.A. Police Retired!) We must have Matabeleland. It is as simple as that," said Zouga Ballantyne, and Jordan looked up sharply from his pad of Pitman's shorthand.
His father sat in one of the deep buttoned leather chairs facing mister Rhodes" desk. Beyond him the green velvet curtains were open and held with yellow tasselled ropes of silk. The view from this top floor of the De Beers Company buildings took in a wide sweep of the dry Griqualand plain dotted with camel-thorn trees, and closer to hand the stacking ground where the blue earth from the Kimberley mine was left to deteriorate in the brilliant sunshine before being made to yield up its precious diamonds.
Jordan had no eyes for the view now; his father's words had shocked him. But mister Rhodes merely hooded his eyes and slumped massively at his desk, gesturing for Zouga to continue.
"The Company shares are six shillings in London, against three pounds fifteen on the day we raised the flag at Fort Salisbury three years ago, " ,I know, I know," Rhodes nodded.
"I have spoken with the men that remain; I have spent the last three months travelling from Fort Victoria to Salisbury as you bid me. They won't stay, mister Rhodes.
They won't stay unless you let them go in and finish it."
"Matabeleland." Rhodes lifted his great shaggy head, and Jordan thought how terribly he had aged in these last three years. "Matabeleland," he repeated softly.
"They are sick of the constant menace of Lobengula's hordes upon their borders; they have convinced themselves that the gold they did not find in Mashonaland lies under Lobengula's earth; they have seen Lobengula's fat herds of choice cattle and compared them to their own lean beasts that starve on the thin sour veld to which they are restricted"
"Go on," Rhodes nodded.
"They know that to reach them the telegraph and the railroad must come through Matabeleland. They are sick to the guts with malaria and the constant fear of the Matabele. If you want to keep Rhodesia, you must give them Matabeleland."
"I have known this all along. I think we all have. Yet we must move carefully. We must be careful of the Imperial Factor, of Gladstone and of Whitehall." Rhodes stood up and began to pace back and forth before the shelves laden with leather-bound books titled in gold leaf.
"We need to prepare ourselves. You must remember, Ballantyne, that we have technically only the right to dig for gold. As long as Lobengula does not molest us, we cannot declare war upon him."
"But if Lobengula. were to interfere in any way with our people and their rights?"
"That would be another matter." Rhodes stopped in front of Zouga's chair. "Then I should certainly end his game for him."
"In the meantime the company's shares are six shillings each," Zouga reminded him.
"We need an incident," said Rhodes. "But in the meantime we have to prepare and I dare not put it on the wires. I want you to leave immediately for Fort Victoria to speak to Jameson. "Rhodes swung his big head towards Jordan. "Do not make notes of this, Jordan," he ordered, and Jordan dutifully lifted his pencil from the pad.
"Instruct Jameson to send me a series of telegrams on the new wires. Telegrams advising against war, that we can show the British Government and people when it is all over, but in the meantime tell him to prepare for war."
Rodes turned back to Jordan. "Take an instruction, Jordan. Sell fifty thousand B.S.A. Company shares for what they will fetch. Jameson must have what he needs to do the business. Tell him that, Ballantyne. I shall be behind him all the way, but we need an incident."
Ralph Ballantyne sat his horse on the heights of the escarpment which fell away before him, in a tumbled splendour of rocky hills and forests. The spring foliage turned the groves of msasa trees into clouds of pink and swelling scarlets, and the air was so clear and bright that he could pick out the telegraph line all the way to the horizon.
The wires were a gossamer thread that glistened red gold in the sunlight, so fragile, so insubstantial, that it seemed impossible that they ran, arrow straight, six hundred miles and more to meet the raithead at Kimberley.
Ralph's men had laid this line. The surveyors riding ahead to set up the beacons, the axemen following to clear the line, then the wagons bringing up the poles and finally the enormous spools of gleaming copper wire uncoiling endlessly.
Ralph had hired good men, paid them well, and visited them less than once a month. Yet he was proud as he saw the wires sparkle and thought of the importance and significance of this achievement.
Beside him his foreman cursed suddenly. "There it is!
The thieving bastards!" And he pointed to where the line of telegraph poles marched up the side of one forested hill. Ralph had thought that cloud shadow had dimmed the sparkle of the copper wire up this slope, but now when he focused his binoculars upon them he saw that the poles had been stripped bare.
"Come on," he said grimly, and rode forward. When they reached the bottom of the slope they found that one of the telegraph poles had been chopped through at the base, and felled like timber. The wires had been hacked IF through, and the scuff marks in the earth where it had been rolled into bundles had not yet been erased by the wind.
Slowly they rode on up the slope, and Ralph did not have to dismount to read the sign of bare feet.
"There were at least twenty of them," he said. "Women and children with them, a family outing, damn them to hell."
"It's the women that put them up to it" the foreman agreed. "That wire makes beautiful bracelets and bangles.
The black girls just love it."
At the top of the slope another telegraph pole had been felled and the wire snipped through, "They have got away with five hundred yards of wire," Ralph scowled. "But next time it could be five thousand.
Do you know who they are?"
The foreman shrugged. "The local Mashona chief is Matanka. His village is just the other side of the valley.
You can see the smoke from here., Ralph slipped his rifle out of its boot under his knee.
It was a magnificent new Winchester Repeater Model 1890 with his name engraved and chased with gold into the metal of the block. He levered a round into the breech.
"Let's go to see brother Matanka."
He was an old man, with legs like a stork and a cap of pure white wool covering his head. He trembled with fear and fell on his knees before this furious young white man with a rifle in his hand.
"Fifty head," Ralph told him. "And next time your people touch the wires it will be a hundred."
Ralph and his foreman cut the fattest cattle out of Matanka's herds and drove them ahead of them, up the escarpment and into the little white settlement of Fort Victoria which had grown up mid-way between the Shashi river and Fort Salisbury.
"All right," Ralph told his foreman. "You can take them from here. Turn them over to the auctioneer, we should get ten pounds a head for them."
"That will cover the cost of replacing the wires fifty times over," the foreman grinned.
"I don't believe in taking a loss when I don't have to," Ralph laughed. "Get on with you, I'll have to go down and square it with the gool doctor."
Doctor Jameson's office, as administrator of the Charterlands of the British South Africa Company, was a wood and iron building with an untidily thatched roof directly opposite the only canteen in Fort Victoria.
