The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur (бесплатные онлайн книги читаем полные версии txt) 📗
"I know you can drive an eighteen ox span," Ralph nodded at the circle of their faces as they squatted around the fire passing the red tin of "Wrights No. ! Best Snuff that Ralph had provided, from hand to hand. "I also know that any one of you can eat his own weight in sadza maize porridge in one sitting, and wash it down with enough beer to stun a rhinoceros, but can you fight?" And Isazi answered for them all, using the patient tone usually reserved for an obtuse child.
"We are Zulu." It was the only reply necessary. an Cheroot brought in six more, all of them Cape boys, with mixed Bushman and Hottentot blood, like Jan Cheroot himself.
"This one is named Grootboom, the big tree." Ralph thought he looked more like a Kalahari Desert thorn bush dark, dry and thorny.
"He was a corporal in the Fifty-second Foot at Cape Town Fort. He is my nephew." "Why did he leave Cape Town?" Jan Cheroot looked pained.
"There was a dispute over a lady. A man had his gizzard slit. They accused my dear nephew of the bastardly deed." "Did he do it?" "Of course he did. He is the best man with a knife that I know after me, "Jan Cheroot declared modestly.
"Why do you want to kill Matabele?" Ralph asked him in Sindebele, and the Hottentot answered him fluently in the same language. "It is work I understand and enjoy." Ralph nodded and turned to the next man.
"It is possible that this one is even more closely related to me," Jan Cheroot introduced him. "His name is Taos, and his mother was a great beauty. She owned a famous shebeen at the foot of Signal Hill above Cape Town docks. At one time she and I were dear and intimate friends, but then the lady had many friends." The prospective recruit had the flat nose and high cheekbones, the oriental eyes and the same waxen smooth skin as Jan Cheroot if he was one of Jan Cheroot's bastards and had spent his boyhood in Cape Town's notorious dock land then he should be a good man in a fight. Ralph nodded.
"Five shillings a day," he said. "And a free box to bury you in if the Matabele catch you." Jameson had taken many hundreds of horses south with him, and the Matabele had swept the horses off the farms.
Maurice Gifford had already taken 160 mounted men down towards Gwanda to bring in any survivors who might be cut off on the outlying farms and mines, and still be holding out. While Captain George Grey had formed a troop of mounted infantry, "Grey's Scouts', with most of the mounts that remained. The four mounts that Ralph had brought in with him were fine beasts, and he had managed to buy six more at exorbitant prices, 100 pounds for an animal that would have fetched 15 pounds on a good day at Kimberley market, but there were no others. He lay awake long after midnight under the wagon worrying about it while above him Robyn and Louise slept with the two girls and the children on the wagon truck under the canvas tent.
Ralph's eyes were closed, and a few feet away Harry Mellow was breathing deeply and regularly drowning out any small sounds. Yet even in his preoccupation, Ralph became aware of another presence near him in the darkness. He smelled it first, the taint of woodsmoke and cured animal furs and the odour of the fat with which a Matabele warrior anoints his body.
Ralph slipped his right hand up under the saddle he was using for a pillow, and his fingers touched the cheque red walnut butt of his Webley pistol.
"Henshaw," whispered a voice he did not recognize, and Ralph whipped his left arm around a thick corded neck and at the same moment thrust the muzzle of the pistol into the man's body.
"Quickly," he grated.. "Who are you, before I kill you?" "They told me you were quick and strong." The man was speaking Sindebele.
"Now I believe it." "Who are you?" "I have brought you good men and the promise of horses." Neither of them had spoken above a whisper.
"Why do you come like a thief?" "Because I am Matabele, the white men will kill me if they find me here. I have come to take you to these men." Ralph released him carefully, and reached for his boots.
They left the laager and slipped through the silent deserted town.
Ralph had spoken only once more.
"You know that I will kill you if this is treachery." "I know it, "replied the Matabele..
He was tall, as tall as Ralph but even heavier built, and once when he glanced back at Ralph the moonlight showed the silky sheen of scar tissue slashed across his cheek beneath his right eye.
In the yard of one of the last houses of the town, close to the open veld, yet screened from it by the wall that some house proud citizen had erected to protect his garden, there were twelve more Matabele amadoda waiting. Some of them wore fur kilts while others were dressed in ragged Western cast-offs.
"Who are these men?" Ralph demanded. "Who are you?" "My name is Ezra, Sergeant Ezra. I was Sergeant to One-bright-Eye who the imp is killed at Khami Hills. These men are all Company police." The Company police have been disbanded and disarmed," Ralph said.
"Yes, they have taken away our guns. They say they do not trust us. That we may go over to the rebels." "Why do you not?" Ralph said.
"Some of your brothers have. They say a hundred of the Company police have gone over, and taken their rifles with them." "We cannot even if we had wished to." Ezra shook his head. "Have you heard of the killing of two Matabele women near the Inyati river? A woman called Ruth and another called Little Flower, Imbali?" Ralph frowned. "Yes, I remember." "It was these men, and I was their sergeant. The and una named Gandang has asked that we be taken to him alive. He wishes personally to supervise the manner of our deaths." "I want men who can kill the women of the Matabele as easily as they killed ours," said Ralph. "Now what of these horses?" "The horses captured by the Matabele at Essexvale and Belingwe are being held in the hills at a place I know of." Long before the curfew bell, they had all slipped out of the central laager singly and in pairs, Jan Cheroot and his Cape boys taking the horses with them, and by the time Ralph and Harry Mellow strolled down the main street as though they were taking the evening air before returning to the laager for dinner, the others were all gathered in the walled garden at the end of the street.
