Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (онлайн книга без txt) 📗

"If I had fallen for your trap, what would you have done?"

Rhodes shrugged his heavy shoulders. "The question doesn't arise.

You acted like a true English gentleman."

"You will never know how close it was," Zouga told him.

"Oh yes, I do. Most of us here have been tested."

Zouga turned to Pickering. "What would have happened, a lynching party?"

"Oh, my dear fellow, probably nothing so theatrical.

You just might have slipped on the roadway and taken a tumble into the diggings, or had the misfortune to be standing under a gravel bucky when the rope parted." He laughed merrily, and the men at the table laughed with him.

"You need a glass of Charlie Champers, Major, or something stronger perhaps."

"Do join us, sir," cried another, making room for him at the table. "An honour to drink with a gentleman."

"Come along, Major." Pickering smiled. "I'll send for the quack to see to that cut on your head."

Then Pickering stopped and his expression changed.

Zouga had kicked his feet loose from the stirrups and jumped down to face him. They were of an even height, both big men, and the group at the camp table was instantly enchanted. This would be more diverting than watching blue-bottles settling on sugar lumps.

,"By God, he's going to bang Pickling's head."

"Or Pickling his."

"Ten guineas the elephant hunter to win."

"I don't approve of brawling," murmured Rhodes, "but I'll take Pickling for ten."

"I say, the other horse has run a fair chase already. I do think you might offer some odds."

Pickering's smile had turned frosty, and he was on his toes, his fists clenched, and his guard half raised.

Zouga dropped his own guard and turned disgustedly to the group under the acacia.

"I've provided you with enough amusement for one day," he told them coldly. "You can take your bloody diamonds, and your damned Committee and you can, " There was a burst of clapping and laughing cheers to cover Zouga's outburst. Zouga swung back onto the gelding's back and kicked him into a gallop, and the ironical applause followed him out of the camp.

"I hope we haven't lost him." Pickering lowered his fists and stared after Zouga. "God knows, we need honest men."

"Oh, don't worry," Rhodes told him. "Give him time to simmer down and then we'll square him."

"Henshaw." Bazo held the woven reed basket on his lap and peered into it mournfully.

"Henshaw, she is not ready to fight again so soon."

They sat in a circle about the cooking fire in the centre of the thatched beehive. Ralph felt more at home here than in the tent under the camel-thorn tree. Here he was with friends, the closest friends he had ever known in his nomadic life, and here also he was beyond the severe and unrelenting surveillance of his father.

Ralph dipped into the communal three-legged black pot with his left hand and scooped up a little of the stiff fluffy white maize porridge. While he rolled it into a ball between his fingers he argued with the Matabele princeling opposite him.

"If it were you to decide, she would never fight again," Ralph told him, and dipped the maize ball into the flavouring of mutton gravy and wild herbs.

"Her new leg is not strong enough yet," Bazo shook his head.

Ralph popped the morsel and chewed as he talked.

"The leg is hard and bright as a knife."

Bazo puffed out his cheeks and looked even more lugubrious, and on her perch in the shadows behind him Scipio, the falcon, shook out her feathers and "kweeted' softly as though in sympathy with him.

Bazo's decision, although heavily influenced by Ralph's arguments and by the urgings of the other young Matabele, would be final. For it was Bazo who had made the original capture of the animal under discussion.

"Every night that she does not fight, we, your brothers, are the poorer," Kamuza came in to support Ralph. "Henshaw is right. She is fierce as a lioness and ready to earn us all many gold queens."

"Already you speak and think like a white man," Bazo replied loftily. "The yellow coins fill your head day and night."

"What other reason for that," Kamuza shuddered slightly as he pointed at the basket, "that thing. If it stings you, the spear of your manhood will shrivel like a rotten fruit until it is no bigger than the finger of a new born baby."

"What a shrivelling that would be," Ralph chuckled.

"Like a bull hippopotamus shrivelling into a striped field mouse."

Bazo grinned and made the gesture of placing the tiny basket on Kamuza's lap. "Come, let her suckle a little to give her strength for the conflict," he suggested, and the circle exploded with a roar of delighted laughter at Kamuza's patent horror as he yelled and leapt violently away.

The noisy jeers covered their own uneasiness at the close proximity of the basket, and they were immediately silent as Bazo cautiously lifted the lid.

They craned forward with sickly fascination, and in the bottom of the basket something dark and furry and big as a rat stirred.

"Hau! Inkosikazi!" Bazo greeted it, and the creature reared up on its multiple legs, raising the front pair defensively, and the rows of eyes glittered in the softly wavering firelight. Bazo lifted his own right hand to return the salute of long hairy legs.

"I see you also, Inkosikazi."

Bazo had named her Inkosikazi, the queen, for, as he explained to Ralph, "She is right royal in her rage, and as thirsty for blood as a Matabele queen."

He and Ralph had been unloading timber baulks at the eastern end of the new stagings, and as one load had swung upwards in the slings the great spider had come out from its nest between the sawn planks, and, raising its swollen velvety abdomen, had scampered over Ralph's arm and leapt ten feet to the ground.

The spider was the size of a dinner plate when its legs were extended. Its hirsute appearance and its extraordinary jumping prowess had given the species the common name of baboon spider.

"Get him, Bazo!" Ralph yelled from the top of the loaded wagon.

For now that Griqualand West and the New Rush diggings were part of Cape Colony and the British Empire there had been changes.

New Rush had been re-named Kimberley, after Lord Kimberley, the Colonial Secretary in London, and the town of Kimberley was starting to enjoy the benefits of British civilization and Victorian morality, amongst which was the total ban on cock fighting which was strictly enforced by the new administrator. The diggers, always eager for distraction, had not taken long to find an alternative sport. Spider fighting was the rage of the diggings.

"Don't let him get away!" Ralph vaulted down from the wagon, ripping off his shirt, but Bazo was quicker.

He whipped the loincloth from his waist and flared it at the spider like a matador caping the bull, bringing the huge arachnid to bay on its hind legs, threatening him with its waving arms, then, naked and triumphant, Bazo had flipped the cloth over it and swiftly bundled it into a bag.

Now he slowly but deliberately extended his own hand into the basket, and the spider raised itself higher, the wolflike mandibles chewing menacingly, and between them the single curved red fang rising from its shallow sheath, a pale droplet of venom shining upon the needlesharp tip.

There was not even the sound of breathing in the dark hut, and the soft tick and rustle of the ashes sounded deafening in the silence as they watched Bazo's open hand draw closer and closer to the creature.