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

"Louise," he spoke at last. "I am not doing this for Mungo, even a friendship cannot condone deliberate robbery and premeditated murder."

She did not reply.

"Many times you must have seen the way I have looked at you, for, God knows, I could not help myself."

Still she was silent.

"You did know," he insisted. "You, as a woman, must know how I feel."

"Yes," she said at last.

"When I thought you were married to a friend, it was hopeless. Now, at least, I can tell you how I feel."

"Zouga, please don't."

"I would do anything you asked me to, even protect a murderer, that is how I feel for you."

"Zouga "I have never known anybody so beautiful and bright and brave "I am not any of those things "I could put you and Mungo on the road to Kuruman and then go back to Kimberley and tell the diamond police where to find you. They would take Mungo, and then you would be free."

"You could," she agreed. "But you never would. Both of us are tied, Zouga, by our own peculiar sense of duty and of honour., "Louise, "

"We have arrived," she said, with patent relief. "The crossroads. Turn off the road here."

From the bench she guided him as he threaded the cart through the scattered bush and the high wheels bumped over rock and rough ground. A quarter of a mile from the road there stood a massive camel-thorn tree, silver and high as a hill in the moonlight. Beneath its spread branches the moon shadow was black and impenetrable.

From the darkness a hoarse voice challenged.

"Stand where you are! Don't come any closer."

"Mungo, it's me and Zouga is with me."

Louise jumped down from the cart, lifted the lantern off its bracket and went forward, stooping under the branches. Zouga tethered the mules and then followed her. Louise was kneeling beside Mungo Sint John. He lay on a saddle blanket, propped on the silver ornamented Mexican saddle.

"Thank you for coming," he greeted Zouga, and his voice was ragged with pain.

"How badly are you hit?"

"Badly enough," he admitted. "Do you have a cheroot?"

Zouga lit one from the lantern and handed it to him.

Louise was unwrapping the torn strips of shirt and petticoat that were bound about his chest.

"Shotgun?" Zouga asked tersely.

"No, thank God," Mungo said. "Pistol."

"You are lucky," Zouga grunted. "Naaiman's usual style is a sawed-off shotgun. He would have blown you in half."

"You know him, Naaiman?"

"He's a police trap."

"Police," Mungo whispered. "Oh God."

"Yes," Zouga nodded. "You are in trouble."

"I didn't know."

"Does it really matter?" Zouga asked. "You planned an I.D.B. switch, and you knew you might have to kill a man."

"Don't preach to me, Zouga."

"All right." Zouga squatted next to Louise as she exposed the wound in Mungo's back. "And it looks as though it missed the bloody lymph, set in a livid spread of bruise."

Between them they lifted Mungo into a sitting position.

"Through and through," Zouga murmured, as he saw the exit wound in Mungo's back. "And it looks as though it missed the lung. You are luckier than you'll ever know."

"One stayed in," Mungo Sint John contradicted him, and reached down to his own leg. His breeches had been split down the leg, and now he pulled the bloodstained cloth aside to reveal a strip of pale thigh in the centre of which was another vicious little round opening from which fluid wept like blackcurrant juice.

"The bullet is still in," Mungo repeated.

"Bone?" Zouga asked.

"No." Sint John shook his head. "I don't think so. I was still able to walk on it."

"There is no chance of trying to cut the bullet out.

Louise knows where she can find a doctor, and I have told her how to get there."

"Louise?" Mungo asked with a sardonic twist of his lips.

She did not look up, concentrating on the task of painting the skin around the wounds with iodine. Mungo was staring at Zouga, his single eye gleaming, and Zouga felt the scar on his cheek throb and he did not trouble to hide his anger.

"You don't think I am doing this for you," he demanded. "I hate I.D.B. as much as any digger on the workings, and I'm not that complacent about deliberate robbery and murder." And he took the pistol from the blanket where it lay at Mungo's side.

He checked the load as he walked to where Shooting Star stood, head down in the moonlight beyond the camel-thorn tree.

The stallion lifted his head, and blew a fluttery breath through his nostrils as Zouga approached; then he shifted his weight awkwardly and painfully on three legs.

"There, boy. Easy, boy." Zouga ran his hands down the animal's flank. it was sticky with drying blood, and Shooting Star whickered as he touched the wound.

Behind the ribs, bullet hole, and Zouga sniffed at it quickly. The bullet had pierced the bowel or the intestines, he could smell it.

Zouga went down on one knee and gently felt the foreleg that the stallion was favouring. He found the damage, another bullet wound. It had struck a few inches above the fetlock and the bone was shattered. Yet the horse had carried Mungo, a big heavy man, and it had brought him many miles. The agony must have been dreadful, but the stallion's great heart had carried them through.

Zouga. shrugged off his greatcoat and wrapped it around the pistol in his right hand. A shot could alert the searching bands on the not too distant road.

"There, boy," Zouga whispered, and touched the muzzle to the forehead between the horse's eyes.

The cloth muffled the shot. It was a dull blurt of sound, and the stallion dropped heavily on his side and never even kicked.

Louise was still bowed over Mungo, tying the knots in the bandage, but Zouga saw that her eyes were bright with tears in the moonlight.

"Thank you," she whispered. "I couldn't have done it myself."

Zouga helped her lift Mungo to the cart. Mungo's breath whistled in his chest and the sweat of agony drenched his shir t and smelled rancid and gamey.

They settled him into the nest of thatching grass and spread a screen of it over him. Then Zouga led the mules on over the veld until they struck the track that led nor thwards towards the Vaal river, and beyond it Kuruman and the vast Kalahari Desert.

"Travel at night, and hobble the mules to graze during the day," Zouga told her. "There is more than enough meal and biltong; but you will have to spare the coffee and sugar."

"Words cannot thank you enough," she whispered.

"Don't attempt the main drift of the Vaal."

"Somehow I know that this is not goodbye." She seemed not to have heard the advice. "And when we meet again," she broke off.

"Go on," he said, but she shook her head and took the reins from his hand and led the mules onto the track.

The cart seemed to merge into the night, and the heels made no sound in the thick pale sand. Zouga stood staring after them, long after they had disappeared , and then Louise came back.

She came silent as a wraith, running with a kind of terrible desperation, the long tresses of hair had fallen out from under the cap and were streaming down her back. Her face was pale and stricken in the moonlight.

The grip of her arms about his neck was fierce, almost painful, and her mouth was shockingly hot and wet as it spread over his. But the taste of it he would never forget, and her sharp white teeth crushed his lips.