Текст книги "The Angels Weep"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 39 страниц)

The cry echoed through the elegant hush of the Kimberley Club, like a Hun war-cry at the gates of Rome.

The consternation was immediate and overwhelming. Members boiled out of the long bar into the marbled lobby, and surrounded the news-crier. Others from the reading room lined the banisters, shouting their queries down the stair-well. In the dining-room someone bumped into the carving-wagon in his haste to reach the lobby, and sent it crashing on its side while the joint rolled across the floor with roast potatoes preceding it like a squad of footmen.

The bearer of the news was one of the prosperous Kimberley diamond-buyers, a profession no longer referred to as "kopje-walloping', and such was his agitation that he had forgotten to remove his straw boater when entering the club portals. An offence that at another time would have merited a reprimand from the committee.

Now he stood in the centre of the lobby, hat firmly on his head and reading spectacles sliding to the end of his em purpled nose, a symptom of his excitement and agitation. He was reading from a copy of The Diamond Fields Advertiser, the ink of which was so fresh that it smeared his fingers. "Jameson raises White Flag at Doomkop after sixteen killed in fierce fighting. Doctor Jameson, I have the honour -to meet you. General Cronje accepts surrender." Ralph Ballantyne had not left his seat at the head of the corner table, although his guests had deserted him to join the rush into the lobby. He signalled the distracted wine waiter to refill his glass, and then helped himself to another spoonful of the sole bonne femme, while he waited for his guests to return. They came trooping back, led by Aaron Fagan, like a funeral party returning from the cemetery.

"The Boers must have been waiting for them-" "Doctor Jim walked straight into it-" "What on earth did the man think he was doing?"

Chairs rasped and every one of them reached for his glass the moment he was seated.

"He had six hundred and sixty men and guns. By God, it was a carefully planned thing then." "There will be a few tales to tell."

"And heads to roll, no doubt." "Doctor Jim's luck has run out at last."

"Ralph, your father is amongst the prisoners!" Aaron was reading the newsprint.

For the first time Ralph showed emotion. "That's not possible."

He snatched the paper from Aaron's hand, and stared at it in agony.

"What happened?" he muttered. "Oh God, what has happened?" But somebody else was yelling in the lobby. "Kruger has arrested all the members of the Reform Committee he has promised to have them tried for their lives." "The gold mines!" another said clearly in the ensuing silence, and instinctively every head lifted to the clock on the wall above the dining-room entrance. It was twenty minutes to two.

The stock exchange re-opened on the hour. There was another rush, this time out of the club doors. On the sidewalk, hatldss members shouted impatiently for their carriages, while others set out at a determined trot towards the stock exchange buildings.

The club was almost deserted, not more than ten diners were left at the tables. Aaron and Ralph were alone at the corner table. Ralph still held the list of prisoners in his hand.

"I cannot believe it,"he whispered.

"It's a catastrophe. What can possibly have possessed Jameson?"

Aaron agreed.

It seemed that the worst had happened, nothing could match the dreadful tidings that they had received so far, but then the club secretary came out of his office ashen-faced, and stood in the doorway of the dining-room.

"Gentlemen, he croaked. "I have some more terrible news. It has just come through on the wire. Mr. Rhodes has offered his resignation as prime minister of Cape Colony. He has also offered to resign from the chairmanship of the Charter Company, of De Beers and of Consolidated Goldfields." "Rhodes," Aaron whispered. "Mr. Rhodes was in it. It's a conspiracy the Lord only knows what will be the final consequences of this thing, and who Mr. Rhodes will bring down with him." "I think we should order a decanter of port," said Ralph, as he pushed his plate away from him. "I'm not hungry any more." He thought about his father in a Boer prison, and suddenly an image come into his mind of Zouga Ballantyne in a white shirt, his hands bound behind his back, his gold– and silver-laced beard sparkling in the sunlight, the whitewashed wall at his back, regarding the rank of riflemen in front of him with those calm green eyes of his. Ralph felt nauseated and the rare old port tasted like quinine on his tongue. He set the glass down.

"Ralph." Aaron was staring at him across the table. "The bear transaction, you sold the shares of Charter and Consolidated short, and your position is still open." "I have closed all your transactions," said David Silver. "I averaged out BSA shares at a little over seven pounds, that gives you a profit, after commission and levy, of almost four pounds a share. You did even better on the Consolidated Goldfields transactions, they were the worst hit in the crash, from eight pounds when you began selling them short they dropped to almost two pounds when it looked as though Kruger was going to seize the mining companies of the Witwatersrand in retaliation." David Silver broke off and looked at Ralph with awe. "It is the kind of killing which becomes a legend on the floor, Mr. Ballantyne. The frightful risk you took," he shook his head in admiration. "What courage! What foresightV "What luck!" said Ralph impatiently. "Do you have my difference cheque?" "I have." David Silver opened the black leather valise in his lap and brought from it a snowy white envelope sealed with a rosette of scarlet wax.

"It is counted signed and guaranteed by my bank." David laid it reverently upon his Uncle Aaron's desk-top. "The total is," and he breathed it like a lover, "one million and fifty-eight pounds eight shillings and sixpence. After the one that Mr. Rhodes paid to Barney Barnato for his claims in the Kimberley mine, it is the largest cheque ever drawn in Africa, south of the equator. what do you say to that, Mr. Ballantyne?" Ralph looked at Aaron in the chair behind the desk.

"You know what to do with it. Just be certain it can never be traced back to me." "I understand," Aaron nodded, and Ralph changed the subject.

"Has there been an answer to my telegraph yet? My wife is not usually so slow in replying." And because Aaron was an old friend, who loved the gentle Cathy as much as any of her many admirers, Ralph went on to explain. "She is within two months of her time. Now that the dust of Jameson's little adventure has begun to settle and there is no longer any danger of war, I must get Cathy down here, where she can have expert medical attention." "I'll send my clerk to the telegraph office." Aaron rose and crossed to the door of the outer office, to give his instructions. Then he looked back at his nephew. "Was there anything else, David?" The little stockbroker started. He had been staring at Ralph Ballantyne with the glow of hero-worship in his eyes.

Now he hastily assembled his papers, and stuffed them into his valise, before coming and offering his soft white hand to Ralph.

"I cannot tell you what an honour it has been to be associated with you, Mr. Ballantyne. If there is ever anything at all I can do for you-" Aaron had to shoo him out of the door.

"Poor David," he murmured, as he came back to the desk. "His very first millionaire, it's a watershed in any young stockbroker's life."

"My father-" Ralph did not even smile.

"I'm sorry, Ralph. There is nothing more we can do. He will go back to England in chains with Jameson and the others. They are to be imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs until they are called to answer the charge. "Aaron selected a sheet of paper from the pile on his desk.

"That they, with certain other persons in the month of December 1895, in South Africa, within Her Majesty's dominions, did unlaufully prepare and fit out a military expedition to proceed against the dominions of a certain friendly state, to wit, the South African Republic, contrary to the provisions of the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870."" Aaron laid down the paper and shook his head. "There is nothing any of us can do now."

"What will happen to them? It's a capital offence-" "Oh no, Ralph, I am sure it won't come to that." Ralph sank down in his chair and stared moodily out of the window, for the hundredth time castigating himself for not having anticipated that Jameson would cut the telegraph lines before marching on Johannesburg. The recall that Cathy had sent to Zouga Ballantyne, the fiction that Louise was gravely ill, had never reached him and Zouga had ridden into the waiting Boer commandos with the rest of them.

If only, Ralph thought, and then his thoughts were interrupted.

He looked up expectantly as the clerk came hesitantly into the office.

"Has there been a reply from my wife?" Ralph demanded, and the man shook his head.

"Begging your pardon, Mr. Ballantyne, Sir, but there has not." He hesitated, and Ralph urged him. "Well, man, what is it? Spit it out, there's a good fellow." "It seems that all the telegraph lines to Rhodesia have been down since noon on Monday." "Oh, so that is it."

"No, Mr. Ballantyne, that's not all. There has been a message from Toti on the Rhodesian border. It seems a rider got through this morning."

The clerk gulped. "This messenger seems to have been the only survivor." "Survivor!" Ralph stared at him. "What does that mean?

What on earth are you talking about?" "The Matabele have risen. They are murdering all the whites in Rhodesia man, woman and child, they are being slaughtered!" "Mummy, Douglas and Suss aren't here. There is nobody to get me breakfast." Jon-Jon came into the tent while Cathy was still brushing out her hair, and twisting it up into thick braids.

"Did you call for them?" "I called and called." "Tell one of the grooms to go down and fetch them, darling." "The grooms aren't here also." "The grooms aren't here either," Cathy corrected him and stood up. "All right, then, let's go and see about your breakfast." Cathy stepped out into the dawn. Overhead the sky was a lovely dark rose colour shaded to ripe orange in the east, and the bird chorus in the trees above the camp was like the tinkle of silver bells. The camp-fire had died to a puddle of grey powdery ash and had not been replenished.

"Put some wood on, jonjon,"Cathy told him and crossed to the kitchen hut. She frowned with annoyance. It was deserted. She took down a tin from the gauzed meat-safe and then looked up as the doorway darkened.

"Oh Isazi, she greeted the little Zulu. "Where are the other servants?" "Who knows where a Matabele dog will hide himself when he is needed?" Isazi asked contemptuously. "They have most likely spent the night dancing and drinking beer and now their heads are too heavy to carry.". "You'll have to help me," said Cathy. "Until the cook gets here." After breakfast in the dining-tent, Cathy called Isazi from the fire again.

"Have any of them come back yet?" "Not yet, Nkosikazi." "I want to go down to the railhead. I hope there is a telegraph from Henshaw.

Will you put the ponies into the trap, Isazi." Then for the first time she noticed the little frown of concern on the old Zulu's wrinkled features.

"What is it?" "The horses they are not in the kraal." "Where are they then?" "Perhaps one of the mujiba took them out early, I will go to find them." oh, it doesn't matter." Cathy shook her head. "It's only a short walk to the telegraph office. The exercise will be good for me." And she called to Jonathan, "Fetch my bonnet for me, Jon-Jon."

"Nkosikazi, it is perhaps not wise, the little one-" "Oh don't fuss," Cathy told him fondly, and took Jonathan's hand. "If you find the ponies in time you can come and fetch us." Then swinging her bonnet by its ribbon and with Jonathan skipping beside her, she started along the track that led around the side of the wooded hill towards the railhead.

There was no clamour of hammers on steel. Jonathan noticed it first.

"It's so quiet, Mama. "And they stopped to listen.

"It's not Friday," Cathy murmured. "Mr. Mac can't be paying the gangs." She shook her head, still not alarmed. "That's strange. "And they went on.

At the corner of the hill they stopped again, and Cathy held her bonnet up to shade her eyes from the low sun. The railway lines ran away southward, glistening like the silken threads of a spider's web, but below them they ended abruptly at the raw gash of the cut line through the bush. There was a pile of teak sleepers at the railhead and a smaller bundle of steel rails, the service locomotive was due up from Kimberley this afternoon to replenish those materials. The sledgehammers and shovels were in neat stacks where the shift had left them at dusk the night before. There was no human movement around the railhead.

"That's even stranger, "said Cathy.

"Where is Mr. Henderson, Mama?" Jonathan asked. His voice was unusually subdued. "Where are Mr. Mac and Mr. Braithwaite?" "I don't know. They must still be in their tents." The tents of the white surveyor and the engineer and his supervisors were grouped just beyond the square galvanized iron shack of the telegraph. There was no sign of life around the hut nor between the neat pyramids of canvas, except for a single black crow which sat on the peak of one of them.

Its hoarse cawing reached them faintly, and as Cathy watched, it spread its black wings and flapped heavily to earth at the entrance of the tent.

"Where are all the hammer-boys?" Jonathan piped, and suddenly Cathy shivered.

"I don't know, darling." Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. "We will go and find out." She realized she had spoken too loudly, and Jonathan shrank against her legs. "Mummy, I'm frightened."

"Don't be a silly boy," Cathy told him firmly, and dragging him by the hand, she started down the hill.

By the time she reached the telegraph hut, she was moving as fast as her big round belly would allow, and her breathing in her own ears was deafening.

"Stay here." She did not know what prompted her to leave Jonathan at the steps of the veranda, but she went up alone to the door of the telegraph hut. , The door was ajar. She pushed it fully open.

Mr. Braithwaite sat beside his table facing the doorway. He was staring at her with those pale popping eyes, and his mouth hung open. "Mr. Braithwaite," Cathy said, and at the sound of her voice there was a hum like a swarm of bees taking flight, and the big cobalt blue flies that had covered his shirt-front rose in a cloud into the air, and Cathy saw that his belly was a gaping mushy red pit, and that his entrails hung in ropes down between his knees into a tangle on the floor under the desk. Cathy shrank back against the door. She felt her legs turn rubbery under her and black shadows wheeled through her vision like the wings of bats at sundown. One of the metallic blue flies settled on her cheek and crawled sluggishly down towards the corner of her mouth.

Cathy leaned forward slowly and retched explosively, and her breakfast spattered on the wooden door between her feet. She backed away slowly out of the door, shaking her head and trying to wipe the sickly sweet taste of vomit from her lips. She almost tripped on the steps, and sat down heavily. Jonathan ran to her, and clung to her arm.

"What happened, Mummy?" "I want you to be a brave little man," she whispered.

"Are you sick, Mummy?" The child shook her arm with agitation, and Cathy found it difficult to think.

She realized what had caused the hideous mutilation of the corpse in the hut. The Matabele always disembowelled their victims. It was a ritual that released the spirit of the dead man, and allowed it to go on to its Valhalla. To leave the belly pouch was to trap the victim's shade upon the earth and have it return to haunt the slayer.

Mr. Braithwaite had been split by the razor-sharp edge of a Matabele assegai and his hot entrails had been plucked from him like those of a chicken. It was the work of a Matabele war party.

"Where is Mr. Henderson, Mummy?" Jon-Jon demanded shrilly. "I am going to his tent." The big burly engineer was one of Jonathan's favourite friends, and Cathy caught his arm.

"No, Jon-Jon don't go!" "Why not?" The crow had screwed up its courage at last and now it hopped into the opening of the engineer's tent and disappeared. Cathy knew what had attracted it.

"Please be quiet, Jon-Jon," Cathy pleaded. "Let Mummy think." The missing servants. They had been warned, of course, as had the Matabele construction gangs. They knew that a war party was out, and they had faded away, and a horrifying thought struck Cathy. Perhaps the servants, her own people, were part of the war party. She shook her head violently. No, not them. These must be some small band of renegades, not her own people.

They would have struck at dawn, of course, for it was the favourite hour. They had caught Henderson and his foreman asleep in the tents. Only the faithful little Braithwaite had been at his machine. The telegraph machine Cathy started up the telegraph was her one link with the outside world.

"Jon-Jon, stay here," she ordered, and crept back towards the door of the hut.

She steeled herself, and then glanced into the interior, trying not to look at the little man in the chair. One quick glance was enough. The telegraph machine had been ripped from the wall and smashed into pieces on the floor of the hut. She reeled back and leaned against the iron wall beside the door, clutching her swollen stomach with both hands, forcing herself to think again.

The war party had struck the railhead and then disappeared back into the forest and then she remembered the missing servants. The camp, they had not disappeared, they would be circling up through the trees towards the camp. She looked around her desperately, expecting at any moment to see the silent black files of plumed warriors come padding out of the thick bush.

The Service train from Kimberley was due late that afternoon, ten hours from now, and she was alone, except for Jonathan. Cathy sank down on her knees, reached for him and clung to him with the strength of despair, and only then realized that the boy was staring through the open doorway.

"Mr. Braithwaite is dead!" Jonathan said matter-of-factly.

Forcibly, she turned his head away. "They are going to kill us too, aren't they, Mummy?" "Oh Jon-Jon!" "We need a gun. I can shoot.

Papa taught me." A gun Cathy looked towards the silent tents. She did not think she had the courage to go into one of them, not even to find a weapon. She knew what carnage to expect there.

A shadow fell over her and she screamed. "Nkosikazi. It is me."

Isazi had come down the hill as silently as a panther.

"The horses are gone," he said, and she motioned him to look into the telegraph hut.

Isazi's expression did not change.

"So,"he said quietly, "the Matabele jackals can still bite." "The tents," Cathy whispered. "See if you can find a weapon." Isazi went with the lithe swinging run of a man half his age, ducking from one tent-opening to another, and when he came back to her, he carried an assegai with a broken shaft.

"The big one fought well. He was still alive, with his guts torn out of him and the crows were eating them. He could no longer speak, but he looked at me. I have given him peace. But there are no guns the Matabele have taken them." "There are guns at the camp," Cathy whispered.

"Come, Nkosikazi," he lifted her tenderly to her feet and Jonathan manfully took her other arm, though he did not reach to her armpit.

The first pain hit Cathy before they reached the thick bush at the edge of the cut line, and it doubled her over. They held her while the paroxysm lasted, Jonathan not understanding what was happening, but the little Zulu was grave and silent.

"All right." Cathy straightened up at last, and tried to wipe the long tendrils of her hair off her face, but they were plastered there by her own sweat.

They went up on the track at Cathy's pace. Isazi was watching the forest on both sides for the dark movement of warriors, and he carried the broken assegai in his free hand with an underhand stabbing grip.

Cathy gasped and staggered as the next pain caught her.

This time they could not hold her and she went down on her knees in the dust. When it passed, she looked up at Isazi.

"They are too close together. It is happening." He did not have to reply.

"Take Jonathan to the Harkness Mine." "Nkosikazi, the train?"

"The train will be too late. You must go." "Nkosikazi you, what will become of you?" "Without a horse, I could never reach the Harkness. It is almost thirty miles. Every moment you waste now wastes the boy's life." He did not move.

"If you can save him, Isazi, then you save part of me. If you stay here, we will all die. Go. Go quickly!" she urged. Isazi reached for Jonathan's hand, but he jerked away.

"I won't leave my mummy." His voice rose hysterically. "My daddy said I must look after my mummy." Cathy gathered herself. It took all her determination to perform the most difficult task of her young life.

She hit Jonathan open-handed across the face, back and forth, with all her strength. The child staggered away from her. The vivid crimson outlines of her fingers rising on the pale skin of his cheeks. She had never struck his face before.

"Do as I tell you," Cathy blazed at him furiously. "Go with Isazi this very instant." The Zulu snatched up the child, and looked down at her for a moment longer.

"You have the heart of a lioness. I salute you, Nkosikazi." And he went bounding away into the forest, carrying Jonathan with him. In seconds he had disappeared and then only did she let the sobs come shaking and. choking up her throat.

She thought then that being entirely alone is the hardest thing in life to bear. She thought of Ralph, and she had never loved nor wanted him the way she did at that moment. It seemed for a time that she had used the last grain of her courage to strike her only child, and to send him away for a faint chance of salvation. She would be content to stay here, kneeling in the dust in the early sunlight until they came for her with the cruet steel.

Then from somewhere deep within, her she found the strength to rise and hobble on up the path. At the heel of the hill, she looked down at the camp. It looked so quiet and orderly. Her home. The smoke from the camp-fire rose like a pale grey feather into the still morning air, so welcoming, so safe, illogically she felt that if she could only reach her tent then it would be all right.

She started and she had not gone a dozen paces, before she felt something burst deep within her, and then the abrupt hot rush down the inside of her legs as her waters broke and poured from her. She struggled on, hampered by her sodden skirts, and then, unbelievably, she had reached her own tent.

It was so cool and dark within, like a church, she thought, and again her legs gave way beneath her. She crawled painfully across the floor, and her hair came tumbling down and blinded her. She groped her way to the wagon chest set at the foot of the big camp cot, and threw the hair out of her eyes as she rested against it.

The lid was so heavy that it took all her strength, but at last it fell open with a crash. The pistol was tucked under the crocheted white bed covers, that she had hoarded for the home that Ralph would one day build for her. It was a big service Webley revolver. She had only fired it once, with Ralph steadying her from behind, holding her wrists against the recoil. Now it needed both her hands to lift it out of the chest. She was too tired to climb onto the cot. She sat with her back against the chest, both her legs straight out in front of her flat against the floor, and she held the pistol with both hands in her lap.

She must have dozed, for when she started awake, it was to hear the whisper of feet against the bare earth. She looked up. There was the shadow of a man silhouetted by the slanting rays of the sun against the white canvas of the tent like a figure in a magic lantern show.

She lifted the pistol and aimed at the entrance. The ugly black weapon wavered uncertainly in her grip, and aman stepped through the flap.

"Oh, thank God." Cathy let the pistol fall into her lap, "Oh thank God, it's you," she whispered and let her head fall forward. The thick curtain of her hair fell open, splitting down the back of her head, exposing the pale skin at the tender nape of her neck. Bazo looked down at it. He saw a soft pulse throbbing beneath the skin.

Bazo wore only a kilt of civet-tails, and about his forehead a band of mole-skin no feathers nor tassels. His feet were bare. In his left hand he held a broad stabbing assegai. In his right he carried a knobkerrie like the mace of a medieval knight. The handle was of polished rhinoceros horn, three feet long, and the head was a ball of heavy lead wood studded with hand-forged nails of native iron.

When he swung the knobkerrie, all the strength of his wide shoulders was behind the blow, and his point of aim was the pulse in the pale nape of Cathy's neck.

Two of his warriors came into the tent and flanked Bazo, their eyes were still glazed with the killing madness. They also wore the mole-skin headbands, and they looked down at the crumpled body on the floor of the tent. One of the warriors changed his grip on the assegai, ready for the cutting stroke.

"The woman's spirit must fly," he said.

"Do it!" Bazo said, and the warrior stooped and worked quickly, expertly.

"There is life within her," he said. "See! It moves yet." "Still it!" Bazo ordered, and left the tent, striding out into the sunlight.

"Find the boy, , he ordered his men who waited there. "Find the white cub." The driver of the locomotive was terrified. They had stopped for a few minutes at the trading-post beside the tracks at Plumtree siding, and he had seen the bodies of the storekeeper and his family lying in the front yard.

Ralph Ballantyne thrust the muzzle of the rifle– between his shoulder-blades, and marched him back to the cab, forcing him to go on northwards, deeper and deeper into Matabeleland.

They had come all the way from the Kimberley shunting yards with the loco throttle wide open, and Ralph had spelled the stoker on the foot plate shovelling the lumpy black coal into the firebox with a monotonous rhythm, bare-chested and sweating in the furnace glare, the coal dust blackening his face and arms like those of a chimney-sweep, his palms wet and raw from the burst blisters.

They had clipped almost two hours off the record run to the railhead. As they came roaring around the bend between the hills and saw the iron roof of the telegraph shack, Ralph hurled the shovel aside and clambered onto the side of the cab to peer ahead.

His heart leaped joyfully against his ribs, there was movement around the hut and between the tents, there was life here! Then his heart dropped as swiftly as it had risen, as he recognized the skulking dog-like shapes. , The hyena were so intent on squabbling over the things they had dragged out of the tents, that they were totally unafraid. It was only when Ralph started shooting that they scattered.

He knocked down half a dozen of the loathsome beasts before the rifle was empty. He ran from the hut to each tent in turn, and then back to the locomotive. Neither the driver nor the fireman had left the cab.

"Mr. Ballantyne, these murdering bloody eat hen will be back at any minute.-" "Wait!"" Ralph shouted at him, and scrambled up the side of the cattle-truck behind the coal buggy. He knocked out the locking-pins and the door came crashing down to form a drawbridge.

Ralph led the horses out of the truck. There were four of them, one already saddled, the best mounts he had been able to find. He paused only long enough to clinch the girth, and then swung up into the saddle with the rifle still in his hand.

"I'm not going to wait here," the driver yelled. "Christ Almighty, those niggers are animals, man, animals "If my wife and son are here, I'll need to get them back. Give me one hour, "Ralph asked.

"I'm not waiting another minute. I'm going back." The driver shook his head.

"You can go to hell then, "Ralph told him coldly.

He kicked his horse into a gallop, and dragging the spare mounts on the lead-rein behind him, took the track up the side of the kopje towards the camp.

As he rode, he thought once more that perhaps he should have listened to Aaron Fagan, perhaps he should have recruited a dozen other horsemen in Kimberley to go with him. But he knew that he would never have been able to abide the few hours that he would have needed to find good men. As it was, he had left Kimberley less than half an hour after he had received the telegraph from Toti just long enough to fetch his Winchester, fill the saddlebags with ammunition, and take the horses from Aaron's stables to the shunting-yard.

Before he turned the angle of the hill, he glanced back over his shoulder. The locomotive was already huffing back along the curve of the rails towards the south. Now, as far as he knew, he might be the only white man left alive in Matabeleland.

Ralph galloped into the camp. They had been there already. The camp had been looted, Jonathan's tent had collapsed, his clothing was scattered and trampled into the dust. "Cathy," Ralph shouted, as he dismounted. "Jon-Jon! Where are you?" Paper rustled under his feet and Ralph looked down. Cathy's portfolio of drawings had been thrown down and had burst open, the paintings of which she was so proud were torn and crumpled. Ralph picked up one of them, it was of the lovely dark scarlet trumpet flowers of Kigeha africana, the African sausage tree. He tried to smooth out the rumpled sheet, and then realized the futility of that gesture.

He ran on to their living-tent, and ripped open the flap. Cathy lay on her back with her unborn child beside her. She had promised Ralph a daughter and she had kept her promise.