Текст книги "Men of Men"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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Zouga waited in the press of hot sweat-stinking bodies that filled the canteen, choosing a man with care while he listened to the voices grow louder and the chaff coarser as the schooners went down.

He selected one who by his comportment and speech was a gentleman, and home-bred rather than colonial born. The man was drinking whisky, and when his glass was empty Zouga moved closer and ordered it refilled.

"Very decent of you, old man," the man thanked him.

He was in his twenties still and remarkably good-looking, with fair English skin and silky sideburns. "The name is Pickering, Neville Pickering," he said.

"Ballantyne, Zouga Ballantyne." Zouga took the proffered hand and the man's expression altered.

"Good Lord, you are the elephant hunter." Pickering raised his voice. "I say, fellows, this is Zouga Ballantyne.

You know, the one who wrote Hunter's Odyssey."

Zouga doubted half of them could read, but the fact that he had written a book made him an object of wonder. He found the centre of interest had shifted from Black Thomas to himself.

It was after dark when he started back to the wagon.

He had always had a strong head for liquor and there was a good moon, so he could pick his way through the ordure that littered the track.

He had spent a few sovereigns on liquor, but in return he had learned a great deal about the diggings. He had learned of the diggers" expectations and fears. He knew now the going price for "briefies", the politics and economics of diamond pricing, the geological composition of the strike and a hundred other related facts.

He had also made a friendship that would alter his whole life.

Although Aletta and the boys were already asleep in the wagon tent, Jan Cheroot, the little Hottentot, was waiting for him, squatting beside the watch-fire, a small gnome-like figure in the silver moonlight.

"There is no fresh water," he told Zouga morosely. "The river is a full day's trek away, and the thieving Boer who owns the wells sells water at the same price as they sell brandy in this hell-hole." Jan Cheroot could be relied upon to know the going price of liquor ten minutes after arriving in a new town.

Zouga climbed into the wagon body, careful not to jolt the boys awake; but Aletta was lying rigidly in the narrow riempie bed. He lay down beside her and neither of them spoke for many minutes.

Then she whispered. "You are determined to stay in this," her voice checked, then went on with quiet vehemence, "in this awful place."

He did not reply, and in the cot behind the canvas screen across the body of the wagon Jordan whimpered and then was silent. Zouga waited until he had settled before he replied.

"Today a Welshman named Black Thomas found a diamond. They say he has been offered twelve thousand pounds by one of the buyers."

"A woman came to sell me a little goat's milk while you were away." Aletta might not have heard him. "She says there is camp fever here. A woman and two children have died already and others are sick."

"A man can buy a good claim on the kopje for one thousand pounds."

"I fear for the boys, Zouga," Aletta whispered. "Let us go back. We could give up this wandering gypsy life for ever. Daddy has always wanted you to come into the business." Aletta's father was a rich Cape merchant, but Zouga shuddered in the darkness at the thought of a high desk in the dingy counting-room of Cartwright and Company.

"It is time the boys went to a good school, else they will grow up as savages. Please let us go back now, Zouga."

"A week," he said. "Give me a week, we have come so far."

"I do not think I can bear the flies and filth for another week."

She sighed and turned her back to him, careful not to touch him in the narrow cot.

The family doctor in Cape Town, who had attended Aletta's own birth, the birth of both boys and her numerous miscarriages, had warned them ominously.

"Another pregnancy could be your last, Aletta. I cannot be responsible for what may happen." For the three years since then she had lain with her back to him, on those occasions when they had been able to share a bed.

Before dawn Zouga slipped out of the wagon while Aletta and the boys still slept. In the darkness before first light he stirred the ashes and drank a cup of coffee crouching over them. Then in the first rosy glow of dawn he joined the stream of carts and hurrying men that moved up for the day's assault on the hill.

In the strengthening light and rising heat and whirls of dust he moved from claim to claim, looking and assessing. He had long ago trained himself as an amateur geologist. He had read every book that he could find on the subject, often by candlelight on the lonely hunting veld; and on his infrequent returns home he had passed days and weeks in the Natural History Museum in London, much of the time in the Geological Section. He had trained his eye and sharpened his instinct for the lie of the rock formations and for the grain and weight and colour of a sample of reef.

At most of the claims his overtures were met with a shrug and a turned back, but one or two of the diggers remembered him as the elephant hunter" or the "writer fellow" and used his visit as an excuse to lean on their shovels and talk for a few minutes.

"I've got two briefies," a digger who introduced himself as Jock Danby told Zouga, "but I call them The Devil's Own. With these two hands," he held up his huge paws, the palms studded with raised calluses, the nails chipped away and black with dirt, "with my own hands I've shifted fifteen thousand tons of stuff, and the biggest stone I've pulled is a two. That there," he pointed to the adjoining claim, "was Black Thomas's claim. Yesterday he pulled a monkey, a bloody fat stinking monkey, only two feet from my side peg. Christ!

It's enough to break your heart."

"Buy you a beer." Zouga jerked his head towards the nearest canteen, and the man licked his lips then shook his head regretfully.

"My kid is hungry, you can see the ribs sticking out of the little bugger and I have to pay wages by noon tomorrow." He indicated the dozen half-naked black tribesmen labouring with pick and bucket in the bottom of the neatly squared off excavation with him. "These bastards cost me a fortune every day."

Jock Danby spat on his callused palms and hefted the shovel, but Zouga cut in smoothly.

"They do say the strike will pinch out at the level of the plain."

At this point the kopje had been reduced to a mere twenty feet above the surrounding plain. "What do you think?"

"Mister, it's bad luck to even talk like that." Jock checked the swing of his shovel and scowled heavily up at Zouga on the roadway above him, but there was fear in his eyes.

"You ever thought of selling out?" Zouga asked him, and immediately Jock's fear faded to be replaced by a sly expression.

"Why, mister? You thinking of buying?" Jock straightened. "Let me give you a little tip for free. Don't even think about it, not unless you got six thousand pounds to do the talking for you."

He peered up at Zouga hopefully, and Zouga stared back at him without expression.

"Thank you for your time, sir, and for your sake I hope the gravel lasts."

Zouga touched the wide brim of his hat and sauntered away. Jock Danby watched him go, then spat viciously on the yellow ground at his feet and swung the shovel at it as though it were a mortal enemy.

As he walked away Zouga felt a strange sense of elation. There was a time when he had lived by the turn of a card and the fall of a dice, and he felt the gambler's instinct now. He knew the gravel would not pinch out.

He knew it sank down, pure and rich into the depths.

He knew it with a deep unshakable certainty, and he knew something else with equal certainty.

"The road to the north begins here." He spoke aloud, and felt his blood thrill in his veins. "This is where it begins."

He felt the need to make an act of faith, of total affirmation, and he knew what it must be. The price of livestock on the diggings was vastly inflated, and his oxen were costing him a guinea a day to water. He knew how to close the road back.

By midafternoon he had sold the oxen: a hundred pounds a head, and five hundred for his wagon. Now he was committed, and he felt the currents of excitement coursing through his body as he paid the gold coin over the raw wooden counter of the tin shack that housed the branch of the Standard Bank.

The road back was cut. He was chancing it all on the yellow gravel and the road northwards.

"Zouga, you promised," Aletta whispered when the buyer came to Zouga's camp to collect the oxen. "You promised that in one week -" Then she fell silent when she saw his face. She knew that expression. She drew the two boys to her and held them close.

Jan Cheroot went to each of the animals in turn and whispered to them as tenderly as a lover, and his stare was reproachful as he turned to Zouga while the span was led away.

Neither man spoke, and at last Jan Cheroot dropped his gaze and walked away, a slight, bare-footed, bowlegged little gnome.

Zouga thought he had lost him, and he felt a rush of distress, for the little man was a friend, a teacher and a companion of twelve years.

It was Jan Cheroot who had tracked his first elephant, and stood shoulder to shoulder with him as he shot it down. Together they had marched and ridden the breadth of a savage continent. They had drunk from the same bottle and eaten from the same pot at a thousand camp fires. Yet he could not bring himself to call him back. He knew that Jan Cheroot must make his own decision.

He need not have worried. When "dop" time came that evening, Jan Cheroot was there to hold out his chipped enamel mug. Zouga smiled and, ignoring the line that measured his daily ration of brandy, he filled the mug to the brim.

"It was necessary, old friend," he said, and Jan Cheroot nodded gravely. "They were good beasts," he said. "But then I have had many fine beasts go from my life, fourlegged and two-legged ones." He tasted the raw spirit.

"After a little time and a dram or two, it does not matter so much."

Aletta did not speak again until the boys were asleep in the tent.

"Selling the oxen and the wagon was your answer," she said.

"It cost a guinea a day to water them, and the grazing has been eaten flat for miles about."

"There have been three more deaths in the camp. I counted thirty wagons leaving today. It's a plague camp."

"Yes." Zouga nodded. "Some of the claim holders are getting nervous. A claim that I was offered for eleven hundred pounds yesterday was sold for nine hundred today."

"Zouga, it's not fair to me or the children," she began, but he interrupted her.

"I can arrange a passage for you and the boys with a transport rider. He has sold his stock and he leaves in the next few days. He will take you back to Cape Town."

They undressed in darkness and silence, and when Aletta followed him into the hard narrow cot the silence continued until he thought she had fallen asleep. Then he felt her hand, smooth and soft, touch his cheek lightly.

"I am sorry, my darling." Her voice was as light as her touch, and her breath stirred his beard. "I was so tired and depressed."

He took her hand and held the tips of her fingers to his lips.

"I have been such a poor wife to you, always too sick and weak when you needed someone strong." Timidly she let her body touch his. "And now when I should be a comfort to you, I do nothing but snivel."

"No," he said. "That's not true." And yet over the years he had resented her often enough for just those reasons.

He had felt like a man trying to run with shackles on his ankles.

"And yet I love you, Zouga. I loved you the first day I laid eyes on you, and I have never ceased to love you."

I love you too, Aletta," he assured her, yet the words came automatically; and to make up for the lack of spontaneity, he placed his arm around her shoulders and she drew closer still and laid her cheek against his chest.

"I hate myself for being so weak and sickly," she hesitated, "for not being able to be a real wife any more."

"Shh! Aletta, do not upset yourself."

I will be strong now, you will see."

"You have always been strong, deep inside."

"No, but I will be now. We shall find that capful of diamonds together, and afterwards we shall go north." He did not reply, and it was she who spoke again. "Zouga, I want you to make love to me, now."

"Aletta, you know that is dangerous."

"Now," she repeated. "Now, please." And she took his hand down and placed it under the hem of her nightdress against the smooth warm skin of her inner thigh. She had never done that before, and Zouga found himself shocked but strangely aroused, and afterwards he was filled with a deep tenderness and compassion for her that he had not felt for many years.

When her breathing had become regular once more, she pulled his hands away gently and slipped out of the cot.

Leaning on one elbow he watched her light the candle and then kneel by the trunk that was lashed to the foot of the cot. She had plaited her hair with a ribbon in it, and her body was slim as a young girl's. The candlelight flattered her, smoothing out the lines of sickness and worry. He remembered how lovely she had been.

She lifted the lid of the trunk, took something from the interior and brought it to him. It was a small cask with an ornate brass lock. The key was in the lock.

"Open it," she said.

In the candlelight he saw that the cask contained two thick rolls of five-pound notes, each bound up with a scrap of ribbon, and a draw-string pouch of dark green velvet. He lifted out the pouch and it was heavy with gold coin.

"I was keeping it," she whispered, "for the day it was really needed. There is almost a thousand pounds there."

"Where did you get this?"

"My father, on our wedding day. Take it, Zouga. Buy that claim with it. This time we will make it all right.

This time is going to be all right."

In the morning the purchaser came to claim the wagon. He waited impatiently while the family moved their meagre possessions into the bell tent.

Once Zouga had removed the cots from the tented half of the wagon body he was able to lift the planking from the narrow compartment over the rear wheel truck. Here the heavier goods were stored to keep the vehicle's centre of gravity low. The spare trek chain, the lead for moulding into bullet, axe heads, a small anvil, and then Zouga's household god which he and Jan Cheroot strained to lift from its padded bed and lower to the ground beside the wagon.

Between them they carried it to the tent and set it upright against the far screen of the bell tent.

"I've lugged this rubbish from Matabeleland to Cape Town and back," complained Jan Cheroot disgustedly as he stood back from the graven birdlike figure on its stone plinth.

Zouga smiled indulgently. The Hottentot had hated that ancient idol from the very first day they uncovered it together in the overgrown ruins of an ancient walled city, a city they had stumbled on while hunting elephant in that wild untamed land so far to the north.

"It's my good-luck charm," Zouga smiled.

"What luck?" Jan Cheroot demanded bitterly. "Is it luck to have to sell the oxen? Is it luck to live in a tent full of flies amongst a tribe of white savages?" Muttering and mumbling bitterly, Jan Cheroot stamped out of the tent and snatched up the halters of the two remaining horses to take them down to water.

Zouga paused for a moment in front of the statue. It stood almost as high as his head on its slim column of polished green soapstone. Atop the column crouched a stylized bird figure on the edge of flight. The cruel curve of the falcon beak fascinated Zouga, and in a habitual gesture he stroked the smooth stone and the blank eyes stared back at him inscrutably.

Zouga opened his lips to whisper to the bird, and at that moment Aletta stooped into the triangular opening of the tent and saw what he was doing.

Quickly, almost guiltily, Zouga dropped his hand and turned to face her. Aletta hated that stone image even more bitterly than did Jan Cheroot. Now she stood very still. Her arms were filled with a pile of neatly folded linen and clothing, but her eyes were troubled.

"Zouga, must we have that thing in here?"

"It takes up no room," he told her lightly, and came to take her burden from her, place it on the truckle bed, and then turn back to take her in his arms.

"I will never forget what you did last night," he told her, and felt the rigidity go out of her body. She swayed against him and lifted her face to his. Once again he felt his chest squeezed with compassion as he saw the lines of sickness and worry at the corners of her eyes and mouth, saw the grey patina of fatigue on her skin.

He bowed his head to kiss her lips, feeling awkward at such unaccustomed demonstration of affection; but at that moment the two boys burst into the tent, raucous with laughter and excitement and dragging between them a stray puppy on a string, and Aletta broke hurriedly from Zouga's embrace and, flushing with embarrassment, adjusted her apron, beginning to scold her offspring fondly.

"Out with it! It's covered in fleas."

"Oh please, Mama!"

"Out, I say!"

She watched Zouga set off into the sprawling settlement, striding down the dusty track with his shoulders squared and the old jaunty spring in his step, then she turned back to the cone of soiled canvas set on a bleak dry plain under the cruel blue African sky, and she sighed. The weariness came upon her again in waves.

In her girlhood there had been servants to perform the menial tasks of cooking and cleaning. She still had not mastered the smoky fluttering open flames of the camp fire, and already a fine red coating of dust had settled upon everything, even the surface of the goat's milk in its earthenware jug. With an enormous effort of will, she gathered her resolve and stooped determinedly into the tent.

Ralph had followed Jan Cheroot down to the wells to help with the horses. She knew that the two of them would not return until the next mealtime. They made an incongruous pair, the wizened little old man and the handsome reckless child already taller and more sturdy than his inseparable protector and tutor.

Jordan stayed with her. He was not yet ten years of age, but without his companionship she doubted that she could have borne the terrible journey across those bonebreaking miles, the burning dusty days and the frosty nights of aching cold.

Already the child could cook the simple camp dishes, and his unleavened bread and griddle scones were family favourites at every meal. She had taught him to read and write, and given to him her love of poetry and fine and beautiful things. He could already darn a torn shirt and wield the heavy coal-filled stroking iron to smooth a shirt. His sweet piping tones and angelic beauty were constant sources of intense joy to her. She had grown his golden curls long for once, resisting her husband when he wanted to scissor them short as he had done Ralph's.

Jordan stood below her now, helping her to string a canvas screen across the tent that would divide the sleeping and living areas. She was suddenly compelled to lean down and touch those soft fine curls.

At the touch he smiled sweetly up at her, and abruptly her senses spun dizzily. She swayed wildly on the rickety cot, trying to keep her balance and, as she fell, Jordan struggled to hold and steady her. He did not have the strength and her weight bore them both to the ground.

Jordan's eyes were huge and swimming with horror.

He helped her half crawl, half stagger back to the cot and collapse upon it.

Waves of heat and nausea and giddiness broke over her.

Zouga was the first customer at the office of the Standard Bank when the clerk opened the door onto Market Square. Once he had deposited the contents of Aletta's casket and the clerk had locked it in the big green iron safe against the far wall, Zouga had a balance of almost 2,500 pounds to his credit.

That knowledge armed his resolve. He felt tall and powerful as he strode up the ramp of the central causeway.

The roadways were seven feet wide. The mining commissioner, after the lesson of the diggings at Bultfontein and Dutoitspan, had insisted that these access roads be left open to service the claims in the centre of the growing pit. The workings were a mosaic of square platforms, each precisely thirty feet square. Some of the diggers, with more capital and better organization, were sinking their claims faster than others, so that the slower workers were isolated on towers of golden yellow earth, high above their neighbouring claims, while the fastest miners had sunk deep square shafts at the bottom of which toiled the naked black labourers.

For a man to move from one claim to another was already a laborious and often downright dangerous journey: crossing rickety board walks above the dizzying shaft of a deep claim, scrambling up high swaying rope ladders or down the steps of a pole ladder, lengths of native timber lashed together with cross-steps that creaked and gave with a man's weight.

Standing on the crumbling roadway with the workings gaping below him, Zouga wondered what would be the outcome if the strike continued to great depth. It already required a level head and strong stomach to chance the uneven pit, and he wondered again at man's determination to accumulate wealth against any odds, in the face of any danger.

He watched while from the bottom of the workings a leather bucket, brimming with broken lumps of the compacted yellow gravel, was hauled up, swinging at the end of a long rope, two sweating black men dipping and swinging over the windlass, their muscles swelling and subsiding in the bright sunlight.

The bucket reached the lip of the roadway, and they seized it, lugged it to the waiting cart with its patient pair of mules, and dumped the contents into the halffull body. Then one of them dropped the empty bucket over the side of the roadway to the waiting men fifty feet below. At hundreds of points along the fourteen causeways the same operation was being repeated, endlessly the loaded buckets came swinging up and were dropped back empty.

Occasionally, breaking the monotonous rhythm, the seam of a leather bucket would burst showering the men below with jagged chunks of rock, or a worn rope would snap and, with warning shouts, the toilers at the bottom of the pit would hurl themselves aside to avoid the plunging missile.

There was an impatient humming excitement that seemed to embrace the entire workings. The urgent shouted commands between pit and roadway, the squeal of rope sheaves, the thudding jar of pick and swinging shovel, the rich lilting chorus of a gang of Basuto tribesmen singing as they worked, small wiry little mountaineers from the Dragon Range.

The white diggers, bullying and bustling, scrambled down the swaying ladderworks or stood over their gangs on the pit floor, hawk-eyed to forestall a "pick-up': the possibility of a valuable diamond being exposed by a spade and swiftly palmed by one of the black workers, to be slipped into the mouth or other body opening at the first opportunity.

Illegal diamond selling and buying was already the plague of the diggers. In their eyes, every black man was a suspect. Only men with less than one quarter black blood were allowed to hold and work claims.

This law made it easier to apportion blame, for a black face with a diamond in his possession was guilty without appeal.

However, this law could not control the shady white men that hung around the diggings, ostensibly travelling salesmen, actors or proprietors of infamous drinking canteens but in reality all I.D.B., Illegal Diamond Buyers.

The diggers hated them with a ferocity that sometimes boiled over in a night of rioting and beating and burning in which innocent merchants, as well as the guilty, lost all their possessions in the flames, while the mob of diggers danced about the burning shacks chanting: I.D.B! I.D.B!" Zouga moved cautiously out along the crest of the roadway, at times pushed perilously close to the edge by a passing cart laden with diamondiferous earth.

He reached the point above Jock Danby's claims from which he had spoken to the friendly digger the previous day.

The two claims were deserted, the leather bucket and rope coils abandoned, a pick handle standing upright with its point driven into the earth far below the level of the roadway.

There was a big bearded digger working the adjoining claim, and he scowled up in response to Zouga's hail.

"What you want?"

"I'm looking for Jock Danby."

"Well, you are looking in the wrong place."

The man turned and aimed a kick at the nearest labourer. "Sebenza, you black monkey!"

"Where will I find him?"

"Other side of Market Square, behind the Lord Nelson."

The man answered offhandedly without turning his head.

The dusty pitted open square was as littered with filth as the rest of the settlement, and crowded with the wagons of the transport riders and the carts of farmers who had come in to sell milk or produce and of the water sellers, peddling the precious stuff by the bucket.

The Lord Nelson was stained red dusty canvas over a wooden frame. Three of the previous night's drinkers were laid out like embalmed corpses in the narrow alley beside the canteen, while the single bar-room was already filling with the early morning customers.

A pariah-dog sniffed the breath of one of the unconscious drunks, and recoiled with shock before slinking away to raid the open drum that served as a rubbish bin behind the shack.

Zouga stepped over the sprawling bodies and gingerly made his way into the noisome slum beyond. He had to make half a dozen further enquiries until he found Jock Danby's hut. So obsessed were the diggers with their own race for the hidden glitter of wealth, and so transient the population of the diggings, that a man seemed to know only the names of his immediate neighbours. It was a community of strangers, every man caring only for himself, completely uninterested in the other human beings about him, except in as much as they could either hinder or help him in his quest for the bright stones.

Jock Danby's hut was hardly distinguishable from a thousand others. Two rooms built of adobe bricks and covered with thatch and tattered canvas. There was a lean-to at one end, with a smoking cooking fire on which stood a sooty black three-legged pot.

In the cluttered dusty yard stood the inevitable diamond sorting-table, a low structure with sturdy wooden legs, the top covered with a sheet of flat iron which was scoured shiny bright by the diamondiferous pebbles that had brushed over the surface. The wooden scrapers lay abandoned on the table top, and a heap of sieved and washed gravel formed a glittering pyramid in the centre of the table.

A two-wheeled cart stood in front of the main door of the hut, two somnolent donkeys still in the traces, flicking their ears at the swarming black cloud of flies. The cart was piled with lumps of yellow earth, but the yard was deserted.

Incongruously there were a few straggling scarlet geraniums growing in galvanized one-gallon syrup cans on each side of the doorway. There were also dainty lace curtains in the single window, so freshly washed that they had not yet turned ochre red with dust, nor become speckled with the excrement of the swarming flies.

The touch of a woman was unmistakable, and to confirm Zouga's guess there was the faint but harrowing sound of a woman weeping from the open doorway.

As Zouga hesitated in the yard, disconcerted by the sounds of grief, a brawny figure filled the doorway and stood blinking in the sunlight, shading his eyes with a gnarled and dirt-ingrained hand.

"Who are you?" Jock Danby demanded, with unnecessary roughness.

"I spoke to you yesterday," Zouga explained, "up at the pit., "What do you want?" the digger demanded, showing no sign of recognition, his features screwed up in an truculence and something else, some other emotion which Zouga did not immediately recognize.

"You spoke of selling your briefies," Zouga reminded him.

Jock Danby's face seemed to swell and turn dark ugly red; the veins and cords stood out in his throat as he ducked his head down on the thickly muscled shoulders.

"You filthy bloody vulture," he choked, and he came out into the sunlight with the heavy irresistible crabbing rush of a gut-shot buffalo bull.

He was taller than Zouga by a head, ten years younger and fifty pounds heavier. Taken completely by surprise, Zouga was a hundredth part of a second late in ducking and spinning away from the man's charge. A fist like a cannon ball smashed into his shoulder, a glancing blow but with the force to send Zouga reeling to sprawl on his back across the sorting-table, scattering diamondiferous gravel across the dusty yard.

Jock Danby charged again, his swollen face working, his eyes mad, his thick stained fingers hooked as they reached for Zouga's throat. Zouga jack-knifed his legs, drawing himself into a ball, tense as the arch in an adder's neck at the moment before it strikes, and he drove the heels of his boots into the man's chest.

The breath whistled out of Jock Danby's throat, and he stopped in mid-charge as though hit in the chest with a double charge of buck-shot. His head and arms snapped forward, nerveless as a straw-man, and he flew backwards, crashing into the unbaked brick wall of the hut and beginning to slide down onto his knees.

Zouga bounded off the tabletop. His left arm was numb to the fingertips from the unexpected blow, but he was light on his feet as a dancer, and the quick rush of cold anger armed and strengthened him. He closed the gap between them with two swift strides and hooked Jock Danby, high in the side of his head just above and in front of his ear; the shock of the punch jarred his own teeth but sent the man spinning along the wall to slump on his knees in the red dust.

Jock Danby was stunned and his eyes were glazing over, but Zouga jerked him to his feet and propped him against the side of the cart, setting him up carefully for the next punch. His anger and outrage driving him on to revenge that unprovoked and senseless attack, Zouga shifted his weight, holding Jock Danby steady with his left hand and pulling back the right fist for a full-blooded swing.