Men of Men - Smith Wilbur. Страница 23

U1, my beauty." Calvin climbed unsteadily onto the packing case that acted as a table. He had been drinking since noon when he left the kopje-walloper's office. "Lily, the moon of my soul," he crooned, "every night for a year and more I dreamed of this moment."

He dug into the back pocket of his coat and held up a fistful of crumpled five-pound notes.

. "I don't know how much that is," he blurted, "but it's yours."

For a moment Lily's plucked and pencilled eyebrows contracted as she made a rapid calculation of the proffered wad of banknotes; and then she smiled so that the tiny diamond set in her front tooth sparkled like the evening star.

"You beautiful boy," she sang. "Tonight I am your bride.

Take me in your arms, my lover."

The next day someone took a thirty carat stone on the eastern section, a lovely white stone of the first water, and the day after that a huge champagne-coloured diamond came from Neville Pickering's block.

"You'll be leaving now?" Zouga asked him when they met on the roadway above the Devil's Own, and he hoped that the envy did not show in his smile.

"No." Pickering shook his head, and answered with his own charming sunny smile. "I always bet on a winning streak. My partner and I are staying in the game."

It seemed that the diamond god was intent on showering sudden largesse on the New Rush, and a fever of expectation and excitement gripped them all so that the great pit at noon sounded like a hive of wild bees when the acacia forests are in yellow bloom. Three great finds in three days; nobody had seen it happen before.

At night around the camp fires, and in the lantern-lit grog-shops and canteens, the wild theories were aired by dusty diggers drunk on bad liquor and reborn hope.

"It's a stratal enrichment," pontificated one. "It's a layer of fat babies right across the kopje. You mark my words, somebody will take a pony before the week is out."

"Hell no," argued another. "The stones are lying in potholes. Some lucky bastard is going to scoop the pot again, like Calvin's two one six or Pickering's monkey."

Thursday night of the crazy week it rained. Here on the fringes of the Kalahari desert the rainfall was less than twenty inches a year.

They had almost half of that on that single night.

The rain was a slanting curtain of silver arrow shafts in the brilliant crackling blue flare of the lighting. The clouds piled to the heavens banged against one another like fighting bulls, mountainous in the lightning bursts, and the thunder jarred the earth while the rain hissed down.

In the dawn it was still raining, and at another time the diggers might have stayed out of the pit and waited for it to dry out. But not on this day, not with the fierce excitement that gripped the entire settlement. That day nothing would keep them out of the pit.

The diggings were greasy with yellow mud. The lowest claims were knee deep with the insidious clinging stuff.

It coated the bare legs of the black workmen to the thigh; it built up in mud bricks on the boots of the white overseers, weighing them down like convicts shackled to a ball and chain.

The thick red mud on the roadways clogged the wheels of the gravel carts and had to be prised clear with the point of a crowbar. They shovelled the slush into the buckets and as they were hoisted the thin watery mud cascaded down on the men below, so that it was no longer possible to tell black man from white behind their slick and glistening yellow masks.

What none of the men in the workings realized was that, apart from the discomfort and filth that the downpour of the night's thunderstorms had brought to the pit, they had created a less obvious but infinitely graver change in the riddled remains of Colesberg kopje.

The rushing rivulets had found a fissure at the neck of number 6 Roadway and had poured into it, carving and cutting and weakening; and the slimy yellow mud had hidden the deep vertical cracks in the hundred-foot high earthen embankment.

There were sixteen mule carts crowded onto the causeway, most of them fully laden with the first load of the morning, the drivers swearing at each other, the long trek whips firing explosively as they tried to clear a path to get their load out to the waiting cradles.

Down on the Devil's Own the Matabele teams were working side by side, but the icy sting of the rain on bare shoulders and backs slowed the swing of the picks, and at each forward pace they slithered and slipped in the treacherous footing. The work chant sounded like a dirge; Zouga snarled at them to keep them moving and the mood was ugly.

Up on the roadway an overladen gravel cart began to slide sideways in the mud, and the wheeler mule was pulled down on his knees, unable to hold it. The off wheel dropped over the edge, and the cart sagged drunkenly and then hung out over the pit. The team slewed across the narrow causeway in tangled traces while the unequal weight of gravel snapped the outer axle of the cart. Zouga's cart was directly behind the stranded team, facing in the same direction, and Ralph jumped down off the driver's seat and shouted furiously.

"You damned fool, you've jammed us in."

"You cheeky puppy," the driver of the bogged-down vehicle yelled back. "You need a lick of the whip across your backside."

Immediately half a dozen diggers were joining in, taking sides, shouting advice or abuse.

"Cut the traces, get those bloody animals off the roadway."

"Dump the gravel out, you're overloaded."

"You don't touch my rig," yelled the driver of the stricken cart. Ralph had drawn the sheath knife from his belt and run forward.

"That's the ticket, Ralph."

"That little brighter needs a lesson."

Men and vehicles and mud-smeared beasts formed an angry, unstable knot at the top of the high earthen wall.

In the bottom of the diggings, Zouga threw his head back and cupped his hands to his mouth.

"Ralph!" he bellowed. He could see how dangerous the tangle had become. Tempers were flaring; he could sense how close they were to mortal danger as fighting men lost control of panicking animals.

In the uproar Zouga's voice was almost drowned, and if Ralph heard him, he gave no sign of doing so. He was kneeling beside the downed wheel hacking at the thongs of the traces with his sheath knife.

"Get away from there," howled the driver, and reared back, the long trek whip flying out high above his shoulders and then snaking forward, twenty feet-long, whispering like the wing of a wild duck in flight.

Ralph saw it, and ducked behind the mule's heavy barrel-like body; the lash exploded in the air like a bursting grenade, and the mule lunged wildly, swinging the disselboom of the cart across the causeway so that the broken axle collapsed before the snapping of the halfsevered leather thongs allowed the mule to regain its feet and then gallop away down the muddy track to firmer ground.

Ralph leaned out and ran to his own team. He called to his wheeler mule, "Pull, Bishop!" The wheels sucked and farted in the mud as Ralph drove them at the narrow gap, the stranded cart on one side, sprawled half across the track, on the other the sheer unguarded drop into the open workings.

"Ha, Rosie!" Ralph grabbed the bridle of the lead mule and, running at her head, guided her into the gap.

"Ralph, damn you!" Zouga roared. "Stop! Do you hear me, stop!"

But he was a helpless spectator. It would take five minutes or longer to reach the causeway across the complicated system of ladderworks and board walks. There was nothing he could do to prevent the developing tragedy.