Chapter Seventeen.
Nearing the Goal.
After this they held on their way without molestation, neither did they come across any further active indications as to the state of the country. Yet, though not active, the volcano was by no means extinct.
They progressed slowly—this partly on account of the ruggedness of the ground, over which nothing but South African built waggons could have travelled without coming in halves, partly because Fleetwood was careful to keep up appearances, and hide the real objective of their trek. Wherefore for days they would outspan near a group of kraals, although of trade there was next to nothing done. At this course of action Wyvern in no wise chafed. He was one of those rare units who recognise that in a given line the other man is an authority while he himself is not, consequently must be allowed an ungrudged free hand. For another thing he was vividly interested. He had fought against the Zulus, and of course except in battles and skirmishes had seen nothing of them. Now he was seeing a great deal of them. There was nothing he enjoyed so much, for instance, as sitting in a cool hut during the hot hours of the day, with three or four fine warriors, who possibly had been foremost in striving to shed his blood during the comparatively recent war, while they told their stories of this or that battle in which he himself had taken part. He was astonished, too, at the readiness with which he followed such narratives, considering that he was as yet very far from at home in the language. Still, gesture, expression, went a long way, and when he was in doubt there was always Fleetwood to help. But he was absorbing the language more and more every day; and the friendly ways of the people, frankly friendly but not servile, independent but always courteous, had long since brought him round to the opinion arrived at by others before him, with opportunities of judging, that the average Zulu is a gentleman. The people, for their part, were strongly attracted to him. His fine stature and presence in the first place appealed powerfully, as it always does to a fine race of warlike savages, in the next, his thoroughbred look, and well-bred ways told too; and the latter, no people are more capable of appreciating than these. As for the part he had taken against them in the late war, no shadow of a grudge or resentment did they bear against him for it; on the contrary, they looked upon him with enhanced respect on the strength of it; even as he himself had predicted to Lalanté would be the case. A man must fight at the “word” of his king, was their way of looking at it. They and the whites had met in fair fight; sometimes one side had got the best of it, and sometimes the other. There was no room for rancour on account of anything so plain and obvious. So Wyvern greatly enjoyed those hours spent in the company of dusky warriors, with a cool bowl of freshly-brewed tywala before him, the clinging cockroaches shimmering in the thatch of the hut overhead, while they vividly recapitulated the stirring times, not so long past, or mapped out with small stones on the floor—and with wonderful accuracy—the scene of more than one pitched battle from the point of view of their own position and tactics. And it might be that the time was coming when this good understanding should stand him in some stead in the hour of his sore peril and need.
And the incidents of the trek, and this in itself, was no mere picnic. There were times when the conditions of the road—though road in anything like the ordinary sense of the word there was none—were frequently such as to render five miles a day the utmost limits of their advance; when they would spend half a day stuck in a river-bed, with the flood steadily rising, the result of that slaty, blue-black curtain of cloud forming the background further up in the hills; when the storm beat down upon them in its terrific crash, and the whole atmosphere seemed tinged with incandescent electricity; and only by a well-nigh superhuman effort of desperation could they at length induce the span to move at the critical moment, failure in which would mean loss of half their outfit and of more than one life. Or when, after a tremendous rain-burst, the wheels would sink in the boggy soil, rendering it necessary to unload the contents of both waggons and dig a way out; and even then it might be necessary to chop a number of great thorn boughs in order to construct a sufficiently firm way. Incidents such as these would constitute a sufficiency of hard labour—in a steaming climate, too—at which an English navvy, if put, would not hesitate to go on strike. No, this trek decidedly was not a picnic. Yet through it all—drenchings, heat, exhaustion, what not—Wyvern never turned a hair. He was always equable, always ready to take things as they came. Fleetwood, less self-contained, was prone to fire off language of a more or less sultry nature upon such occasions.
“I wouldn’t curse so much if I were you, Joe,” laughed Wyvern once. “It must be so infernally additionally exhausting.” And the other had laughed, and, while thoroughly concurring, had explained that he couldn’t help it.
Plenty of compensations were there, however, for these and other incidents of the road. When they got into the forest country sport was fairly plentiful, and when Wyvern brought down a splendid koodoo bull, shot fair and clean through the heart, it was a moment in his life not the least thrilling that he had known; and instinctively he had gloated over the great spiral horns, picturing them at Seven Kloofs—when he had bought it back, which of course he fully intended to do, as one of the results of their successful quest—and himself and Lalanté, in close juxtaposition, admiring them while he went over some of the incidents of their eventful trek—incidentally, perhaps not for the first time. Then the trek, under the glorious moon with the breaths of night distilling around, the whole atmosphere redolent of life and health-giving openness; or, failing the said moon, the blue-black velvety vault of heaven aglow with myriad stars, seeming to hang down to the earth itself with a luscious brilliance unknown to the severe northern skies; vivid meteors and streak-like falling stars flashing with a frequency only to be appreciated by those whom circumstances lead to passing many nights in the open. So, as they moved on, slowly, but surely as they hoped, towards their goal, these were indeed compensations.
And Lalanté? She was ever in his thoughts, ever enwrapped in every joyous communing with joyous Nature, or in time of toil and hardship, such toil or hardship was being endured for her. Often, at the midnight outspan, when Fleetwood had laughingly declared that he, having nothing particularly pleasant to think about, and being most infernally sleepy, was going to turn in, Wyvern would sit, or pace up and down, hour upon hour, while the Southern Cross turned in the heavens, and give his powers of imagination and recollection play. He pictured her as he saw her last—heart-wrung; as he used to see her every day, sweet, strong, smiling, in the full glow of her splendid youth and health; his, for she had given herself to him; and the thought thrilled him until he could conjure up her presence here, here in this savage solitude, could hear her voice in his ear, as the tiger wolves slunk and howled dismally in the surrounding brake, even as he had heard it again and again on the moonlit stoep at Seven Kloofs. He had received letters from her since he left, until he had been beyond the reach of receiving letters at all—brave, true, loving letters—sweet beyond all conception of sweetness; treasured beyond all earthly possessions, and in his midnight pacings, when all around was still as death except the weird voices of the wild, he would bring out one or other of these and re-read it by the light of the great overhanging moon. Ah, yes! This love was worth a lifetime of toil and pain, and it had come to him, all so suddenly, so naturally. Did he appreciate it the less on that account? Not one whit. He would achieve the object of his quest, and then—and then—
And then came as a refrain certain words he had heard uttered long ago by a very valued friend of his—incidentally, a highly-placed dignitary of the Catholic Church—when he had been remarking upon the position and circumstances of somebody which should leave nothing to be desired, and which for all that, covered “a thorn in the flesh”—“It is not intended that anyone should be perfectly happy in this world.” Wyvern had realised the truth of this then, as indeed none but a fool could have failed to realise it, since it was a truth borne out by all experience. Now it came back to him with force, and alone with the solitude of the wild, he looked reverently up to the moonlit heavens with an aspiration that here might be the exception which should prove the rule.
The young Zulu whom they had rescued had shown no desire to leave them. He had tacitly and naturally fallen in with their party as though one of it, and Fleetwood was not at all unwilling that he should; for he was a fine, active, warrior-like specimen of his race and came of a splendid fighting stock. There was no telling when such advantages might not be of solid use to his rescuers. He was a son—one of many—of a powerful chief whose clan dwelt in the mountainous fastnesses in the north-west of the country, and entirely and whole-heartedly attached to the cause of the exiled and captive King. He, Mtezani, had thrown in his lot with the other side, not through conviction, but to get the better of his brothers, with whom he had quarrelled over the division of certain cattle, their patrimony. Besides, he wanted to tunga, and take a wife—he explained frankly enough to Fleetwood. He had heard that under the chiefs set up by the English, any man was at liberty to do this whenever he chose; whereas his father, Majendwa, was among the most conservative of Zulus, and strongly objected to this young bull-calf setting aside the traditions of the nation, and daring to aspire to the head-ring without leave from the Great Great One—who, of course, was not there to grant it. They had done him out of his cattle, he declared, so that he should have no lobola to offer for any girl.
This was a situation which, we may be sure, strongly appealed to Wyvern, who reflected, whimsically enough, that he himself was much in the same position. He accordingly took a great fancy to Mtezani, and the young Zulu seemed to attach himself to him more than to Fleetwood. He would invariably be with him when a hunt was afoot in the wild and broken forest country they were then traversing; and for more than one successful find of koodoo or impala, Wyvern had to thank Mtezani.
They fell in with no more contending impis. Now and again armed runners would fetch up at their outspan, and when pressed for news would give evasive replies, but these became fewer as, at last, through the great tumbled, rolling forests, the precipitous savage rise of the Lebombo range came into view.
“We are getting there at last, Wyvern,” said Fleetwood one day. “But there’s one thing I must tell you that I hadn’t bargained for, and a most infernal nuisance it is too. I learn that almost bang on the scene of our operations, a particularly obnoxious sweep named Rawson—Bully Rawson—a white man, of course, has planted himself down. Now this fellow is likely to prove a considerable thorn in our side, to give us trouble, in fact.”
“Why? Who is he?”
“Oh, as to that nobody knows, strictly, which likely enough is just as well for him. He’s nominally a trader like myself, but actually he’s a chiefs white man, and that spells gun-runner.”
“Yes? But why should he interfere with us?”
“Well, it’s this way. Being in my own line himself, he knows devilish well that no sane being—and he knows me well enough to credit me with sanity—is going to bring a couple of trade waggons up to a remote and almost uninhabited part of the country, that, too, where trekking with the same is more than pain and grief, as you’ve seen—for trade purposes. No. Well, then, having come to that conclusion, the first thing he’ll say to himself will be—what the devil we’re up here for at all. See?”
“Yes. But what the same devil is he doing up here himself, then, on those terms? You don’t think he has any inkling of Hlabulana’s yarn? Eh?”
“No. I don’t see how he could have,” answered Fleetwood. “He’s cutting timber in the Lumisana forest, and shipping it to the coast, which in all probability spells gun-running for Hamu.”
“For Hamu? Oh, this is Hamu’s country, then?”
“Yes. Well, Rawson was with him before, and they know each other. But here’s where the fun comes in. Once he gets suspicious—and, of course, he will, on the terms I told you before, he’ll stick to us like our shadows night and day, or at any rate take care that someone else does—say, when he’s too drunk to attend to business himself. Then how are we going to set about our prospecting with the care and nicety and, above all, freedom from interruption it requires?”
“When he’s too drunk, I think you said, Joe? I read a saving clause in that. What sort of a type—both outwardly and inwardly—is this very attractive being?”
“Oh, outwardly he’s a thick-set, shaggy, broken-nosed brute whom any jury would hang at sight without retiring from the box. For the other part, he hasn’t a redeeming quality, unless it is that he’s as plucky as they make ’em. The only point on which no one has ever been able to damn Bully Rawson is that of his pluck. On all others, everybody who has ever known him is united in damning him to a lurid degree.”
“H’m! Yes, it’s a nuisance,” mused Wyvern. “One rather reckoned on difficulties at the hands of the noble savage, and now it seems we are likely to find them the thickest at those of a white man and a brother. Well, we are two to one. One or other of us must manage to be one too many for Mr Bully Rawson.”
Here Mtezani interrupted. He had been away on a private prowl of his own, and had come back in a hurry.
“Nkose, there are people coming,” he said. “Impela, they are not very far behind me, and one of them is a white man.”
“A white man! What is he like?” said Fleetwood. “Did you see him?”
“Eh-hi!” And the young Zulu gave a rapid and graphic description.
“That is Inxele,” pronounced Hlabulana, who was squatted near.
Fleetwood turned upon his companion a whimsical look.
“Talk of the devil!” he quoted. “Inxele is their name for Bully Rawson.”