The iron-shod wheels crunched in the sand, but the night dew had damped down the dust. The lantern on the tailboard of the cart swung and jiggled to the motion.
They had just passed the last house on the Cape road, and were drawing level with the cemetery when there was the dust-muffled beat of hooves from behind them and Louise only just had time to drop down and cover herself before a small group of riders swept out of the darkness and overtook them.
As they galloped through the arc of lantern light, Zouga saw they were all armed. He stooped and lowered his chin into the collar of his greatcoat and the woollen cap was pulled low over his eyes. One of the riders pulled up his horse and shouted to Zouga.
"Hey, you! Have you seen anybody on this road tonight?"
"Niemand me! Nobody!" Zouga answered in the taal, and the sound of the guttural dialect reassured the man.
He wheeled his horse and galloped on after his companions.
When the sound of hooves had died away Zouga spoke quietly.
"That means that Naaiman got away to spread the word. Unless he dies of his wounds later, it's not murder."
"Please God," Louise whispered.
"It also means that you cannot try to get out on either the Cape road or the road to the Transvaal. They will be watched."
"Which way can we go?"
if I were you I would take the track north, it goes to Kuruman. There is a mission station there, it's run by my grandfather. His name is Doctor Moffat. He will give you shelter, and Mungo will need a doctor. Then when Mungo is strong enough, you can try to reach German or Portuguese territory and get out through Mideritz Bay or Lourenqo Marques."
Neither of them spoke for a long time as Zouga trudged on beside the mule, and Louise crawled out to sit on the bench of the cart, it was she who broke the silence.
"I am so tired of running. We seem to have run out of lands, America, Canada, Australia, we cannot go back to any of them."
"You could go home to France," Zouga said, "to your sons."
Louise's head jerked up. "Why do you say that?"
"When Mungo and I first met he told me about you, his wife, that you were of a noble French family. He told me that you and he had three sons."
Louise's chin sank onto her chest and Jordan's cloth cap covered her eyes.
"I have no sons," she said. "But oh how I pray that one day I may have. I belong to a noble family, Yes, but not French. My grandmother was the daughter of Hawk Flies Lightly, the Blackfoot War Chief."
"I don't understand, Mungo told me "He told you about the woman who is his wife, Madame Solange de Montijo Sint John., Louise was silent again, and Zouga had to ask: "She is dead?"
"Their marriage was unhappy. No, she is not dead. She returned with their three sons to France at the beginning of the Civil War. He has not seen her since."
"Then she and Mungo are," Zouga hesitated over the unsavoury word, "divorced?"
"She is a Catholic," Louise replied simply; and it was fully five minutes before either of them spoke again.
"Yes," Louise said. "What you are thinking is correct.
Mungo and I are not married; we could not be."
"It's not my business," Zouga murmured, and yet what she had said did not shock him. He felt instead a strange lightness of spirit, a kind of glowing joy.
"It's a relief to speak completely honestly," she explained. "After all the lies. Somehow it had to be you, Zouga. I could never have admitted all this to anybody else."
"Do you love him?" Zouga's voice was rough-edged, brusque.
"Once I loved him completely, without restraint, wildly, madly."
"And now?"
"I do not know, there have been so many lies, so much shame, so much to hide."
"Why do you stay with him, Louise?"
"Because now he needs me."
I understand that." His voice was gentler. He did understand, he truly did. "Duty is a harsh and unforgiving master. And yet you have a duty to yourself also."
The mules plodded on in the darkness, and the swinging lantern did not light the face of the woman on the bench, but once she sighed, and it was a sound to twist Zouga's heart.
"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.