"You don't think I am doing this for you," he demanded. "I hate I.D.B. as much as any digger on the workings, and I'm not that complacent about deliberate robbery and murder." And he took the pistol from the blanket where it lay at Mungo's side.
He checked the load as he walked to where Shooting Star stood, head down in the moonlight beyond the camel-thorn tree.
The stallion lifted his head, and blew a fluttery breath through his nostrils as Zouga approached; then he shifted his weight awkwardly and painfully on three legs.
"There, boy. Easy, boy." Zouga ran his hands down the animal's flank. it was sticky with drying blood, and Shooting Star whickered as he touched the wound.
Behind the ribs, bullet hole, and Zouga sniffed at it quickly. The bullet had pierced the bowel or the intestines, he could smell it.
Zouga went down on one knee and gently felt the foreleg that the stallion was favouring. He found the damage, another bullet wound. It had struck a few inches above the fetlock and the bone was shattered. Yet the horse had carried Mungo, a big heavy man, and it had brought him many miles. The agony must have been dreadful, but the stallion's great heart had carried them through.
Zouga. shrugged off his greatcoat and wrapped it around the pistol in his right hand. A shot could alert the searching bands on the not too distant road.
"There, boy," Zouga whispered, and touched the muzzle to the forehead between the horse's eyes.
The cloth muffled the shot. It was a dull blurt of sound, and the stallion dropped heavily on his side and never even kicked.
Louise was still bowed over Mungo, tying the knots in the bandage, but Zouga saw that her eyes were bright with tears in the moonlight.
"Thank you," she whispered. "I couldn't have done it myself."
Zouga helped her lift Mungo to the cart. Mungo's breath whistled in his chest and the sweat of agony drenched his shir t and smelled rancid and gamey.
They settled him into the nest of thatching grass and spread a screen of it over him. Then Zouga led the mules on over the veld until they struck the track that led nor thwards towards the Vaal river, and beyond it Kuruman and the vast Kalahari Desert.
"Travel at night, and hobble the mules to graze during the day," Zouga told her. "There is more than enough meal and biltong; but you will have to spare the coffee and sugar."
"Words cannot thank you enough," she whispered.
"Don't attempt the main drift of the Vaal."
"Somehow I know that this is not goodbye." She seemed not to have heard the advice. "And when we meet again," she broke off.
"Go on," he said, but she shook her head and took the reins from his hand and led the mules onto the track.
The cart seemed to merge into the night, and the heels made no sound in the thick pale sand. Zouga stood staring after them, long after they had disappeared , and then Louise came back.
She came silent as a wraith, running with a kind of terrible desperation, the long tresses of hair had fallen out from under the cap and were streaming down her back. Her face was pale and stricken in the moonlight.
The grip of her arms about his neck was fierce, almost painful, and her mouth was shockingly hot and wet as it spread over his. But the taste of it he would never forget, and her sharp white teeth crushed his lips.
For seconds only they clung to each other, while Zouga thought his heart would burst; then she tore herself from his arms, and with neither a word nor a backward glance, she flew into the night, and was gone.
Ten days after Neville Pickering's funeral, Zouga signed the transfer deeds to the Devil's Own claims, and watched while one of Rhodes" secretaries registered them in favour of the Central Diamond Company. Then he walked out into the cold.
For the first time in living memory it was snowing over the diamond fields. Big soft flakes came twisting down like feathers from a shimmering white egret struck by birdshot.
The snowflakes vanished as they touched the earth, but the cold was a vindictive presence and Zouga's breath steamed in the air and condensed on his beard as he trudged up to the workings to watch the shift come off the Devil's Own claims for the last time. As he walked he tried to compose the words to tell Ralph that this was the last shift.
They were coming up in the skip. Zouga could make out Ralph, for he was the only man who wore a coat.
The other men with him were almost naked.
Once again Zouga wondered idly that the men had not rebelled against the harsh measures of the new Diamond Trade Act, enforced by Colonel John Fry of the recently recruited Diamond Police, and aimed at stamping out I.D.B. on the fields.
Nowadays the black workers were compounded behind barbed wire; there were new curfew regulations to keep them in the compounds after nightfall; and there were spot searches and checks of the compounds, of men on the streets even during daylight, and body searches of each shift coming out of the pit.
Even the diggers, or at least a few of them, had protested at the most draconian of John Fry's new regurations. All black workers had been forced to go into the pit stark naked, so that they would not be able to hide stones in their clothing.
John Fry had been amazed when Zouga and a dozen other diggers had demanded to see him.
"Good Lord, Ballantyne, but they are a bunch of naked savages anyway. Modesty, forsooth!"
in the end, with the cooperation of Rhodes, they had forced him to compromise.
Grudgingly Fry had allowed every worker a strip of seamless cotton "limbo" to cover himself.
Thus Bazo and his Matabele wore only a strip of loincloth each as they rode up beside Ralph in the skip. The wind threw an icy noose about them, and Bazo shivered as goose-bumps rose upon the smooth dark skin of his chest and upper arms.
Above him stood Ralph Ballantyne, balancing easily on the rim of the steel skip, ignoring the wind and the deadly drop below him.
Ralph glanced down at Bazo crouching below the side of the steel bucket, and on impulse slipped the scrap of stained canvas off his own shoulders. Under it Ralph wore an old tweed jacket and dusty cardigan.
He dropped the canvas over Bazo's neck.
"It's against the white man's law," Bazo demurred, and made as if to shrug it off.
"There are no police in this skip," Ralph grunted, and Bazo hesitated a moment and then crouched lower and gratefully pulled the canvas over his head and shoulders.
Ralph took the butt of a half-smoked cheroot from his breast pocket, and carefully reshaped it between his fingers; the dead ash flaked away on the wind and wafted down into the yawning depths below. He lit the butt and drew the smoke down deeply, exhaled and drew again, held the smoke and passed the butt to Bazo.
"You are not only cold, but you are unhappy," Ralph said, and Bazo did not answer. He cupped the stubby cheroot in both hands and drew carefully upon it.
"Is it Donsela?" Ralph asked. "He knew the law, Bazo.
He knows what the law says of those who steal the stones."
"It was a small stone," murmured Bazo, the words and blue smoke mingled on his lips. "And fifteen years is a long time."
"He is alive," Ralph pointed out and took the cheroot that Bazo passed back to him. "In the old days before the Diamond Trade Act, he would be dead by now."
"He might as well be dead," Bazo whispered bitterly.
"They say that men work like animals, chained like monkeys, on the breakwater wall at Cape Town harbour., He drew again on the cheroot and it burned down with a fierce little glow that scorched his fingers. He crushed it out on the workhardened calluses of his palm and let the shreds of tobacco blow away.
"And you, Henshaw, are you then so happy?" he asked quietly, and Ralph shrugged.
"Happy? Who is happy?"
"Is not this pit", with a gesture Bazo took in the mighty excavation over which they dangled, "is not this your prison, does it not hold you as surely as the chains that hold Donsela as he places the rocks on the breakwater over the sea?"