Still kneeling, facing the burning building which was now a pyre,
Rosa slumped forward and lifted her hands to cover her face as though in prayer.
The Askari who had thrown the child snatched up his rifle from where it lay at his feet and stood over her. He lifted it above his head the way a harpooner holds his steel with the point of the bayonet aimed at the base of Rosa's neck where her hair had fallen open to expose the pale skin.
In the moment that the Askari paused to take his aim, Herman
Fleischer shot him in the back of the head with the Luger.
"Mad dog!" the Commissioner shouted at the Askari's corpse. "I
told you to take them alive." Then, breathing like an asthma case from the exertion of his run to intervene, he turned to Rosa.
Frulein, my apologies," he doffed the slouch hat with ponderous courtesy, and spoke in German that Rosa did not understand. "We do not make war on women and babies." She did not look up at him. She was crying quietly into her cupped hands.
Early in the year for a bush fire," Flynn muttered. He sat with an enamel mug cupped in his hands and blew steam from the hot coffee. His blanket had slid down to his waist.
Across the camp-fire from him Sebastian was also sitting in a muddle of bedding, and cooling his own pre-dawm mug of coffee. At
Flynn's words he looked up from his labour, and out into the dark south.
False dawn had paled the sky just enough to define the hills below it as an undulating mass that seemed much closer than it was. That way lay Lalapanzi, , Maria. and Rosa and Without real interest Sebastian saw the radiated glow at one point along the spine of the ridge; a fan of pink light no larger than a thUmb-nail.
"Not a very big one, "he said.
"No," agreed Flynn. "Hope she doesn't spread though and he gulped noisily at his mug.
As Sebastian watched it idly, the glow diminished, shrinking into insignificance at the coming of the sun, and above it the stars paled out also.
"We'd best get moving. It's a long day's march and we've wasted enough time on this trip already." "You're a regular bloody fire-eater when it comes to getting your home comforts." Flynn feigned disinterest, yet secretly the thought of returning to his granddaughter had strong appeal. He hurried the coffee a little and scalded his tongue.
Sebastian was right- They had wasted a lot of time on the return trip from the Mahenge raid.
,44 First, there was a detour to avoid a party of German Askari that one of the native headmen had warned them was at M'tapa's village. They had trekked upstream for three days before finding a safe crossing, and a village willing to hire canoes.
Then there was the brush with the hippo which had cost them almost a week. As was usual practice, the four hired canoes, loaded to within a few inches of freeboard with Flynn, Sebastian, their retinue and loot, had slipped across the Rovuma and were hugging the Portuguese bank as they headed downstream towards the landing opposite M'tapa's village when the hippo had disputed their passage.
She was an old cow hippo who a few hours earlier had given birth to her calf in a tiny island of reeds, separated from the south bank by twenty feet of lily-padded water.
When the four canoes entered this channel in line astern with the paddlers chanting happily, she took it as a direct threat to her offspring and she threw a tantrum.
Two tons of hippo in a tantrum has the destructive force of a localized hurricane. Surfacing violently from under the leading canoe,
she had thrown Sebastian, two gun-boys, four paddlers, and all their equipment, ten feet in the air.
The canoe, rotted with beetle, had snapped in half and sunk immediately.
The mother hippo had then treated the three following canoes with the same consideration, and within the space of a few minutes, the canal was clogged with floating debris, and struggling, panic-stricken men. Fortunately they were ashore. None of them, however, was very far behind him, no more than ten feet from the bank. Sebastian was first and they all took off like the start of a cross-country race over the veld, when the hippo emerged from the river and signified that, not satisfied with wrecking the flotilla, she intended chopping a few of them in half with her guillotine jaws.
A hundred yards later she abandoned the pursuit, and trotted back to the water, wiggling her little ears and snorting in triumph. Half a mile farther on the survivors had stopped running.
They camped there that night without food, bedding or weapons, and the following morning, after a heated council Of war, Sebastian was elected to return to the river and ascertain whether the hippo was still in control of the channel. He came back at high speed to report that she was.
Three more days they waited for the hippo and her calf to move away- During this time they suffered the miseries of cold nights and hungry days, but the greatest misery was inflicted on Flynn O'Flynn whose case of gin was under eight feet of water and by the third morning he was threatening delyrium tremens again. just before
Sebastian set off for his morning reconnaissance of the channel, Flynn informed him agitatedly that there were three blue scorpions sitting on his head. After the initial alarm, Sebastian went through the motions of removing the imaginary scorpions and stamping them to death, and
Flynn was satisfied.
Sebastian returned from the river with the news that the % hippo and her calf had evacuated the island, and it was now possible to begin salvage operations.
Protesting mildly and talking about crocodiles, Sebastian was stripped naked and coaxed into the water. On his first dive, he retrieved the precious case of gin.
"Bless you, MY boy," Flynn murmured fervently as he eased the cork out of a bottle.
By the following morning Sebastian had recovered nearly all their equipment and booty, without being eaten by crocodiles, and they set off for Lalapanzi on foot.
Now they were in their last camp before Lalapanzi, and Sebastian felt his impatience rising. He wanted to get home to Rosa and baby
Maria. He should be home by evening.
"Come on, Flynn. Let's go." He flicked the coffee grounds from his mug, threw aside his blanket, and shouted to Mohammed and the bearers who were huddled around the other fire.
"Safari! Let us march." Nine hours later, with the daylight dying around him, he breasted the last rise and paused at the top.
All that day eagerness had lengthened his stride, and he had left
Flynn and the column of heavily laden bearers far behind.
Now he stood alone, and stared without comprehension at the smoke-blackened ruins of Lalapanzi from which a few thin tendrils of smoke still drifted.
"Rosa!" Her name was a harsh bellow of fear, and he ran wildly.
"Rosa!" he shouted as he crossed the scorched and trampled lawns.
"Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!" the echo from the kopje above the homestead shouted back.