But Ralph was up in the saddle and away before the little Hottentot was ready to ride.
Ralph circled wide of the town of Bulawayo, to avoid meeting an acquaintance and to reach the telegraph line at a lonely place, well away from the main road. Ralph's own construction gangs had laid the telegraph line, so he knew every mile of it, every vulnerable point and how most effectively to cut off Bulawayo and Matabeleland from Kimberley and the rest of the world.
He tethered his horses at the foot of one of the telegraph poles and shinned up it to the cluster of porcelain insulators and the gleaming copper wires. He used a magnus hitch on a leather thong to hold the ends of the wire from falling to earth, and then cut between the knots. The wire parted with a singing twang, but the thong held, and when he climbed down to the horses and looked up, he knew it would need a skilled linesman to detect the break.
He flung himself back into the saddle, and booted the horse into a gallop. At noon he intersected the road and turned southwards along it. He changed horses every hour, and rode until it was too dark to see the tracks. Then he knee-haltered the horses, and slept like a dead man on the hard ground. Before dawn, he ate a hunk of cheese and a slice of the rough bread Louise had put into his saddlebag, and was away again with the first softening of the eastern sky.
At midmorning, he turned out of the track, and found the telegraph line where it ran behind a flat-topped kopje. He knew the Company linesmen hunting for the first break in the line would be getting close to it by now, and there may be somebody in the telegraph office in Bulawayo anxious to send a report to Mr. Rhodes about the terrible plague that was ravaging the herds.
Ralph cut the line in two places and went on. In the late afternoon, one of his horses broke down. It had been ridden too hard, and he turned it loose beside the road. If a lion did not get it, then perhaps one of his drivers would recognize the brand.
The next day, fifty miles from the Shashi river, he met one of his own convoys coming up from the south. There were twenty-six wagons in the charge of a white overseer. Ralph stopped only long enough to commandeer the man's horses, leave his own exhausted animals with him, and then he rode on. He cut the telegraph lines twice more, once on each side of the Shashi river, before he reached the railhead.
He came upon his surveyer first, a red-haired Scot. With a gang of blacks, they were working five miles ahead of the main crews, and cutting the lines for the rails. Ralph did not even dismount.
"Did you get the telegraph I sent you from Bulawayo, Mac?" he demanded without wasting time on greetings.
"No, Mr. Ballantyne." The Scot shook his dusty curls. "Not a word from the north in five days they say the lines are down, longest break I've heard of." "Damn it to hell," Ralph swore furiously, to cover his relief. "I wanted you to hold a truck for me." "If you hurry, Mr. Ballantyne, sir, there is an empty string of trucks going back today." Five miles further on Ralph reached the railhead. It was crossing a wide flat plain dotted with thorn scrub. The boil of activity seemed incongruous in this bleak, desolate land on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. A green locomotive buffed columns of silver steam high into the empty sky, shunting the string of flat-topped bogies to the end of the glistening silver rails. Teams of singing black men, dressed only in loincloths, but armed with crowbars, levered the steel rails over the side of the trucks and as they fell in a cloud of pale dust, another team ran forward to lift and set the tracks onto the teak sleepers.
The foremen levelled them with cast4 on wedges and the hammer boy followed them, driving in the steel spikes with ringing blows. Half a mile back was the construction headquarters. A square sweat box of wood and corrugated iron that could be moved up each day. The chief engineer was in his shirtsleeves, sweating over a desk made of condensed-milk cases nailed together.
"What is your mileage?" Ralph demanded from the door of the shack.
"Mr. Ballantyne, sir," the engineer jumped up. He was an inch taller than Ralph, bull-necked and with thick hairy forearms, but he was afraid of Ralph. You could see it in his eyes. It gave Ralph a flicker of satisfaction, he was not trying to be the most popular man in Africa. There was no prize for that. "We didn't expect you, not until the end of the month." "I know. What's your mileage?" "We have had a few snags, sir." "By God, man, do I have to kick it out of you?"
"Since the first of the month," the engineer hesitated. He had proved to himself that there was no profit in lying to Ralph Ballantyne.
"Sixteen miles." Ralph crossed to the survey map, and checked the figures. He had noted the beacon numbers of the railhead as he passed.
"Fifteen miles and six hundred yards, isn't sixteen," he said.
"No, sir. Almost sixteen." "Are you satisfied with that?" "No, sir." "Nor am I." That was enough, Ralph told himself, any more would decrease the man's usefulness, and there wasn't a better man to replace him, not between here and the Orange river.
"Did you get my telegraph from Bulawayo?" "No, Mr. Ballantyne. The lines have been down for days." "The line to Kimberley?" "That is open." "Good. Get your operator to send this." Ralph stooped over the message pad and scribbled quickly.
"For Aaron Fagan, attorney at law, De Beers Street, Kimberley.
Arriving early tomorrow 6th. Arrange urgent noon meeting with Rough Rider from Rholand." Rough Rider was the private code for Roelof Zeederberg, Ralph's chief rival in the transport business.
Zeederberg's express coaches plied from Delagoa to Algoa Bay, from the gold fields of Pilgrims Rest to Witwatersrand, to the railhead at Kimberley.
While his telegraph operator tapped it out on the brass and teak instrument, Ralph turned back to his engineer.
"All right, what were the snags that held you up, and how can we beat them?" "The worst is the bottle-neck at Kimberley shunting, yards."
For an hour they worked, and at the end of it the locomotive whistled outside the shack. They went out, still arguing and planning.
Ralph tossed his saddlebag and blanket-roll onto the first flat car, and held the train for ten minutes longer while he arranged the final details with his engineer.
"From now on you will get your hardware faster than you can nail it down," he promised grimly, as he vaulted up onto the bogie and waved at the driver.
The whistle sent a jet of steam spurting into the dry desert air, and the locomotive wheels spun and then gripped with a jolt, and the long string of empty cars began to trundle southwards, building up speed rapidly. Ralph found a corner of the truck out of the wind, and rolled into his blanket. Eight days" ride from the Lupani river to the railhead. It had to be some sort of record.
"But there is no prize for that either," he grinned wearily, pulled his hat over his eyes and settled down to listen to the song of the wheels over the ties. "We have got to hurry. We have got to hurry." And then just before he fell asleep, the song changed. "The cattle are dying. The cattle are dead," sang the wheels over and over again, but even that could not keep him awake one second longer.