Part 3 (1/2)
”Alamachtig!” gasped Smoots Beste, rendered breathless by the alluring, tempting prospect. Surely the devil spoke with the voice of the tavern-keeper Bough, when, in human form, he tempted children of men.
Sweat glistened on Smoots' flabby features, his thick hands trembled, and his bowels were as water. But his purpose was solidifying in his brain as he said innocently, looking over Bough's left shoulder at the wooden part.i.tion that divided off the bar from the landlord's dwelling-room:
”Aye, I am no dirty schelm that cannot be trusted. Therefore would it not be better if I took both teams and waggons, and all the rooinek's goods with me up to Gueldersdorp, and handed it over to the Engelsch landrost there?”
The fish was hooked. Bough said, steadily avoiding those twirling eyes:
”A good notion, but the lawyer chaps at Gueldersdorp will want to look at the Englishman's dead body to be able to satisfy his people that he did not die of a gunshot, or of a knife-thrust; we must bury him, of course, but not too deep for them to dig him up again. And they will want to ferret in all the corners of the room where he died, and make sure that his bags and boxes have not been tampered with--and then there is the child. In a way”--he spoke slowly and apologetically--”the kid and the goods are my security for getting my own back again--if ever I do. So you will inspan one of the waggons--the best if you like, with a team of six beasts, and you will trek up to Gueldersdorp--you will travel light enough with only the grub you will need, and the Cape boys, and you will hand over the letter to the Resident Magistrate, and bring back the man who will act as his deputy.”
But at this point Smoots Beste set down his splay foot. He would undertake to deliver the letter, but he objected to the company of the coloured voor-loopers or the Kaffir driver. He was firm upon that and, finding his most honeyed persuasions of no avail, Bough said no more. He would pay off the n.i.g.g.e.rs and dismiss them, or get rid of them without paying; there were ways and means. He sent up country, and the team came down, six thin, overworked creatures, with new scars upon their slack and baggy hides, and hollow flanks, and ribs that showed painfully. Smoots Beste was about to grumble, but he changed his mind, and took the letter, b.u.t.toning it up in the flapped pocket of his tan-cord jacket, and the long whip cracked like a revolver as the lash hissed out over the backs of the wincing oxen, and the white tilt rocked over the veld, heading to the nor'-west.
”When will the Dutchy be back, boss?” asked the woman, with a knowing look.
Bough played the game up to her. He answered quite seriously: ”In three weeks' time.”
Then he strolled out, smoking a cigar, his hat tilted at an angle that spoke of satisfaction. His walk led him past the oblong cairn of ironstone boulders in the middle of the sandy patch of ground enclosed with zinc wire-netting. At the foot of the cairn was a new grave.
For the lover did not even lie beside his beloved, as he had vowed once, promised and planned, but couched below her feet, waiting, like some faithful hound that could not live without the touch of the wors.h.i.+pped hand, for the dead to rise again.
Why is it that Failure is the inevitable fate of some men and women?
Despite brilliant prospects, positions that seem a.s.sured, commanding talents n.o.bly used, splendid opportunities that are multiplied as though in mockery, the result is Nothing from first to last; while the bad flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the fruit of the brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that the worker has sunk into hopeless apathy and died.
Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to nothing. He had prospered as a rogue of old in England, really his native country, though he called himself an Afrikander. Reared in the gutters of the Irish quarter of Liverpool, he had early learned to pilfer for a living, had prospered in prison as sharp young gaol-birds may prosper, and returned to it again and again, until, having served out part of a sentence for burglary and obtained his ticket-of-leave, he had s.h.i.+fted his convict's skin, and made his way out to Cape Colony under a false name and character. He had made a mistake, it was true, enlisting as a trooper of Colonial Police, but the step had been forced upon him by circ.u.mstances.
Then he had deserted, and had since been successful as a white-slave dealer at Port Elizabeth, and as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had done better and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-running for Oom Paul. Though, get caught--only once get caught--and the Imperial Government authorities, under whose noses you had been playing the game with impunity for years, made it as hot as h.e.l.l for you. Bough, however, did not mean ever to get caught. There was always another man, a semi-innocent dupe, who would appear to have been responsible for everything, and who would get pinched.
Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre three-span ox-team.
When, after a hard day's toil, he at length outspanned, the waggon-pole still faithfully pointed to the north-west. But before it was yet day the waggon began to move again, and it was to the north-east that the waggon-pole pointed thenceforwards, and the letter Bough had given Smoots Beste for the Chief Resident Magistrate at Gueldersdorp was saved from the kindling of the camp-fire by a mere accident.
The cat's-paw could not read, or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty, understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not elaborate--a mere stage property, nothing more. But yet he gave it in full belief that it would be burned, and that, the boats of Smoots Beste being consumed with it, according to the thick judgment of the said Smoots, it would be as a pillar of fire behind that slim child of the old voortrekkers, hastening his journey north-eastwards. It is typical of the cla.s.s of Smoots that it never once occurred to him to go north.
But Smoots Beste never bought a farm with the price of the oxen and the high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-canvas tilted waggon that had cost such a good round sum. There was a big rainfall on the third day. It began with the typical African thunderstorm--deafening, continuous rolls and crashes of heavy cloud-artillery, and lightning that blazed and darted without intermission, and ran zigzagging in a horrible, deadly, playful fas.h.i.+on over the veld, as though looking for dishonest folks to shrivel.
One terrible flash struck the wheel-oxen, a thin double tongue of blue flame sped flickering from ridge to ridge of the six gaunt backs ... there was a smell of burning hair--a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by the electric fluid.
Smoots Beste crawled under the waggon, and, remembering all he had heard his father spell out from the Dutch Bible about the Judgment Day, and the punishment of sinners in everlasting flame, felt very ill at ease. The storm pa.s.sed over, and the rain poured all through the night, but dawn brought in a clear blue day; and with it a train of eight transport-waggons, and several wearied, muddy droves of sheep and cattle, the property of the Imperial Government Commissariat Department, Gueldersdorp, being taken from Basutoland East up to Gueldersdorp, under convoy of an escort of B.S.A. Police. To the non-commissioned officer in command Smoots Beste, resigned to the discharge of a trust, handed the letter for the Civil Commissioner.
The sergeant, sitting easily in the saddle, looked at the boldly-written direction on the envelope, and smelt no rats--at least until he coolly opened the supposed letter. The scrawled sheet of paper it contained was a surprise, but he did not let Smoots see that. Then the following brief dialogue took place:
”You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp,” he said to the decidedly nervous Smoots, ”to fetch down a Deputy Civil Commissioner to deal with the effects of a dead English traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote this letter--that is, three days' trek over the veld to the southward, and called the Free State Hotel?”
Smoots nodded heavily. The dapper sergeant c.o.c.ked his felt smasher hat, and turned between pleasantly smiling lips the cigar he was smoking. Then he pointed with his riding-whip, a neatly varnished sjambok, with a smart silver top, to the north-west.
”There lies Gueldersdorp. Rum that when the lightning killed the ox-team you should have been trekking north-east, isn't it?”
Smoots Beste agreed that it was decidedly rum.
The sergeant said, without a change in his agreeable smile:
”All right; you can inspan six of our drove-bullocks, and drive the waggon with us to Gueldersdorp.”