Dettington lounged moodily against the counter of Randal and Hallam's
_winkel_, his eyes sardonic, his mouth decorated with discontent. He
was bored to the verge of suicide. Two whole days had been wasted in
Umtali waiting for the convoy of waggons with all his kit on board, to
arrive from Salisbury. Thirty miles off he had taken advantage of a
lift offered him by a man in a trap and come on ahead. Now he was
wishing himself back at the waggons instead of stuck in this place where
everyone appeared to have been dead and buried for the last five years,
in spite of the recent native rebellion when they had all had to leave
their homes and come into laager with not enough food and ammunition to
go round. Since then the Imperial troops had passed through, bent on
punitive measures, and people had gone back to their homes and were
dully occupied in nursing and feeding themselves into good health again.
The burden of Bettington's song of dolour was that there was no one to
talk to, nothing to drink but bad whiskey at a pound a bottle, not a man
who could play poker worth a tin tack, no one keen on a shoot, and not a
pretty woman in sight! Driven to sitting among the piles of coloured
blankets, and bags of meal, and Kaffir corn, that composed the
stock-in-grade of Randal and Hallam, he grew madder and madder every
minute. Not so was he accustomed to waste his good time and rare gifts.
The shop was a large galvanised iron shed, lined with shelves and a
counter, and stuffed with every imaginable thing on earth that had a
strong smell attached to it--leather, limbo, toilet soap, paraffin,
cheese, tarred rope, shoddy blankets, and tinned foods sweltering in
their tins. Hallam who had been a medical student at Columbia until the
examiners turned him down, was casting up the firm's books, perched on a
packing-case at the far end of the shop. Randal flannel-shirted, pipe
in mouth, coatless, tieless, his fair hair in damp streaks on his
forehead, sat opposite Bettington, his elbows folded on the counter
before him. No one would have guessed him an old Harrovian (except
Bettington who was one himself), and one who in his year had stroked for
Leander, but he was at peace with all the world, in spite of a poisoned
foot that kept him from leaving the premises. Nothing about him of the
restless energy which characterised the blonde man burnt a bright red
who sat on the other side of the counter.
Vigour and vitality was in Bettington's every line. He wore his hat
slouched low, but beneath it could be discerned a shrewd grey-green eye,
a nose jutting out like an insolent rock, a mouth with more than a hint
of coarseness but none of weakness about it.
With the crop in his hand, he smote indiscriminately at his gaitered
legs or the bags of mealies and other merchandise surrounding him.
"Nice country!" he muttered, giving so vicious a cut at a pile of shoddy
Kaffir blankets, striped with gaudy red and yellow, that a cloud of dust
ascended from it and joined all the other little cloudlets whirling and
whisking through the open door from the hot and dusty street.
"_You_ needn't kick--you're leaving it," said Randal, sucking peacefully
at his pipe. "Stop beating the colour out of my blankets. I got to
make my living selling them for _portieres_ and table covers."
"No one in this hole with the spunk to get up a shoot, and half a dozen
lions roaring their heads off out at Penhalonga! Oh, pot!"
"Yes, it's sad," agreed Randal. "But the fellows round here are like
Oom Paul, they haven't lost any lions. Besides, this is the first I've
heard of half a dozen. The nigger only reported one, and I daresay he
saw that in his dreams."
Bettington became inconsequently derisive.
"This would be a fine place to raise a team for the Olympian Games, I
should think--or send out an expedition against the Mad Mullah--any
great adventure might have birth here!"
"What a fellow you are, Bettington! Haven't you had enough excitement
round Salisbury during this unholy rebellion? One would think you'd be
glad of a rest!"
"Rest--nothing," said the other savagely. "Time enough to rest when I'm
dead."
"You soon will be, all right," prophesied Randal cheerfully. "You worry
too much behind your face."
No similar accusation could be levelled at Eustace, commonly known as
Useless Randal, and Bettington was about to intimate as much when
something caused him to sit to attention. A woman had quietly entered
the shop, and from a sheet of paper in her hand began to read out a list
of her requirements to Hallam. It transpired that she stood in need of
a tin kettle, a water bag, six tins of bully beef, six ditto of
sardines, a box of biscuits, matches, sugar, tea, coffee, and plenty of
condensed milk. All were to be packed in an open packing-case ready for
use on a journey. Bettington listened to these instructions because he
liked the sound of her voice, but he considered it out of place in
Randal to sit with mouth open and ears cocked like a terrier at point.
She had pretty dark bronzy hair pushed up under a sunburnt Panama; worn
but well-shaped brown leather shoes; ditto gloves; and a good line to
her grey linen coat. When she turned away from Hallam to look
speculatively at the provisions on the shelves, Bettington caught sight
of a pale haughty little profile, a small ear, and a curving cheek. It
was a long while indeed since a profile had impressed him so agreeably.
A slight sound, made no doubt inadvertently, with his crop, caused her
to turn her head quickly in the direction of the two men, revealing for
a moment a face that would more than have fulfilled the promise of its
outline but for the look of weariness and disdain stamped upon it. At
her glance, Randal rose upon his poisoned foot, clutched the buttonless
shirt across his bosom, and bowed with grace. Bettington, whose hat had
been jammed on his forehead concealing all but one arrogant eye, removed
it abruptly and placed it on the counter, thus affording to anyone
sufficiently interested an uninterrupted view of the sanguine complexion
and well-shaped head of Africa's most brilliant journalist.
It was not quite apparent whether or not the lady availed herself of
this priceless opportunity--while nodding recognition to Randal, but a
faint colour showed in her cheek as she turned back to Hallam.
"Please don't forget the condensed milk," she murmured. "And would you
try and pick out the freshest looking tins, Mr Hallam? My little child
lives on it, and it is very important to have it good. You know the
last you had was dreadfully yellow and old."
"Yes, it was a bad lot, Mrs Stannard. I am awfully sorry, but, as you
know, we couldn't help it. We never meant to sell that consignment when
we found it was bad. But Colonel Monk commandeered it for the
children's use as there was nothing better in the town."
"I know. I'm not complaining," she said gently. "The children would
have starved without it. Only I do hope you've got some fresher tins in
now?"
"Why, certainly," Hallam waved his hand at the well-filled shelves
behind him. "We've got plenty of everything since the troops came up.
And I can vouch for the milk--it's a first-class brand, and fresh as
paint. Where are these things to be sent, Mrs Stannard? Out to your
camp?"
"No," she said in a low voice; "keep them here until that convoy of
waggons arrives from Salisbury--they are expected to-night, I believe--
then send the box out to be put on the waggon in which I have engaged
accommodation for myself and child." Hallam looked up as if something
had hit him, but she stared at him so haughtily that he dropped his eyes
and applied himself to the business of adding up the bill. She paid,
and with a cold nod and no further glance at the other men left the
shop. Bettington, having occasion to go to the door to examine some
whip thongs that hung in a bunch before the entry, saw her walking in
light fleet fashion towards the Police Camp.
"_She_ won't hurt the daisies," he murmured pleasantly to himself, as he
sauntered back into the shop where the two other men were neck deep in
what sounded perilously like village scandal.
"What do you think of that?" Hallam was inquiring with a stunned air.
He had come over to Randal's side of the shop. "She's had enough!
Going to take the baby and scoot!"
"And I don't blame her a brass button. The only wonder is she didn't do
it long ago!" Randal wore a judicial manner.
"Her sister kept her from it, I guess, and lack of funds. Stannard is
tight with the sinews of war. Needs them all to square his whiskey
bills."
Bettington made no attempt to take part in this interesting dialogue,
but listened to it very carefully and pensively.
"What will Miss van Rimmel do?" Randal wondered. "Go with her?"
"Not she. She's always been dead against her sister leaving Stannard.
Thinks that while there's life there's hope of reformation, even in such
a double-dyed sheep as he is. I bet if Mrs Stannard does go, _she'll_
stay behind and nurse Stan through--and the Doc says he's got 'em bad
this time--rats and cats and purple elephants."
"I don't care what colour the menagerie is as long as it keeps Miss van
Rimmel here."
"Me neither," averred Hallam elegantly.
They became aware of Bettington's sardonic presence, and dropped the
subject as if it burnt.
"As I was saying," remarked Randal briskly, "we had better take fifty
pounds of that dried buck off that Boer. It's the best biltong I've
struck since I dunno when."
"Right you are!" Hallam began to write in his note book. Randal turned
his attention to the thoughtful journalist.
"What about your lions, Bet? Still think of going out to look for
them?"
Bet regarded him pensively.
"So I am to have the society of a pretty lady between here and Beira?"
he remarked.
"You? Who said so?" Randal's voice sounded slightly aggressive. "I
suppose there are other people besides you on those waggons,
Bettington?"
"Yes, but no one so good-looking," said Bettington, wrinkling his rocky
nose and gazing at them with bland eyes. "Besides the only empty tent
is the one on the waggon where my kit is."
The other two studied his red complexion discontentedly.
"Well, you ought to be very nice to that lady," quoth Hallam at last.
"I'll try to be," promised Bettington earnestly. The American may or
may not have been reassured, but Randal stirred uneasily.
"She drew a blank in the marriage lottery, all right," continued Hallam.
"But she has a nice little kid, and a sister that could take any man in
this country in tow if she cared to, but she don't."
"Wise sister!" thought Bettington, "but I'm glad it's not _she_ who's
going to Beira." What he said was:
"I should regard Stannard as more in the nature of a surprise packet
with a live bomb inside it than a blank. I used to know him years ago,
before drink and gambling debts drove him out of the army. How came a
pretty woman like that to tie up with him?"
"You can search me. I guess she hadn't seen many other fellows."
"That was just it," proffered Randal. "They belong to an old Huguenot
family, and these girls were brought up as innocent as lambs on a farm
near Worcester, and I suppose thought everything that had worn a British
uniform was an angel, and every man that came from England a gentleman."
"Well, they know better now, no doubt," remarked Bettington pleasantly,
and looked at his watch. "I think I'll go round to the Bank and see if
I can decoy Johnson out to Penhalonga to-night. Sure you won't come,
Hallam?"
"Can't! Randal's poisoned foot has me tied up here."
After the journalist had gone, Randal spoke to his partner gloomily.
"Damn bad luck his going on the same trek with Mrs Stannard. She's
just rottenly unhappy enough not to care what she does, and he's just
the fellow women throw their bonnets over the mill for."
"Why, he is as ugly as Halifax!" exclaimed Hallam.
"That makes nix. He's got brains behind that lovely complexion, and
women like brains."
"More likely that insolent, don't-care-a-tinker's-curse air of his that
gets 'em," mused the American.
"He doesn't care a tinker's curse either. He'd walk over anybody to get
his own way. He threw down the editorship of the biggest paper at the
Cape because he wouldn't take orders from the owners, and the same thing
up at Salisbury. He hadn't run the _Journal_ a month before he bust up
with Max the proprietor. Refused to air Max's politics because they
weren't his own, and went off and fought the niggers instead. Now he's
got another big job in Johannesburg. Everybody wants him till they get
him. There's no doubt he can put it all over every other journalist in
South Africa."
Later, the subject of this monograph returned to the shop with a demand
for .303 cartridges, and the announcement that he had got Johnson, a
horse, and some boys. Remained only to get the lion, and he seemed
cocksure of that.
His parting injunction to Randal was to have his box of provisions put
on McKinnon's waggon if the convoy passed through before he got back,
and to send out a messenger to let him know where the waggons were so
that he could go straight after them without returning to Umtali.
As it happened, he did not get back, and the waggons passed through that
night whilst he and Johnson were lying behind a roughly constructed
scherm between the Penhalonga hills. Smokeless, drinkless, oppressed by
a deep and nameless silence, ears straining and guns at the cock, they
were in a state of discomfort only to be suffered in the quest for
glory. But the lion came at the pitch-black hour of two, and his doom
was dight.
They breakfasted in the grey dawn, and while the boys skinned the
trophy, Johnson, who besides being a bank manager, was a gossip and
something of a wit, regaled the journalist with amusing biographies of
the Umtali residents. Incidentally the Stannards came before the board,
and Bettington learned, among other things, that the ex-army man had
been running a farm out beyond the Police Camp, that the farm was a
failure, and all his wife's money had gone in it, likewise the money of
his sister-in-law; that the latter was very pretty, and Randal and
Hallam only two of a dozen men who were in love with her; but that she
would have none of them, preferring to devote all her time to the
business of minding the Stannard baby and keeping the peace in the
Stannard household. In fact, there was very little about this
unpropitious menage that Bettington did not learn, and the more he heard
the more he felicitated himself upon the fact that with the oxen and
veld in the state they were it would take ten good days to reach Beira.
Those ten days looked good to him. Next to shooting, and fighting, and
writing, he held that life had nothing more piquant to offer than the
society of a pretty, disillusioned married woman. It was not so much
because he was a scoundrel that he preferred them married, as because he
knew himself fonder of adventure and travel and a careless life than he
could ever be of a wife. Wherefore he had long ago decided that
marriage was not for him. It did not follow, according to _his_ code,
that flirtation was not for him; only that he must eschew the society of
pretty girls and devote himself to the pretty women who were safely tied
up. Certainly, even in this there was a risk of finding himself laid by
the heels for life; but it was less of a risk than flirtation with girls
entailed.