After this they held on their way without molestation, neither did they
come across any further active indications as to the state of the
country. Yet, though not active, the volcano was by no means extinct.
They progressed slowly--this partly on account of the ruggedness of the
ground, over which nothing but South African built waggons could have
travelled without coming in halves, partly because Fleetwood was careful
to keep up appearances, and hide the real objective of their _trek_.
Wherefore for days they would outspan near a group of kraals, although
of trade there was next to nothing done. At this course of action
Wyvern in no wise chafed. He was one of those rare units who recognise
that in a given line the other man is an authority while he himself is
not, consequently must be allowed an ungrudged free hand. For another
thing he was vividly interested. He had fought against the Zulus, and
of course except in battles and skirmishes had seen nothing of them.
Now he was seeing a great deal of them. There was nothing he enjoyed so
much, for instance, as sitting in a cool hut during the hot hours of the
day, with three or four fine warriors, who possibly had been foremost in
striving to shed his blood during the comparatively recent war, while
they told their stories of this or that battle in which he himself had
taken part. He was astonished, too, at the readiness with which he
followed such narratives, considering that he was as yet very far from
at home in the language. Still, gesture, expression, went a long way,
and when he was in doubt there was always Fleetwood to help. But he was
absorbing the language more and more every day; and the friendly ways of
the people, frankly friendly but not servile, independent but always
courteous, had long since brought him round to the opinion arrived at by
others before him, with opportunities of judging, that the average Zulu
is a gentleman. The people, for their part, were strongly attracted to
him. His fine stature and presence in the first place appealed
powerfully, as it always does to a fine race of warlike savages, in the
next, his thoroughbred look, and well-bred ways told too; and the
latter, no people are more capable of appreciating than these. As for
the part he had taken against them in the late war, no shadow of a
grudge or resentment did they bear against him for it; on the contrary,
they looked upon him with enhanced respect on the strength of it; even
as he himself had predicted to Lalante would be the case. A man must
fight at the "word" of his king, was their way of looking at it. They
and the whites had met in fair fight; sometimes one side had got the
best of it, and sometimes the other. There was no room for rancour on
account of anything so plain and obvious. So Wyvern greatly enjoyed
those hours spent in the company of dusky warriors, with a cool bowl of
freshly-brewed _tywala_ before him, the clinging cockroaches shimmering
in the thatch of the hut overhead, while they vividly recapitulated the
stirring times, not so long past, or mapped out with small stones on the
floor--and with wonderful accuracy--the scene of more than one pitched
battle from the point of view of their own position and tactics. And it
might be that the time was coming when this good understanding should
stand him in some stead in the hour of his sore peril and need.
And the incidents of the _trek_, and this in itself, was no mere picnic.
There were times when the conditions of the road--though road in
anything like the ordinary sense of the word there was none--were
frequently such as to render five miles a day the utmost limits of their
advance; when they would spend half a day stuck in a river-bed, with the
flood steadily rising, the result of that slaty, blue-black curtain of
cloud forming the background further up in the hills; when the storm
beat down upon them in its terrific crash, and the whole atmosphere
seemed tinged with incandescent electricity; and only by a well-nigh
superhuman effort of desperation could they at length induce the span to
move at the critical moment, failure in which would mean loss of half
their outfit and of more than one life. Or when, after a tremendous
rain-burst, the wheels would sink in the boggy soil, rendering it
necessary to unload the contents of both waggons and dig a way out; and
even then it might be necessary to chop a number of great thorn boughs
in order to construct a sufficiently firm way. Incidents such as these
would constitute a sufficiency of hard labour--in a steaming climate,
too--at which an English navvy, if put, would not hesitate to go on
strike. No, this _trek_ decidedly was not a picnic. Yet through it
all--drenchings, heat, exhaustion, what not--Wyvern never turned a hair.
He was always equable, always ready to take things as they came.
Fleetwood, less self-contained, was prone to fire off language of a more
or less sultry nature upon such occasions.
"I wouldn't curse so much if I were you, Joe," laughed Wyvern once. "It
must be so infernally additionally exhausting." And the other had
laughed, and, while thoroughly concurring, had explained that he
couldn't help it.
Plenty of compensations were there, however, for these and other
incidents of the road. When they got into the forest country sport was
fairly plentiful, and when Wyvern brought down a splendid koodoo bull,
shot fair and clean through the heart, it was a moment in his life not
the least thrilling that he had known; and instinctively he had gloated
over the great spiral horns, picturing them at Seven Kloofs--when he had
bought it back, which of course he fully intended to do, as one of the
results of their successful quest--and himself and Lalante, in close
juxtaposition, admiring them while he went over some of the incidents of
their eventful _trek_--incidentally, perhaps not for the first time.
Then the _trek_, under the glorious moon with the breaths of night
distilling around, the whole atmosphere redolent of life and
health-giving openness; or, failing the said moon, the blue-black
velvety vault of heaven aglow with myriad stars, seeming to hang down to
the earth itself with a luscious brilliance unknown to the severe
northern skies; vivid meteors and streak-like falling stars flashing
with a frequency only to be appreciated by those whom circumstances lead
to passing many nights in the open. So, as they moved on, slowly, but
surely as they hoped, towards their goal, these were indeed
compensations.
And Lalante? She was ever in his thoughts, ever enwrapped in every
joyous communing with joyous Nature, or in time of toil and hardship,
such toil or hardship was being endured for her. Often, at the midnight
outspan, when Fleetwood had laughingly declared that he, having nothing
particularly pleasant to think about, and being most infernally sleepy,
was going to turn in, Wyvern would sit, or pace up and down, hour upon
hour, while the Southern Cross turned in the heavens, and give his
powers of imagination and recollection play. He pictured her as he saw
her last--heart-wrung; as he used to see her every day, sweet, strong,
smiling, in the full glow of her splendid youth and health; his, for she
had given herself to him; and the thought thrilled him until he could
conjure up her presence here, here in this savage solitude, could hear
her voice in his ear, as the tiger wolves slunk and howled dismally in
the surrounding brake, even as he had heard it again and again on the
moonlit stoep at Seven Kloofs. He had received letters from her since
he left, until he had been beyond the reach of receiving letters at
all--brave, true, loving letters--sweet beyond all conception of
sweetness; treasured beyond all earthly possessions, and in his midnight
pacings, when all around was still as death except the weird voices of
the wild, he would bring out one or other of these and re-read it by the
light of the great overhanging moon. Ah, yes! This love was worth a
lifetime of toil and pain, and it had come to him, all so suddenly, so
naturally. Did he appreciate it the less on that account? Not one
whit. He would achieve the object of his quest, and then--and then--
And then came as a refrain certain words he had heard uttered long ago
by a very valued friend of his--incidentally, a highly-placed dignitary
of the Catholic Church--when he had been remarking upon the position and
circumstances of somebody which should leave nothing to be desired, and
which for all that, covered "a thorn in the flesh"--"It is not intended
that anyone should be perfectly happy in this world." Wyvern had
realised the truth of this then, as indeed none but a fool could have
failed to realise it, since it was a truth borne out by all experience.
Now it came back to him with force, and alone with the solitude of the
wild, he looked reverently up to the moonlit heavens with an aspiration
that here might be the exception which should prove the rule.
The young Zulu whom they had rescued had shown no desire to leave them.
He had tacitly and naturally fallen in with their party as though one of
it, and Fleetwood was not at all unwilling that he should; for he was a
fine, active, warrior-like specimen of his race and came of a splendid
fighting stock. There was no telling when such advantages might not be
of solid use to his rescuers. He was a son--one of many--of a powerful
chief whose clan dwelt in the mountainous fastnesses in the north-west
of the country, and entirely and whole-heartedly attached to the cause
of the exiled and captive King. He, Mtezani, had thrown in his lot with
the other side, not through conviction, but to get the better of his
brothers, with whom he had quarrelled over the division of certain
cattle, their patrimony. Besides, he wanted to _tunga_, and take a
wife--he explained frankly enough to Fleetwood. He had heard that under
the chiefs set up by the English, any man was at liberty to do this
whenever he chose; whereas his father, Majendwa, was among the most
conservative of Zulus, and strongly objected to this young bull-calf
setting aside the traditions of the nation, and daring to aspire to the
head-ring without leave from the Great Great One--who, of course, was
not there to grant it. They had done him out of his cattle, he
declared, so that he should have no _lobola_ to offer for any girl.
This was a situation which, we may be sure, strongly appealed to Wyvern,
who reflected, whimsically enough, that he himself was much in the same
position. He accordingly took a great fancy to Mtezani, and the young
Zulu seemed to attach himself to him more than to Fleetwood. He would
invariably be with him when a hunt was afoot in the wild and broken
forest country they were then traversing; and for more than one
successful find of koodoo or impala, Wyvern had to thank Mtezani.
They fell in with no more contending impis. Now and again armed runners
would fetch up at their outspan, and when pressed for news would give
evasive replies, but these became fewer as, at last, through the great
tumbled, rolling forests, the precipitous savage rise of the Lebombo
range came into view.
"We are getting there at last, Wyvern," said Fleetwood one day. "But
there's one thing I must tell you that I hadn't bargained for, and a
most infernal nuisance it is too. I learn that almost bang on the scene
of our operations, a particularly obnoxious sweep named Rawson--Bully
Rawson--a white man, of course, has planted himself down. Now this
fellow is likely to prove a considerable thorn in our side, to give us
trouble, in fact."
"Why? Who is he?"
"Oh, as to that nobody knows, strictly, which likely enough is just as
well for him. He's nominally a trader like myself, but actually he's a
chiefs white man, and that spells gun-runner."
"Yes? But why should he interfere with us?"
"Well, it's this way. Being in my own line himself, he knows devilish
well that no sane being--and he knows me well enough to credit me with
sanity--is going to bring a couple of trade waggons up to a remote and
almost uninhabited part of the country, that, too, where trekking with
the same is more than pain and grief, as you've seen--for trade
purposes. No. Well, then, having come to that conclusion, the first
thing he'll say to himself will be--what the devil we're up here for at
all. See?"
"Yes. But what the same devil is he doing up here himself, then, on
those terms? You don't think he has any inkling of Hlabulana's yarn?
Eh?"
"No. I don't see how he could have," answered Fleetwood. "He's cutting
timber in the Lumisana forest, and shipping it to the coast, which in
all probability spells gun-running for Hamu."
"For Hamu? Oh, this is Hamu's country, then?"
"Yes. Well, Rawson was with him before, and they know each other. But
here's where the fun comes in. Once he gets suspicious--and, of course,
he will, on the terms I told you before, he'll stick to us like our
shadows night and day, or at any rate take care that someone else does--
say, when he's too drunk to attend to business himself. Then how are we
going to set about our prospecting with the care and nicety and, above
all, freedom from interruption it requires?"
"When he's too drunk, I think you said, Joe? I read a saving clause in
that. What sort of a type--both outwardly and inwardly--is this very
attractive being?"
"Oh, outwardly he's a thick-set, shaggy, broken-nosed brute whom any
jury would hang at sight without retiring from the box. For the other
part, he hasn't a redeeming quality, unless it is that he's as plucky as
they make 'em. The only point on which no one has ever been able to
damn Bully Rawson is that of his pluck. On all others, everybody who
has ever known him is united in damning him to a lurid degree."
"H'm! Yes, it's a nuisance," mused Wyvern. "One rather reckoned on
difficulties at the hands of the noble savage, and now it seems we are
likely to find them the thickest at those of a white man and a brother.
Well, we are two to one. One or other of us must manage to be one too
many for Mr Bully Rawson."
Here Mtezani interrupted. He had been away on a private prowl of his
own, and had come back in a hurry.
"_Nkose_, there are people coming," he said. "_Impela_, they are not
very far behind me, and one of them is a white man."
"A white man! What is he like?" said Fleetwood. "Did you see him?"
"_Eh-hi_!" And the young Zulu gave a rapid and graphic description.
"That is Inxele," pronounced Hlabulana, who was squatted near.
Fleetwood turned upon his companion a whimsical look.
"Talk of the devil!" he quoted. "Inxele is their name for Bully
Rawson."