'Soon, Little Hawk, very soon. But you, I thought your wagon would be heavy with ivory 'Done, Little Axe, already done.' Ralph stepped back and looked at him. In the months since they had parted, both men had changed.
In Bazo there remained no trace of the young trim labourer who had worked his shifts in the pit and eaten Zouga Ballantyne's rations. Here was a warrior and a prince, tall and plumed and proud.
Ralph was no longer the callow lad, his every action ordered by his father. Instead he was a grown man, with a jaunty lift to his chin and a self-assured set to his shoulder. Yet though his clothes were travel-worn an stained the training of Zouga Ballantyne still showed, for they were recently washed and his jaws had been clean shaven that very morning. They looked at each other and the affection between them was tempered and hardened with respect.
'I shot a young buffalo cow, not two hours ago.'
'Yes,' Bazo nodded. 'It was the shot which brought us.'
'Then I am glad of it. The buffalo meat is fat, and there is enough even for a hungry Matabele.'
Bazo glanced at the sun. 'Though I am in haste, on the king's business, my prisoners are in need of rest. We will help you eat your buffalo, Henshaw, but in the dawn we will go on.'
'Then there is much to talk about, and little time to do so.'
There was the pop of a trek-whip, and Bazo glanced beyond Ralph's shoulder to see the oxen come plodding between the trees and the wagon lurching and wallowing behind them.
'You still keep bad company,'Bazo scolded with a grin as he recognized Umfaan at the head of the span and Isazi, the little Zulu, on the flank, 'but the load you carry is welcome.'
From the wagon box hung the raw quarters and shoulders of the freshly-butchered buffalo carcass.
'We have not tasted fresh meat since we left the king's kraal.'
Ralph and Bazo sat at a separate fire apart from their retinues, where they could talk freely.
'The king agreed to buy the guns and bottles that I carried up from Kimberley,' Ralph told Bazo, 'and he paid me generously., He did not go on to describe to Bazo the currency in which he had been paid. He did not describe his own astonishment when Lobengula had offered him an uncut diamond, a big bright first-water stone.
His surprise had immediately been tempered by conscience; he had no doubts about where that stone had come from. His conscience lasted about as long as his surprise, and he haggled with gusto, forcing up the price to six stones, which he had picked with an eye trained by many years on the diggings. He knew they would be worth 10,000 pounds when he got them back to civilization.
Thus in a single stroke he had paid for the wagon and team, his entire debt to Diamond Lil, interest and all and was already many thousands of pounds in profit.
'Then I asked Lobengula to let me hunt elephant, and he laughed and said I was too young and that the elephant would eat me up. He kept me waiting outside his kraal for ten days.'
'If he kept you such a short time, then you have found favour with the king,' Bazo interrupted. 'Some white men have waited from the beginning of the dry season to the middle of the wet, merely for permission to take the road out of Matabeleland.'
'Ten days was long enough for me,' Ralph granted.
'But when I asked him in which part of his lands I was allowed to hunt, he laughed again and said, 'The elephant will be in so little danger from you, Little Hawk, that you may go where you wish, and kill as many as are stupid or lame enough to let you.'
Bazo chuckled delightedly. 'And how many lame stupid elephant have you found so far, Henshaw?'
'I have fifty good tusks in the wagon already., 'Fifty!' Bazo's chuckles died and he stared at Ralph in amazement; then he stood up and crossed to the wagon.
He untied one of the straps and lifted the canvas cover to peer in at the load, while Isazi looked up from his cooking fire, frowned and called to Ralph.
'This boy's great-grandfather, Mashobane, was a thief, his grandfather, Mzilikazi was a traitor, you have every reason to trust him with our ivory, Henshaw.'
Bazo did not look at him, but glanced up into the trees.
'The monkeys hereabout make a frightful chatter,' he murmured, and then came back to Ralph.
'Fine tusks!' he admitted. 'Like the ones the hunters took when I was still a child.'
Ralph did not tell him that most of those in the wagon were taken even before that time. He had discovered all but two of the caches that his father had bequeathed to him.
The ivory had dried out, lost almost a quarter of its green weight; but most of it was still in good condition, and would fetch the market price once he got it to the railhead.
Though Ralph had hunted diligently for his own elephant whilst he sought out Zouga's ancient dumps, he had had little success. He had killed five, only one of which was a bull and whose green tusks had weighed just over sixty pounds. The others had been small female barely worth taking.
ivory The great herds that Zouga had described in A Hunter's Odyssey no longer existed. Since those days there had been many hunters, some of them inspired by Zouga's own writing. Boer and Briton, Hottentot and German, they had hunted and harried the huge grey beasts and left their white bones piled on the veld and in the forest.
'Yes, they are good tusks,' Ralph nodded. 'And my wagon is heavy laden now. I am on the road back to the king's kraal to ask him for permission to leave Matabeleland and go back to Kimberley.'
'Then when you have gone, we will see you no more,' Bazo said quietly. 'You will be like the other white men who come to Matabeleland. You will take what you want, and never come back.'
