He was an incorrigible thief. Jordan's vegetable garden had to be fenced, but still Tom left tufts of his drab hair on the spikes of the barbed wire. He had a trick of plucking the carrots out of the ground with a delicate grip between his square white teeth, and then knocking the earth off them against his forehooves.
He learned to push open the kitchen window and reach the fresh loaves of bread that were cooling on the marble sink, and once when Jan Cheroot left the door to the storeroom off the latch, Tom got in and ate half a bag of sugar, at twenty shillings a pound.
However, he would follow like a dog, and when ordered he would stand for hours, and Zouga, who was not sentimental about animals, had come to love him.
Zouga looked back from the horse to the young man across the log fire.
'Agreed,' he said without emphasis. 'Do we need to have further witnesses?'
'I don't think so, Major,' said Rhodes. 'Do you?'
'At the gun the competitor will ride out to the first flag-' Neville Pickering was the steward-in-chief, and his voice through the speaking trumpet carried to every member of the huge Sunday crowd that spilled out across the dry veld below the Magersfontein hills.
'At the first red flag they will fire upon the standing targets. When they have demolished all four targets to the satisfaction of the stewards, they will be free to round the second yellow flag, and thereafter to return to the finish line.' He pointed to the twin poles each with its crown of coloured bunting. 'The first rider to pass between them will be declared the winner.'
Pickering paused and drew fresh breath before going on.
'Are there any questions?'
'Would you recite the rules, please, mister Pickering,' Louise Sint John called. She looked like a child on the great glistening pale stallion's back. She was walking him in circles, leaning forward to pat his neck for the crowds had made him nervous. He was chewing the light snaffle and sweating in dark patches on the rippling muscled shoulders.
'There are no other rules, ma'am.' Pickering answered her loudly enough for those at the back of the crowd to hear.
'No rules, barging and fouling?'
'There are no fouls, ma'am,' Pickering replied. 'Though if one of you deliberately shoots an opponent, he or she might have to face criminal charges, but not disqualification.'
Louise turned her head towards the figure on the front seat of the high-wheeled phaeton which was parked beyond the course markers. Her face was pale, the freckles standing out on her cheeks; and her head was bared so that the thick dark braid of hair thumped against her shoulder.
Mungo Sint John smiled back at her over the heads of the crowd, and shrugged slightly, so that Louise was forced to turn back to Pickering.
'Very well, then,' she agreed. 'But the stake. We have not agreed the stake.'
'Major Ballantyne,' Pickering called to where Zouga stood at Tom's head. 'You have laid out the course. Now will you be good enough to name the stake.'
Then a strange thing happened. For the first time since Zouga had met her, Louise Sint John was uncertain of herself. Nobody else seemed to notice it, perhaps it was merely that Zouga had become highly receptive to every shade of her voice and expression. But he was certain that he saw something dark move in the blue depths of her eyes, like the shadow of a shark beneath the surface of the sea, and she took a pinch of her soft lower lip between her white teeth and again she glanced almost furtively at Mungo Sint John.
It was not Zouga's imagination. Mungo Sint John did not return Louise's glance with his usual amused indulgence.
He was looking at Zouga and under his calm was a small undercurrent of unease, like an eddy at highwater when the tide turns.
Zouga raised his voice so that it would carry to Sint John.
'Firstly, the loser will publish at his or her own expense upon the front page of the Advertiser in terms dictated by the winner, an acknowledgement of defeat.'
'A composition I shall enjoy.' Louise had swiftly recovered her poise. 'And what else, Major?''A payment by the loser to a charity of the winner's choice of,' Zouga paused, and both man and woman watched his face with outward calm, 'of the sum of one shilling!'
'Done!'
There was a slightly jarring note in Louise's laugh, relief perhaps, and though Mungo Sint John's expression did not alter, the tension went out of his shoulders.
'missis Sint John. You are under starter's orders,' Pickering called through his speaking trumpet. 'Be so good as to bring your mount under control.'
'He is under perfect control, sir,' she called back, and Shooting Star put his head down and lashed out with both back hooves towards the crowd.
'If he is under control, Missus, then so is my motherin-law,' called a wag, and there was a hoot of laughter.
'On the count of three then,' Pickering intoned, his voice hollow and solemn through the trumpet. 'One.'
Shooting Star backed up against the crowd, and they scattered as he bucked.
'Two.'
He went into a tortured high-stepping circle, so tight that his nose almost touched the toe of Louise's boot in the fancy silver stirrup.
