The chest was only half-full, and he carried it easily down the steps into the yard. That was all that he was taking, the rest of it, the meagre furnishings of the bungalow he had sold to one of the auctioneers in Market Square. Ten pounds the lot. As Rhodes had predicted, he was leaving as he had come.
'Where is Ralph?' he demanded of Jan Cheroot, and the little Hotten tot paused in chaining the cooking-pot and black iron kettle onto the tailboard of the cart.
'Perhaps he stopped at Diamond Lil's. The boy has got a right to his thirst, he worked hard enough for it.'
Zouga let it pass, and instead ran an appraising eye over the cart. It was the newest and strongest of the three vehicles he owned. One cart had gone with Louise Sint John, and she had taken the best mules, but this rig would get them back to Cape Town, even under the additional burden that he was planning to put into it.
Jan Cheroot ambled across to Zouga and took the other handle of the chest, ready to boost it up into the body of the cart.
'Wait,' Zouga told him. 'That first.' And he pointed to the roughly-hewn block of blue mottled rock that lay below the camel-thorn tree.
'My mother -' Jan Cheroot gaped. 'This I don't believe.
In twenty-two years I've seen you do some stupid crazy things Zouga strode across to the block of blue ground that Ralph had brought up from the Devil's Own and put his foot on it. 'We'll hoist it up with the block and tackle.'
He glanced at the sturdy branch above his head from which the sheave block and manila rope hung. 'And we'll back the cart up under it.'
'That's it!' Jan Cheroot sat down on the chest and folded his arms. 'This time I refuse. Once before I broke my back for you, but that was when I was young and stupid.'
'Come on, Jan Cheroot, you are wasting time.'
'What do you want with that, piece of ugly bloody stone? With another piece of thundering nonsense.'
'I have lost the bird, I need a household god.'
'I have heard of someone putting up a monument to a brave man, or a great battle, but to put up a stone to stupidity,' Jan Cheroot mourried.
'Back the cart up.'
'I refuse, this time I refuse. I won't do it. Not for anything. Not for any price.'
'When we get it loaded, you can have a bottle of smoke all to yourself to celebrate.'
Jan Cheroot sighed, and stood up. 'That's my price.'
He shook his head and came across to stand beside Zouga. He glared at the block of blue stone venomously.
'But don't expect me to like it.'
Zouga chuckled, for the first time in weeks, and in an unusual display of affection he put one arm around Jan Cheroot's shoulders.
'Now that you have something to hate again, just think how happy it will make you,' he said.
'You have been drinking,' Zouga said, and Ralph tossed his hat into the corner and agreed.
'Yes, I have had a beer or two.' He went to the black iron stove and warmed his hands. 'I would have had more, if I had had the money.'
'i have been waiting for you,' Zouga went on, and Ralph turned back to him truculently.
'i give you every hour of my day, Papa, let me have a little time at the end of it.'
'i have something of great importance to tell you,' Zouga nodded to the deal chair facing him. 'Sit down, Ralph.'
Zouga rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb as he collected his words. He had tried so often in the last days to find an easy way to tell Ralph that it was over, that they were destitute, that all that toil and heartbreak had been in vain, but there was no easy way. There were only the stark hard words of reality.
He dropped his hand, and looked at his son, and then slowly and carefully he told him, and when he had finished he waited for Ralph to speak. Ralph had not moved during the long recital, and now he stared at Zouga stonily.
Zouga was forced to speak again. 'We shall leave in the morning. Jan Cheroot and I have loaded the number 2 wagon and we shall need all the mules, double team it's a long haul.'
Again he waited, but there was still no reaction.
'You will be wondering where we are going and what we shall do. Well, once we get back to the Cape we still have the Harkness cottage.'
'You gambled it all.' Ralph spoke at last. 'Without telling me. You, you, who are always preaching to me about gambling, and honesty.'
'Ralph!'
'It wasn't yours, it belonged to all of us.'
'You are drunk,' Zouga said flatly.
'All these years I have listened to your promises. We shall go north, Ralph.' He mimicked Zouga with a sudden savagery in his tone. 'It's for all of us, Ralph. It's yours to share. There is a land waiting for us, Ralph. It will be yours as well as mine, Ralph., 'It's not over, I still have the concession. When we get back to Cape Town-, 'You, not
