He did not sign it.
The Post Office clerk assured him that if he paid the sevenpence for urgent rating, the message would have priority as soon as the northern lines were reinstated.
Mark wandered back into the street, feeling sick and depleted by the crisis of conscience, not certain that he had done the right thing in either circumstance, and he wondered just how futile was his hope that he might have forced Fergus MacDonald to throw that deadly cargo down some disused mine shaft before death and revolution was turned loose upon the land.
It was almost dark as Fergus MacDonald wheeled his bicycle into the shed and paused in the small back yard to slip the clips off the cuffs of his trousers, before going on to the kitchen door.
The smell of cooking cabbage filled the small room with a steamy moist cloud that made him pause and blink.
Helena was sitting at the kitchen table and she hardly glanced up as he entered. A cigarette dangled from her lips with an inch of grey ash clinging hopelessly to the end of it.
She still wore the grubby dressing-gown she had worn at breakfast, and it was clear that she had neither bathed nor changed since then. Her hair had grown longer and now dangled in oily black snakes to her cheeks. She had grown heavier in the last months, the line of her jaw blurring with a padding of fat and the hair on her upper lip darker and denser, breasts bulging and drooping heavily in the open front of the gown. Hello then, love. Fergus shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it across the back of a kitchen chair. She turned the page of the pamphlet she was reading, squinting at the curl of blue smoke that drifted across her eyes.
Fergus opened a black bottle of porter and the gas hissed fiercely. Anything happened today? Something for you, she nodded at the kitchen dresser, and the cigarette ash dropped down the front of her gown, settling in fine grey flakes.
Carrying the bottle, Fergus crossed to the dresser and fingered the buff envelope. One of your popsies, Helena chuckled at the unlikeliness of her sally, and Fergus frowned and tore open the envelope.
He stared at the message for long uncomprehending seconds before he swore bitterly. Jesus Christ! He slammed the bottle down on the kitchen table with a crash.
Even this late in the evening, there were small groups on each street corner. They had that disconsolate andbored air of men with too little to fill their days, even the commando drilling and the nightly meetings were beginning to pall. As Fergus MacDonald pedalled furiously through the darkening streets, his first alarm and fright turned to fierce exultation.
The time was right, they were as ready as they would ever be, if time drifted on without decisive action from either side, the long boring days of strike inactivity would erode their determination. What had seemed like disaster merely minutes before, he now saw was a heaven-sent opportunity. Let them come, we will be ready for them, he thought, and braked alongside a group of four loungers on the pavement outside the public bar of the Grand Fordsburg Hotel. Get a message to all area commanders, they are to assemble at the Trade Hall immediately. It's an emergency. Brothers, hurry. They scattered quickly, and he pedalled on up the rising ground of the dip, calling out his warning as he went.
In the Trade Union offices, there were still a dozen or so members; most of them were eating sandwiches and drinking Thermos tea, while a few worked on the issue of strike relief coupons to Union families, but the relaxed atmosphere changed as Fergus burst in. All right, comrades, it's beginning. The ZARPS are on their way. It was classic police tactics. They came in the first light of dawn. The advance guard rode down into the dip of land between Fordsburg and the railway crossing, where the Johannesburg road ran down between sleazy cottages and overgrown plots of open ground, thick with weeds and mounds of rotting refuse.
There was a heavy ground-mist in the dip, and the nine troopers on police chargers waded through it, as though fording the sluggish waters of a river crossing.
They had muted harness and muffled accoutrements, so that it was in ghostly silence that they breasted the softly swirling mists. The light was not yet strong enough to pickZuid Afrikaanse Republiek Polisie, used as a derogatory term, out their badges and burnished buttons, it was only the dark silhouette of their helmets that identified them.
Fifty yards behind the leading troopers followed the two police carriages. High four-wheelers with barred windows to bold prisoners, and beside each one of them marched ten constables. They carried their rifles at the slope, and were stepping out sharply to keep up with the carriages.
As they entered the dip, the mist engulfed them, chesthigh, so that their disembodied trunks bobbed in the white soft surface. They looked like strange dark sea-animals, and the mist muted the tramp of their boots.
Fergus MacDonald's scouts had picked them up before they reached the railway crossing and for three miles had been pacing them, slipping back unseen ahead of the advance, runners reporting every few minutes to the cottage where Fergus had established his advance headquarters. All right, Fergus snapped, as another of the dark figures ducked through the hedge of the sanitary lane behind the cottage and mumbled his report through the open window. They are all coming in on the main road. Pull the other pickets out and get them here right away.
The man grunted an acknowledgement and was gone.
Fergus had his pickets on every possible approach to the town centre. The police might have split into a number of columns, but it seemed his precautions were unnecessary.
Secure in the certainty of complete surprise and in overwhelming force, they were not bothering with diversion or flanking manoeuvres.
Twenty-nine troopers, Fergus calculated, together with the four drivers, was indeed a formidable force. More than sufficient, if it had not been for the warning from some unknown ally.
Fergus hurried through into the front parlour of the cottage. The family had been moved out before midnight, all the cottages along the road had been cleared. The grumpy squalling children in pyjamas carried on the shoulders of their fathers, the women with white frightened faces in the lamplight, bundling a few precious possessions with them as they hurried away.
Now the cottages seemed deserted, no lights showed, and the only sound was the mournful howling of a mongrel dog down in the dip. Yet in each cottage, at the windows that faced on to the road, silent men waited.
Fergus spoke to one of them in a whisper and he pointed down into the misty hollow, then spat and worked a
