stirrups and legs thrust forward, sitting well back on his mount, sjambok trailing from his left hand and reins held low on the pommel of the saddle.
In the shade of the leadwood tree, his stallion stood with the patience of a trained gun horse, its weight braced on three legs and the fourth cocked at rest, neck stretched against the reins as it reached to crop the fine sweet grass that covered the upper slopes of the escarpment, its teeth making a harsh tearing sound with each mouthful.
Sean looked out across the spreading forests and grassland below him, and realized how much it had all changed since he had ran across it barefooted with his hunting dogs and throwing sticks s asmall boisterous child.
Four or five miles away, nestled against the protective wall of the escarpment, was the homestead of Tbeunis Kraal, where he had been born in the old brass bedstead in the front room, both he and Garrick, his twin brother, in the course of a single sweltering summer morning, a double birthing that had killed the mother he had never known. Garrick lived there still, and at last he had found peace and pride among his books and his papers. Sean smiled with affection and sympathy, tinged with ancient guilt, what might his brother have been if one leg had not been shattered by the careless shotgun that Sean had fired?
He thrust the thought aside, and instead turned in the saddle to survey his own domain.
The thousands upon thousands of acres that he had planted to timber and which had given him the foundation of his fortune. From where he sat he could see the sawmills and timber yards adjoining the railway yards down in the town, and once again he felt the warm contentment of a life not thrown to waste, the glow of achievement and endeavour rewarded. He smiled and lit one of the long dark cheroots, striking the match off his boot, adjusting easily to the shifting balance of the horse under him.
A moment longer he indulged this rare moment of selfgratification, almost as though to avoid thinking of the most pressing of his problems.
Then he let his eyes drift away across the spreading rooftops of Ladyburg to that new ungainly structure of steel and galvanized sheet iron that rose tall enough to dwarf any other structure in the valley, even the massive fourstorey block of the new Ladyburg Farmers Bank.
The sugar refinery was like some heathen idol, ugly and voracious, crouching at the edge of the neat blocks of planted sugar which stretched away beyond the limit of the eye, carpeting the low rolling hills with waving, moving green that rolled in the wind like the waves of the ocean, planted to feed that eternally hungry structure.
The frown puckered the skin between Sean's eyes at the bridge of his big beaky nose. Where he counted his land in thousands of acres, the man who had once been his son counted his in tens of thousands.
The horse sensed his change of mood and gathered itself, nodding its head extravagantly and skittering a little in the shade, ready to run. Easy, boy, Sean growled at him, and gentled him with a hand on his shoulder.
He waited now for that man, having come early to the rendezvous as was always his way. He liked to be there first and let the other man come to him. It was an old trick, to let the other seem the interloper in established territory, while the waiting man had time to consider and arrange his thoughts, and to study the other as he approached.
He had chosen the place and the time with care. He had not been able to sanction the tough of Dirk Courtney riding on to his land again, and enter his home. The aura of evil that hung around the man was contagious, and he did not want that evil to sully the inner sanctum of his life which was the homestead of Lion Kop. He did not even want him on his land, so he had chosen the one small section of boundary where his land actually bordered on that of Dirk Courtney. It was the only half-mile of any land of Sean's along which he had strung barbed wire.
As a cattleman and horseman, he had an aversion to barbed wire, but still he had strung it between his land and that of Dirk Courtney, and when Dirk had written asking him for this meeting, he had chosen this place where there would be a fence between them.
He had chosen the late afternoon with intent also. The low sun would be behind him and shining into the other man's eyes as he came up the slope of the escarpment.
Now Sean drew the watch from his waistcoat and saw it was one minute before four, the appointed time. He looked down into the valley, and scowled. The slope below him was deserted, and he could follow the full length of the road into town beyond that. Since he had seen young Mark puttering past on his motorcycle half an hour before, the road also had been deserted.
He looked beyond the town to the flash of the white walls of the grand mansion that Dirk Courtney had bult when first he returned to the valley. Great Longwood, a pretentious name for a pretentious building.
Sean did not like to look at it. To him it seemed that the same aura of evil shimmered about it, even in the daylight an almost palpable thing, and he had heard the stories they had been repeated to him with glee by the gossipmongers, about what happened up there under the cover of night.
He believed those stories, or he knew with the deep instinct which had once been love, the man who had once been his son.
He looked again at the watch in his hand, and scowled at it. It was four o'clock. He shook the watch and held it to his ear. It ticked stolidly, and he slipped it back into his pocket and gathered the reins. He wasn't coming, and Sean felt a sneaking coward's relief, because he found any meeting with Dirk Courtney draining and exhausting. Good afternoon, Father, The voice startled him, so that he gripped the horse with his knees and jerked the reins.
The stallion pranced and circled, tossing his head.
Dirk sat easily on a golden red bay. He had come down out of the nearest edge of the forest, walking his mount carefully and silently over the thick mattress of fallen leaves. You're late, growled Sean. I was just leaving. Dirk must have circled out, climbing the escarpment below the falls on to Lion Kop, avoiding the fence and riding up through the plantations to come to the rendezvous from the opposite direction. Probably he had been sitting among the trees watching Sean for the last half hour. What did you want to speak to me about? He must never again underestimate this man. Sean had done so many times before, each time at terrible cost. I think you know, Dirk smiled at him, and Sean was reminded of some beautiful glossy and deadly dangerous animal. He sat his horse with a casual grace, at rest but in complete control, and he was dressed in a hunting-jacket of finely woven thorn-proof tweed, with a yellow silk cravat at the throat; his long powerful legs were encased in polished chocolate leather. Remind me, invited Sean, consciously hardening himself against the fatal mesmeric charm that the man could project at will.
oh come now, I know you have been busy thrashing the sweating unwashed hordes back into their places. I read with pride of your efforts, Father. Your butcher's bill at Fordsburg was almost as fearsome as when you put
