forest. It was light enough to read the dial of his wristwatch. Twenty
minutes to five.
'Get them moving, Ruffy. If we make Msapa Junction before dark we can
drive through the night. Home for breakfast tomorrow.'
'Now you're talking, boss.' Ruffy clapped his helmet on to his head and
went off to rouse the men who lay in the road beside the trucks.
Shermaine was asleep. Bruce leaned into the window of the Ford and
studied her face. A wisp of hair lay over her mouth, rising and falling
with her breathing. It tickled her nose and in her sleep it twitched
like a rabbit.
Bruce felt an almost unbearable pang of tenderness towards her.
With one finger he lifted the hair off her face.
Then he smiled at himself If you can feel like this before breakfast,
then you've got it in a bad way, he told himself.
Do you know something, he retorted. I like the feeling.
'Hey, you lazy wench!' He pulled the lobe of her ear.
'Time to wake up.' It was almost half past five before the convoy got
under way. It had taken that long to bully and cajole the sleep out of
sixty men and get them into the lorries. This morning Bruce did not find
the delay unbearable. He had managed to find time for four hours' sleep
during the night. Four hours was not nearly enough to make up for the
previous two days.
Now he felt light-headed, a certain unreal quality of gaiety overlaying
his exhaustion, a carnival spirit. There was no longer the same urgency,
for the road to Elisabethville was clear and not too long. Home for
breakfast tomorrow!
'We'll be at the bridge in a little under an hour.' He glanced
sideways at Shermaine.
'You've left a guard on it?'
'Ten men,' answered Bruce. 'We'll pick them up almost without stopping,
and then the next stop, room 201, Grand Hotel Leopold II, Avenue du
Kasai.' He grinned in anticipation.
'A bath so deep it will slop over on to the floor, so hot it will take
five minutes to get into it. Clean clothes. A steak that thick, with
French salad and a bottle of Liebfraumilch.'
'For breakfast!' protested
Shermaine.
'For breakfast,' Bruce agreed happily. He was silent for a while,
savouring the idea. The road ahead of him was tiger-striped with the
shadows of the trees thrown by the low sun. The air that blew in through
the missing windscreen was cool and clean-smelling. He felt good. The
responsibility of command lay lightly on his shoulders this
morning; a pretty girl beside him, a golden morning, the horror of the
last few days half-forgotten, - they might have been going on a picnic.
'What are you thinking?' he asked suddenly. She was very quiet beside
him.
'I was wondering about the future,' she answered softly.
'There is no one I know in Elisabethville, and I do not wish to stay
there.' 'Will you return to Brussels?' he asked. The question was
