bedevilled by his impatience and anxiety, lifting his head every dozen
paces to the dirty grey roof of cloud.
The light strengthened and the circle of their vision opened from
six feet to as many yards, to a hundred, so they could make out the tops
of the ivory palms, shaggy against the grey cloud.
Jacque broke into a trot and ahead of them was the end of the clearing
and the beginning of the forest. Two hundred yards beyond rose the
massive pile of the kopie, in the early light looking more than ever
like a castle, turreted and sheer. There was something formidable in its
outline. It seemed to brood above them and Bruce looked away from it
uneasily.
Cold and with enough weight behind it to sting, the first raindrop
splashed against Bruce's cheek.
'Oh, no!' he protested, and stopped. Jacque straightened up from the
spoor and he too looked at the sky.
'It is finished. In five minutes there will be nothing to follow.'
Another drop hit Bruce's upturned face and he blinked back the tears of
anger and frustration that pricked the rims of his eyelids.
Faster now, tapping on his helmet, plopping on to his shoulders and
face, the rain fell.
Quickly,' cried Bruce. 'Follow as long as you can.' Jacque opened his
mouth to speak, but before a word came out he was flung-backwards,
punched over as though by an invisible fist, his helmet flying from his
head as he fell and his rifle clattering on the earth.
Simultaneously Bruce felt the bullet pass him, disrupting the air, so
the wind of it flattened his shirt against his chest, cracking viciously
in his ears, leaving him dazedly looking down at Sergeant
Jacque's body.
It lay with arms thrown wide, the jaw and the side of the head below the
ear torn away; white bone and blood bubbling over it. The trunk twitched
convulsively and the hands fluttered like trapped birds.
Then flat-sounding through the rain he heard the report of the rifle.
The kopje, screamed Bruce's brain, he's lying in the kopie!
And Bruce moved, twisting sideways, starting to run.
Wally Hendry lay on his stomach on the flat top of the turret. His body
was stiff and chilled from the cold of the night and the rock was harsh
under him, but the discomfort hardly penetrated the fringe of his mind.
He had built a low parapet with loose flakes of granite, and he had
screened the front of it with the thick bushy stems of broom bush.
His rifle was propped on the parapet in front of him and at his elbow
were the spare ammunition clips.
He had lain in this ambush for a long time now - since early the
preceding afternoon. Now it was dawn and the darkness was drawing back;
in a few minutes he would be able to see the whole of the clearing below
him.
I coulda been across the river already, he thought, coulda been fifty
miles away. He did not attempt to analyse the impulse that had made him
lie here unmoving for almost twenty hours.
Man, I knew old Curry would have to come. I knew he would only bring one
nigger tracker with him. These educated Johnnies got their own rules -
