'Have you any?'
'Sure.' Ruffy called to one of the gendarmes and the man climbed down
into the coach and came back with half a dozen bottles. Ruffy opened two
with his teeth. Each time half the contents frothed out and splattered
back along the wooden side of the coach.
'This beer's as wild as an angry woman,' he grunted as he passed a bottle
to Bruce.
'It's wet anyway.' Bruce tasted it, warm and gassy and too sweet.
'Here': how! said Ruffy.
Bruce looked down into the open trucks at the gendarmes who were
settling in for the journey. Apart from the gunners at the Brens, they
were lying or squatting in attitudes of complete relaxation and most of
them had stripped down to their underwear. One skinny little fellow was
already asleep on his back with his helmet as ! pillow and the tropical
sun beating into his face.
Bruce finished his beer and threw the bottle overboard.
Ruff opened another and placed it in his hand without comment.
'Why we going so slowly, boss?'
'I told the driver to keep the speed down - give us a chance to stop if
the tracks have been torn up.'
'Yeah. Them Balubas might have done that - they're mad Arabs all of
them.' The warm beer drunk in the sun was having a soothing effect on
bruce. He felt at peace, now, withdrawn from the need to make decisions,
to participate in the life around him.
'Listen to that train-talk,' said Ruffy, and Bruce focused his hearing,
on the clicketv-chock of the crossties.
'Yes, I know. You can make it say anything you want it to,' agreed
Bruce.
'And it can sing,' Ruffy went on. 'It's got real music in it, like
this.' He inflated the great barrel of his chest, lifted his head and
let it come.
His voice was deep but with a resonance that caught the attention
of the men in the open trucks below them. Those who had been sprawled in
the amorphous shapes of sleep stirred and sat up. Another voice joined
in humming the tune, hesitantly at first, then more confidently; then
others took it up, the words were unimportant, it was the rhythm that
they could not resist. They had sung together many times before and like
a well-trained choir each voice found its place, the star performers
leading, changing the pace, improvising, quickening until the original
tune lost its identity and became one of the tribal chants. Bruce
recognize it as a planting song. It was one of his
favourites and he sat drinking his lukewarm beer and letting the
singing wash round him, build up into the chorus like storm waves, then
fall back into a tenor solo before rising once more.
And the train ran on-through the sunlight towards the rain clouds in the
north.
Presently Andre came out of the coach below him and picked his way
forward through the men in the trucks until he reached Hendry. The two
of them stood together, Andre's face turned up towards the taller man
