horses, slipped the tether and led them over the hot ash into the shelter of the walls. From the saddlebag he took a fresh bandolier of ammunition and slung it over his other shoulder, crisscrossing his chest like a Mexican bandit, and muttering to himself.
'All right, you black bastards, let's burn some powder.' One corner of the stone wall had collapsed where the unbaked Kimberley brick had not been able to withstand the heat. The opening was jagged, it would break the silhouette of his head and the rear wall would prevent back lighting. Carefully he peered out over the bloody ground.
They were well concealed, probably in the bush above the mine shaft.
Then with a start of surprise he realized that the mouth of the adit shaft had been barricaded, it was blocked with baulks of timber and what looked like sacks of maize.
They were in the mine shaft but that didn't make sense, he puzzled. Yet it was confirmed immediately. There was a vague shadowy movement beyond the barricade in the throat of the shaft, and another bullet sang off the lip of the wall under Ralph's nose, blinding him with brick dust.
He ducked down, and wiped his swimming eyes. Then he filled his lungs and bellowed.
'Harry! Harry Mellow!' There was silence, even the vultures and the jackals quieted by the shocking burst of gunfire.
'Harry it's me, Ralph.' There was a faint answering shout, and Ralph jumped up, vaulted over the broken wall and ran towards the shaft. Harry Mellow was racing towards him, jumping over the piles of dead Matabele, a wide grin on his face. They met halfway, and embraced with the violence of relief, wordlessly pounding each other's backs, and then before he could speak, Ralph looked over the big American's shoulder.
Other figures had emerged from behind the rude barricade. Vicky dressed in men's breeches and shirt, with a rifle in her hand and coppery hair tangled around her shoulders. At her side Isazi, the diminutive Zulu driver, and another even smaller figure ran ahead of them both. The child ran with both arms pumping, and face screwed up.
Ralph caught him up and hugged him to his chest, pressing his haggard unshaven cheek against the boy's velvet skin.
'Jonathan,' he croaked, and then his voice failed. The feel of the child's warm little body, and the milky puppy smell of his sweat was almost too painful to be borne.
'Daddy.' jon jon pulled back his head, and his face was pale and stricken.
'I couldn't look after Mummy. She wouldn't let me.' 'That's all right, Jon-Jon,' Ralph whispered. 'You did your best. And then he was crying. The terrible dry hacking sobs of a man driven to the far frontiers of his love. he hated to let the child out of his arms for a moment, Ralph sent Jonathan to help Isazi feed the horses at the entrance to the shaft. Then he drew Vicky and Harry Mellow aside and in the gloom of the tunnel where they could not see his face, he told them simply.
'Cathy is dead.' 'How?' Harry broke the stunned silence. 'How did she die?'.
'Badly,' Ralph told them. 'Very badly. I don't want to say any more.' Harry held Vicky while she wept and when her first sharp grief was over, Ralph went on, 'We can't stay here. We have a choice, the railhead or Bulawayo.' 'Bulawayo may be burned and sacked by now,' Harry pointed out.
'And there may be an impi between here and the railhead,' said Ralph. 'But if Vicky wants to try and reach the railhead, we can send her and Jon-Jon south on the first train that gets through.' 'Then?'
Harry asked. 'What then?' 'Then I am riding to Bulawayo. If they are still alive, then they'll want fighting men to stay that way.'
'Vicky?'
Harry hugged his wife.
'My mother and my family are at Bulawayo. This is the land of my birth I'm not running away.' She wiped the wetness off her cheeks with her thumbs. 'I'm coming with you to Bulawayo.' Ralph nodded. He would have been surprised if she had agreed to go south.
'We will ride as soon as we have eaten.' They took the wagon road northwards and it was a dismal route. The derelict wagons abandoned during the rinderpest were as regular as milestones. The wagon canvas was already rotted to tatters, the cargoes looted, and scattered on the grass, shattered cases and broken boxes and rusting tins. In the traces of some of the wagons the mummified remains of the oxen lay where they had fallen, heads twisted back in the convulsions that had killed them.
Then at intervals they came upon death and destruction that was fresher and more poignant. One of the Zeederbergs' express coaches in the middle of the track, with the mules speared to death and, festooned from the branches of a thorn-tree, the disembowelled bodies of the driver and his passengers.
At the drift of the Inyati river the blackened walls of the trading-post was all that were left standing. Here there was a macabre twist to the usual mutilation of the dead. The naked bodies of the Greek shopkeeper's wife and her three daughters had been laid in a neat row in the front yard with the shafts of the knobkerries thrust up into their private parts. The shopkeeper himself had been beheaded, and his trunk thrown onto the fire. His head, fixed on an assegai, leered at them in the centre of the road. Ralph covered Jon Jon face with his coat, and held him close as they rode past.
Ralph sent Isazi ahead to scout the drift and he found it defended. Ralph closed up the little party and they took it at a gallop, catching the dozen or so Matebele amadoda by surprise, shooting four of them down as they ran to their weapons, and thundering up the far bank together in the dust and gunsmoke. They were not followed, though Ralph, hoping they might be, turned back and lay in ambush beside the road.
Ralph held Jonathan in his lap during the night, starting awake every few minutes from nightmares in which Cathy screamed and pleaded for mercy. In the dawn he found that without realizing it, he had taken the mole-skin headband from his jacket and held it balled in his fist. He put it back in his pocket and buttoned the flap, as though it was something rare and precious.
They rode on northwards all that day, past the little one-man gold mines and the homesteads where men and their families had begun to carve a life out of the wilderness. Some of them had been taken completely by surprise. They were still clad in the remnants of their night-clothes. One little boy even clutched his teddy bear while his dead mother reached out to him with fingers that did not quite touch his sodden curls.
Others had sold their lives dearly, and the dead Matabele were flung like wood chips from a sawmill in a wide circle around the burned-out homesteads. Once they found dead amadoda but no white bodies. There were tracks of horses and a vehicle heading out northwards.
'The Andersons. They got away,' Ralph said. 'Please God, they are in Bulawayo by now.' Vicky wanted to take the old wagon road, past Khami Mission, but Ralph would not do so.
'If they are there, it's too late. You've seen enough. If they got away, we'll find them in Bulawayo.' So they rode into the town of Bulawayo in the early morning of the third day. The barricades opened to let them pass into the huge central laager in the town square, and the townspeople thronged around the horses, shouting questions.
'Are the soldiers coming?' 'When are the soldiers coming?' 'Did you see my brother? He was at the Antelope Mine-' 'Have you any news?'
When she saw Robyn waving to her from the top of one of the wagons in the market square, Vicky wept again for the first time since leaving the Harkness Mine. Elizabeth jumped down from the wagon and pushed her way through the crowd to Ralph's horse.
'Cathy?' she asked.
Ralph shook his head and saw his own sorrow reflected in her clear dark honey-coloured eyes. Elizabeth reached up and lifted Jon Jon down from the front of the saddle.
'I'll look after him, Ralph,' she said softly.
The family was installed in a corner of the central laager. Under Robyn's and Louise's direction, the single wagon had been turned into a crowded but adequate home.
On the first day of the rising, Louise and Jan Cheroot, the little Hottentot, had brought the wagon in from King's Lynn. One of the survivors from the Matabele attack at Victoria Mine had galloped past the homestead, shouting a barely coherent warning as he went by.
Louise and Jan Cheroot, already alerted by the desertion of the Matabele labourers and servants, had taken time to pack the wagon with a load of essentials, tinned food and blankets and ammunition, and they had driven into Bulawayo, Jan Cheroot handling the traces, and Louise sitting on top of the load with a rifle in her hands. Twice they had seen small war parties of Matabele at a distance, but a few warning shots had kept them there, and they reached the town amongst the very first refugees.
Thus the family did not have to rely on the charity of the townsfolk, like so many others who had arrived in Bulawayo with only a lathered horse and an empty rifle.
Robyn had set up a clinic under a canvas awning beside the wagon and had been asked by the Siege Committee to supervise the health and sanitation of the laager. While Louise had quite naturally taken charge of the other women in the laager, setting up a system by which all food stocks and other essential supplies were pooled and rationed, delegating the care of the halfdozen orphans to foster mothers, and organizing the other activities, from an entertainment committee, to lessons in loading ammunition and handling firearms for those gentlewomen who did not already have those
