CHAPTER XXIII
IN THE DRIFT OF THE VAAL
The day had been intensely hot, and our travellers sat in the shade of
the cart overpowered and gasping. During the afternoon a faint breeze
blew, but this had now died away, and the stifling air felt as thick
as though they were breathing cream. Even the two Boers seemed to feel
the heat, for they lay outstretched on the grass a few paces to the
left, to all appearance fast asleep. As for the horses, they were
thoroughly done up--too much so to eat--and hobbled along as well as
their knee-halters would allow, daintily picking a mouthful here and a
mouthful there. The only person who did not seem to mind was the Zulu
Mouti, who sat on an ant-heap near the horses, in full glare of the
setting sun, and comfortably droned out a little song of his own
invention, for Zulus seem as clever at improvising as are the
Italians.
"Have another egg, Jess?" said John. "It will do you good."
"No, thank you; the last one stuck in my throat. It is impossible to
eat in this heat."
"You had better. Goodness knows when and where we shall stop again. I
can get nothing out of our delightful escort; either they don't know
or they won't say."
"I can't, John. There is a thunderstorm coming up. I feel it in my
head, and I can never eat before a thunderstorm--and when I am tired,"
she added by an afterthought.
After that the conversation flagged for a while.
"John," said Jess at last, "where do you suppose we are going to camp
to-night? If we follow the main road we shall reach Standerton in an
hour."
"I don't think that they will go near Standerton," he answered, "I
suppose that we shall cross the Vaal by another drift and have to
'veldt' it."
Just then the two Boers woke up and began to talk earnestly together,
as though they were debating something hotly.
Slowly the huge red ball of the sun sank towards the horizon, steeping
the earth and sky in blood. About a hundred yards from where they sat
the little bridle path that branched from the main road crossed the
crest of one of the great landwaves which rolled away in every
direction towards the far horizon. John watched the sun sinking behind
it till something called off his attention for a minute. When he
looked up again there was a figure on horseback, standing quite still
upon the crest of the ridge, and in full glow of the now disappearing
sun. It was Frank Muller. John recognised him in a moment. His horse
was halted sideways, so that even at that distance every line of his
features, and even the trigger-guard of the rifle which rested on his
knee, showed distinctly against the background of smoky red. Nor was
that all. Both he and his horse had the appearance of being absolutely
on fire. The effect produced was so wild and extraordinary that John
called his companion's attention to it. Jess looked and shuddered
involuntarily.
"He looks like a devil in hell," she said; "the fire seems to be
running all up and down him."
"Well," said John, "he is certainly a devil, but I am sorry to say
that he has not yet reached his destination. Here he comes, like a
whirlwind."
In another twenty seconds Muller had reined the great black horse on
to his haunches alongside of them, and was smiling sweetly and taking
off his hat.
"You see I have managed to keep my word," he said. "I can tell you
that I had great difficulty in doing so; indeed I was nearly obliged
to give the thing up at the last moment. However, here I am."
"Where are we to outspan to-night?" asked Jess. "At Standerton?"
"No," he said; "I am afraid that is more than I could manage for you,
unless you can persuade the English officers there to surrender. What
I have arranged is, that we should cross the Vaal at a drift I know of
about two hours (twelve miles) from here, and outspan at a farm on the
other side. Do not trouble, I assure you you shall both sleep well
to-night," and he smiled, a somewhat terrifying smile, as Jess
thought.
"But how about this drift, Mr. Muller?" said John. "Is it safe? I
should have thought the Vaal would have been in flood after all the
rain that we have had."
"The drift is perfectly safe, Captain Niel. I crossed it myself about
two hours ago. I know you have a bad opinion of me, but I suppose you
do not think that I would guide you to an unsafe drift?" Then with
another bow he rode on to speak to the two Boers, saying, as he went,
"Will you tell the Kafir to put the horses in?"
With a shrug of the shoulders John rose and went to Mouti, to help him
to drive up the four greys, which were now standing limply together,
biting at the flies, that, before a storm, sting more sharply than at
any other time. The two horses belonging to the escort were some fifty
paces to the left. It was as though they appreciated the position of
affairs, and declined to mix with the animals of the discredited
Englishman.
The Boers rose as Muller came and walked towards their horses, Muller
slowly following them. As they drew near, the horses hobbled away for
twenty or thirty yards. Then they lifted up their heads, and, as a
consequence, their forelegs, to which the heads were tied, and stood
looking defiantly at their captors, just as though they were trying to
make up their minds whether or not to shake hands with them.
Frank Muller was alongside the two men now, and they were alongside
the horses.
"Listen!" he said sternly.
The men looked up.
"Go on loosening the reims, and listen."
They obeyed, and slowly began to fumble at the knee-halters.
"You understand what our orders are. Repeat them--you!"
The man with the tooth, who was addressed, still handling the reim,
began as follows: "To take the two prisoners to the Vaal, to force
them into the water where there is no drift, at night, so that they
drown: if they do not drown, to shoot them."
"Those are the orders," said the Vilderbeeste, grinning.
"You understand them?"
"We understand, /Meinheer/; but, forgive us, the matter is a big one.
You have the orders--we wish to see the authority."
"Yah, yah," said the other, "show us the authority. These are two
harmless people enough. Show us the authority for killing them. People
must not be killed so, even if they are English folk, without proper
authority, especially when one is a pretty girl who would do for a
man's wife."
Frank Muller set his teeth. "Nice fellows you are to have under one!"
he said. "I am your officer; what other authority do you want? But I
thought of this. See here!" and he drew a paper from his pocket.
"Here, you--read it! Careful now--do not let them see from the
waggon."
The big flabby-faced man took the paper and, still bending down over
the horse's knee, read aloud:
"The two prisoners and their servant (an Englishman, an English girl,
and a Zulu Kafir) to be executed in pursuance of our decree, as your
commanding officer shall order, as enemies to the Republic. For so
doing this shall be your warrant."
"You see the signature," said Muller, "and you do not dispute it?"
"Yah, we see it, and we do not dispute it."
"Good. Give me back the warrant."
The man with the tooth was about to obey when his companion
interposed.
"No," he said, "the warrant must remain with us. I do not like the
job. If it were only the man and the Kafir now--but the girl, the
girl! If we give you back the warrant, what shall we have to show for
the deed of blood? The warrant must remain with us."
"Yah, yah, he is right," said the Unicorn; "the warrant must remain
with us. Put it in your pocket, Jan."
"Curse you, give it me!" said Muller between his teeth.
"No, Frank Muller, no!" answered the Vilderbeeste, patting his pocket,
while the two or three square inches of skin round his nose wrinkled
up in a hairy grin that, owing to the cut on his head, was even more
curious than usual. "If you wish to have the warrant you shall have
it, but then we shall up-saddle and go, and you can do your murdering
yourself. There, there! take your choice; we shall be glad enough to
get home, for we do not care for the job. If I go out shooting I like
to shoot buck or Kafirs, not white people."
Frank Muller reflected a moment, then he laughed a little.
"You are funny folk, you home-bred Boers," he said; "but perhaps you
are right. After all, what does it matter who keeps the warrant,
provided that the thing is well done? Mind that there is no bungling,
that is all."
"Yah, yah," said the fat-faced man, "you can trust us for that. It
won't be the first that we have toppled over. If I have my warrant I
ask nothing better than to go on shooting Englishmen all night, one
down the other come on. I know no prettier sight than an Englishman
toppling over."
"Stop that talk and saddle up, the cart is waiting. You fools can
never understand the difference between killing when it is necessary
to kill and killing for killing's sake. These people must die because
they have betrayed the land."
"Yah, yah," said the Vilderbeeste, "betrayed the land; we have heard
that before. Those who betray the land must manure it; that is a good
rule!" and he laughed and passed on.
Frank Muller watched his retreating form with a smile of peculiar
malignity on his handsome face. "Ah, my friend," he said to himself in
Dutch, "you and that warrant will part company before you are many
hours older. Why, it would be enough to hang me, even in this happy
land of patriots. Old ---- would never forgive even me for taking that
little liberty with his name. Dear me, what a lot of trouble it is to
be rid of a single enemy! Well, it must be done, and Bessie is well
worth the pains; but if it had not been for this war I could never
have managed it. Yes! I did well to give my voice for war. I am sorry
for the girl Jess, but it is necessary; there must be no living
witnesses left. Ah! we are going to have a storm. So much the better.
Such deeds are best done in a storm."
Muller was right; the storm was coming up fast, throwing a veil of
inky cloud across the star-spangled sky. In South Africa there is but
little twilight, and the darkness follows hard upon the heels of the
day. No sooner had the angry ball of the setting sun disappeared than
the night swept with all her stars across the sky. And now after her
came the great storm, covering up her beauty with his blackness. The
air was stiflingly hot. Above was a starry space, to the east the
black bosom of the storm, in which the lightnings were already playing
with an incessant flickering movement, and to the west a deep red
glow, reflected from the sunken sun, yet lingered on the horizon.
On toiled the horses through the gathering gloom. Fortunately, the
road was almost level and free from mud-holes, and Frank Muller rode
just ahead to show the way, his strong athletic form standing out
clearly against the departing western glow. Silent was the earth,
silent as death. No bird or beast, no blade of grass or breath of air
stirred upon its surface. The only sign of life was the continual
flickering of those awful tongues of light as they licked the lips of
the storm. On for mile after mile, on through the desolation! They
were not far from the river now, and could hear the distant growling
of the thunder, echoing down it solemnly.
It was an awful night. Great pillars of mud-coloured cloud came
creeping across the surface of the veldt towards them, seemingly blown
along without a wind. Now, too, a ghastly-looking ringed moon arose
throwing an unholy and distorted light upon the blackness that seemed
to shudder in her rays as though with a prescience of the advancing
terror. On crept the mud-coloured columns, and on above them, and
resting on them, came the muttering storm. The cart was quite close to
the river now, and they could distinguish the murmur of its waters. To
their left stood a koppie, covered with white, slab-like stones, on
which the sickly moonbeams danced.
"Look, John, look!" cried Jess with an hysterical laugh; "it is like a
huge graveyard, and the dark shadows between are the ghosts of the
buried."
"Nonsense," said John sternly; "why do you talk such rubbish?"
He felt that her mind had lost its balance, and, what is more, his own
nerves were shaken. Therefore he was naturally the angrier with her,
and the more determined to be perfectly matter-of-fact.
Jess made no answer, but she was frightened, she could not tell why.
The scene resembled that of some awful dream, or of one of Dore's
pictures come to life. No doubt, also, the near presence of the
tempest exercised a physical effect upon her. Even the wearied horses
snorted and shook themselves uneasily.
They crept over the ridge of a wave of land, and the wheels rolled
softly on the grass.
"Why, we are off the road!" shouted John to Muller, who was still
guiding them, fifteen or twenty paces ahead.
"All right! all right! it is a short cut to the ford!" he called in
answer, and his voice rang strange and hollow through the great depths
of the silence.
Below them, a hundred yards away, the light, such as it was, gleamed
faintly upon the wide surface of the river. Another five minutes and
they were on the bank, but in the gathering doom they could not see
the opposite shore.
"Turn to the left!" shouted Muller; "the ford is a few yards up. It is
too deep here for the horses."
John turned accordingly, and followed Muller's horse some three
hundred yards up the bank till they came to a spot where the water ran
with an angry music, and there was a great swirl of eddies.
"Here is the place," said Muller; "you must make haste through. The
house is just the other side, and it will be better to get there
before the tempest breaks."
"It is all very well," said John, "but I cannot see an inch before me;
I don't know where to drive."
"Drive straight ahead; the water is not more than three feet deep, and
there are no rocks."
"I am not going, and that is all about it."
"You must go, Captain Niel. You cannot stop here, and if you can we
will not. Look there, man!" and he pointed to the east, which now
presented a truly awful and magnificent sight.
Down, right on to them, its centre bowed out like the belly of a sail
by the weight of the wind behind, swept the great storm-cloud, while
over all its surface the lightning played unceasingly, appearing and
disappearing in needles of fire, and twisting and writhing serpentwise
round and about its outer edges. So brilliant was the intermittent
light that it appeared to fire the revolving pillars of mud-coloured
cloud beneath, and gave ghastly peeps of river and bank and plain,
miles upon miles away. But perhaps its most awful circumstance was the
preternatural silence. The distant boom and muttering of thunder had
died away, and now the great storm swept on in voiceless majesty, like
the passage of a ghostly host, from which there arose no sound of feet
or of rolling wheels. Only before it sped the swift angels of the
wind, and behind it swung the curtain of the rain.
Even as Muller spoke a gust of icy air caught the cart and tilted it,
and the lightning needles began to ply more dreadfully than ever. The
tempest was breaking upon them.
"Come, drive on, drive on!" he shouted, "you will be killed here; the
lightning always strikes along the water;" and as he said it he struck
one of the wheelers sharply with his whip.
"Climb over the back of the seat, Mouti, and stand by to help me with
the reins!" called out John to the Zulu, who obeyed, scrambling
between him and Jess.
"Now, Jess, hold on and say your prayers, for it strikes me that we
shall have need of them. So, horses, so!"
The horses backed and plunged, but Muller on the one side and the
smooth-faced Boer on the other lashed them without mercy, and at last
they went into the river with a rush. The gust had passed now, and for
a few moments the heavy quiet was renewed, except for the whirl of the
water and the snake-like hiss of the coming rain.
For some yards, ten or fifteen perhaps, all went well, and then John
discovered suddenly that they were driving into deep water; the two
leaders were evidently almost off their legs, and could scarcely stand
against the current of the flooded river.
"Damn you!" he shouted back, "there is no drift here."
"Go on, go on, it is quite safe!" came Muller's voice in answer.
John said no more, but, putting out all his strength, he tried to drag
the horses round. Jess turned herself on the seat to look, and just
then a blaze of lightning flamed which revealed Muller and his two
companions standing dismounted on the bank, the muzzles of their
rifles pointing straight at the cart.
"O God!" she screamed, "they are going to shoot us."
Even as the words passed her lips three tongues of fire flared from
the rifles' mouths, and the Zulu Mouti, sitting by her side, pitched
heavily forward on to his head into the bottom of the cart, while one
of the wheelers reared straight up into the air with a shriek of
agony, and fell with a splash into the river.
Then followed a scene of horror indescribable. Overhead the storm
burst in fury, and flash after flash of fork, or rather chain
lightning, leapt into the river. The thunder, too, began to crack like
the trump of doom; the wind rushed down, tearing the surface of the
water into foam, and, catching under the tent of the cart, lifted it
quite off the wheels, so that it began to float. Then the two leaders,
made mad with fear by the fury of the storm and the dying struggles of
the off-wheeler, plunged and tore at the traces till at last they rent
themselves loose and vanished between the darkness overhead and the
boiling water beneath. Away floated the cart, now touching the bottom
and now riding on the river like a boat, oscillating this way and
that, and slowly turning round and round. With it floated the dead
horse, dragging down the other wheeler beneath the water. It was awful
to see his struggles in the glare of the lightning, but at last he
sank and choked.
Meanwhile, sounding sharply and clearly through the din and hubbub of
the storm, came the cracking of the three rifles whenever the flashes
showed the position of the cart to the murderers on the bank. Mouti
was lying still in the bottom of it on the bed-plank, a bullet between
his broad shoulders and another in his skull: but John felt that his
life was yet whole in him, though something had hissed past his face
and stung it. Instinctively he reached across the cart and drew Jess
on to his knee, and cowered over her, thinking dimly that perhaps his
body would protect her from the bullets.
/Rip! rip!/ through the wood and canvas; /phut! phut!/ through the
air; but some merciful power protected them, and though one cut John's
coat and two passed through the skirt of Jess's dress, not a bullet
struck them. Very soon the shooting began to grow wild, then that
dense veil of rain came down and wrapped them so closely that even the
lightning could not reveal their whereabouts to the assassins on the
bank.
"Stop shooting," said Frank Muller; "the cart has sunk, and there is
an end of them. No human being can have lived through that fire and
the Vaal in flood."
The two Boers ceased firing, and the Unicorn shook his head softly and
remarked to his companion that the damned English people in the water
could not be much wetter than they were on the bank. It was a curious
thing to say at such a moment, but probably the spirit which caused
the remark was not so much callousness as that which animated
Cromwell, who flipped the ink in his neighbour's face when he signed
the death-warrant of his king.
The Vilderbeeste made no reply. His conscience was oppressed; he had a
touch of imagination. He thought of the soft fingers which had bound
up his head that morning: the handkerchief--her handkerchief!--was
still around it. Now those fingers would be gripping at the slippery
stones of the Vaal in a struggle for life, or more probably they were
already limp in death, with little grains of gravel sticking beneath
the nails. It was a painful thought, but he consoled himself by
remembering the warrant, also by the reflection that whoever had shot
the people he had not, for he had been careful to fire wide of the
cart every time.
Muller was also thinking of the warrant which he had forged. He must
get it back somehow, even if----
"Let us take shelter under the shore. There is a flat place, about
fifty yards up, where the bank hangs down. This rain is drowning us.
We can't up-saddle till it clears. I must have a nip of brandy, too.
Almighty! I can see that girl's face still! the lightning shone on it
just as I shot. Well, she will be in heaven now, poor thing, if
English people ever go to heaven."
It was the Unicorn who spoke, and the Vilderbeeste made no reply, but
advanced with him to where the horses stood. They caught the patient
brutes that were waiting for their masters, their heads well down and
the water streaming from their flanks, and led them along with them.
Frank Muller stood by his own horse still thinking, and watched them
vanish into the gloom. How was he to win that warrant back without
dying his hands even redder than they were?
As he thought an answer came. For at that moment, accompanied by a
fearful thunderclap, there shot from the storm overhead, which had now
nearly passed away, one of those awful flashes that sometimes end an
African tempest. It lit up the scene with a light vivid as that of
day, and in the white heart of it Muller saw his two companions in
crime and their horses as the great king saw the men in the furnace.
They were about forty paces from him on the crest of the bank. He saw
them, one moment erect; the next--men and horses falling this way and
that prone to the earth. Then it was dark again.
Muller staggered with the shock, and when it had passed he rushed to
the spot, calling the men by name; but no answer came except the echo
of his voice. He was there alone now, and the moonlight began to
struggle faintly through the rain. Its pale beams lit upon two
outstretched forms--one lying on its back, its distorted features
gazing up to heaven, the other on its face. By them, the legs of the
nearer sticking straight into the air, lay the horses. They had all
gone to their account. The lightning had killed them, as it kills many
a man in Africa.
Frank Muller looked; then, forgetting about the warrant and everything
else in the horror of what he took to be a visible judgment, he rushed
to his horse and galloped wildly away, pursued by all the terrors of
hell.
