Men of Men by Wilbur Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

Alice Danby stood bareheaded beside her husband. It was evident by her drawn grey features that she had not slept either.
    ‘Sell them,’ she said. ‘I cannot stay here another day. Sell them, sell everything – let’s go, Jock, let’s get away from this dreadful place. I cannot bear to
spend another night here.’
    T he mining commissioner was a dour little magistrate appointed by President Brand of the fledgling Boer Free State, who laid claim to the
diggings.
    Brand was not the only one to have done so. Old Waterboer, the chief of the Griqua Bastaards, made cross claim to the arid plains where his people had lived for fifty years and more. In London,
Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, had only just awakened to the potential wealth of the diamond diggings, and for the first time was listening attentively to the pleas of the
Imperialists to support old Nicholaas Waterboer’s claim and take Griqualand into the sphere of British influence.
    In the meantime the Free State mining commissioner was trying, with only qualified success, to maintain some order over the unruly diggers. Just as his roadways were crumbling into the
surrounding pits on Colesberg kopje, so his authority was eroding before the onrush of events with the gathering of national interests and the emergence from obscurity of the first powerful figures
as the financial aristocracy of the fields.
    Zouga and Jock Danby found the commissioner bewailing his task over a liquid breakfast in the bar of the London Hotel and, supporting him by each elbow, they escorted him back across Market
Square to his office.
    By mid-morning that day, the commissioner had copied the details of the Devil’s Own, claim Nos 141 and 142 held under perpetual quit-rent letter, from J. A. Danby, Esq. to Major M. Z.
Ballantyne, and noted payment in full in the sum of £2,000 by cheque drawn on the Standard Bank.
    An hour after noon, Zouga stood at the corner of Market Square, and watched the cart piled high with the green velvet armchairs and the brass bedstead pull away towards the northern corner of
the square. Jock Danby led the team, and his wife sat thin and erect upon the load. Neither of them looked back at Zouga, and the moment they disappeared into the maze of narrow alleys and shanties
Zouga turned towards the kopje.
    Despite the night of sleep that he had missed, he felt no fatigue, and his step was so light that he almost ran out along the narrow causeway that intersected the jumble of claims and
workings.
    The Devil’s Own were deserted, two forlorn patches of raw yellow earth, neatly squared off and littered with abandoned equipment. Jock Danby’s black workers had gone, for there was
always a desperate shortage of labourers on the diggings. When Jock had not mustered them the previous dawn they had simply wandered away to take daily hire with one of the other diggers.
    Most of the mining gear left on the claims seemed worn out, the buckets on the point of bursting and the ropes furry as fat yellow caterpillars. Zouga would not trust them with his own
weight.
    Gingerly he climbed down the swaying ladder, his cautious movements alerting the diggers on the neighbouring claims that he was an outsider.
    ‘Those are Jock Danby’s briefies, man,’ one of them shouted a challenge. ‘You breaking the diggers’ law. That’s private ground. You better clear out –
and bloody quick, at that.’
    ‘I bought Jock out,’ Zouga shouted back. ‘He left town an hour ago.’
    ‘How do I know that?’
    ‘Why don’t you go up to the commissioner’s office?’ Zouga asked. The challenger scowled up at him uncertainly, the level of his claim twenty feet below the Devil’s
Own.
    Men had stopped work along the length of the irregular pit, others had lined the causeway high above, and there was an ugly mood on all of them – that was broken by a clear young voice
speaking in the cadence and intonation of a refined English gentleman.
    ‘Major