Sunset at Sheba by John Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

his money and carried what he gave me without asking questions. I didn’t know who was getting them.’
    ‘That old fool,’ Polly said heavily. ‘Doing this to a girl. He must have been crackers, using my place. And so must we, not to keep an eye on him, letting ourselves get mixed up with money. You get out of your depth.’ She turned to him again, her face softened into anxiety once more, clearly unable to concentrate on her own worries for her thoughts of him. ‘What’ll you live on, Sammy?’
    He grinned. ‘That’s the least of my troubles,’ he said. ‘There’s plenty of game. That’s one thing. No need to worry about food so long as you’ve got a gun.’
    ‘A gun’s not enough. You’ll need a horse.’
    ‘I’ve got this one. I’ll pick up another in the Sidings for riding. Or mebbe a mule. A mule can work a hoss into the ground. I’ve got plenty of money. Winter gave me plenty.’
    She shrugged. ‘Suits me,’ she said, unconvinced. ‘Sooner it was you than me, though.’
     
     
    By the time they had reached the outskirts of the town, she had forgotten her worries and had picked up a concertina from the back of the cart and was singing softly to herself in a detached way, as though she knew no one was listening to her.
    Then she paused, staring at the little town ahead again with an expression of alarm on her face.
    ‘It’s not my idea of a big city,’ she observed. She studied it for a moment, then shrugged and went on singing, unable to be unhappy for long.
    After a while, however, she turned her attention to Plummerton Sidings again, sitting uncomfortably on the seat beside Sammy, the concertina limp in her hands, staring ahead with an expression of marked distaste.
    It was only a small place, set solidly athwart the old missionary road opened by Moffat and Livingstone and finally Rhodes, its chief reason for existence being the shimmering steel lines that had been run there from Kimberley in 1894, and onwards in the following years to Bulawayo. Its spreading mass of sidings and engine sheds had made it invaluable to the British in the Boer War.
    It had a few hangdog streets, most of them still unpaved, and in the broad dusty area of its square a brand-new garage backed up by the still-necessary livery stables where the rigs stood outside in the sunshine.
    The whole place looked as though it had been scattered carelessly across the veld, for in that vast expanse of land no one had been concerned with saving space when the town grew up, and only near the railway track was there any suggestion of neighbourliness. Beyond the railway line, the dun veld stretched desolately towards the river, a muddy trickle under the iron bridge, the rocks smooth and black in the river bed.
    Sammy let the horse move at its own pace through the streets into the outskirts of the town. Behind the solitary hotel, among the pomegranates and the brick-edged flowerbeds, and the fallen twisted leaves, a dove was moaning heartbrokenly.
    The area round the station seemed emptied of white men in the hot silence of the afternoon. A group of Kaffirs and yellow-faced Hottentots with their peppercorn hair dozed in the shade like bundles of old rags, their heads down on their knees, their dogs as though dead in the dust. A few Indians trying to sell chickens as skinny as themselves stood thin-legged as storks in the sunshine.
    There were soldiers billeted near the station water towers in a shabby warehouse just off the splintery platform, volunteers in raspy grey-back shirts, Bedford cords and spurred brown boots - Dutch and native-born South Africans mostly, with a sprinkling of British and other nationalities -- farmers, clerks, diggers and railwaymen, the men Botha was trying to use against De Wet’s rebels instead of Imperial troops in the hope of keeping the uprising a private quarrel; deeply-burned men, hard-bitten and fined down by hard living to a curious uniformity of countenance. Their horses were huddled together