Sunset at Sheba (20 page)

Helped by a couple of troopers, Kitto and Romanis laid Plummer in the shade of the Daimler and placed a blanket over him, then Kitto straightened up and stared at the slope.

The troopers nearby watched him, their faces hard and unemotional. They could all of them feel the atmosphere changing. The thing had grown, the excitement of it feeding on itself until it was suddenly completely out of hand.

Originally, it had been merely a chase, but anger and frustration and finally murder had swollen it like the ugly body of a leech, until the desire to capture had become a desire for retaliation, and Kitto’s wish to achieve success had become in all of them a lust to kill.

Kitto’s thin face was hard as he glanced round at the group of men. Then he slapped his boot with the riding crop. ‘We’ll attend to the murderer first,’ he announced. ‘There’ll be no stopping now until he lies here with Offy Plummer.’

Polly had watched Plummer stand spread-eagled, his arms outstretched as though in an appeal against fate. She had watched with horror each of the stiff-legged steps backwards until he had disappeared, crucified against the sky, over the edge of the rock and crashed to the earth below.

Sammy had made no attempt to fire again but his face had grown tight and thin and there was a muscle twitching at the edge of his jaw.

‘You’ve shot Mr Plummer,’ Polly breathed.

For a while, neither of them spoke again as they watched the movement below, then Polly put into words a last faint hope she still harboured in her mind.

‘You didn’t kill him, did you?’

Sammy nodded without speaking, and she knew then there could be no doubt. He had waited until Plummer had stepped within range. There on the rock, near where Plummer’s white hat had fallen she could see the spot of yellow rag, standing out glaringly against the dun-grey of the rock.

‘Sammy,’ she breathed, ‘why did you do it?’

He shook his head. ‘You shouted too late,’ he said flatly.

‘You murderer, Sammy,’ she breathed. ‘You murderer!’

He turned to her, startled, making a forlorn movement with the gun, pain in his eyes, bewilderment, and a lack of understanding.

‘You’re worse than a wild animal,’ she went on, her voice rising. ‘You’re worse than all them jackals, all them vultures. All them lions and tigers. Killing and killing. All the time. You’ve hunted so much, you’re just another of ‘em.’

‘Poll - ’

He reached out a hand but she cowered away.

‘Don’t touch me,’ she said sharply. ‘You’re not fit to touch a decent girl! Not with blood on your hands, like you’ve got!’

He dropped the rifle and seized her quickly by the arms.

‘Polly, have you gone mad? They started it. Not me. Didn’t they? Didn’t they?’

‘You shot first,’ she screamed, wrenching herself free. ‘I saw it plain as you please! You were the one that fired the first shot! Last night, you did!
You
started it!’

In the shocked horror of the killing, she had forgotten the wretchedness of the last few days when they had crossed and recrossed the veld like hunted animals.

He was staring at her, hurt and angry. ‘Polly, you don’t know what you’re saying.’

‘I know all right. I know. I know you killed Mr Plummer. He was a good man, Mr Plummer was.’

‘Poll, I
didn’t know
it was Plummer.’

‘I told you. They’ll never stop now. They’ll never stop till they get you.’

Her words seemed to remind Sammy of his relaxed vigilance and he turned quickly away from her, scrambling for his little parapet and grabbing the Mauser, his eyes glued to the cleft in the rocks.

‘They’ll never get me, Polly,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘They’ll never get me in a million years. I can hold out here for ever.’

‘You’ve not got that many bullets,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t hold out against that lot down there. You haven’t a chance. They’ll bring up more of ‘em. And more - and more and more till there’s an army down there with flags and cannons and horses and everything. They’ll stay there now till they starve you out.’

Sammy was calm once more now, not heeding her. ‘Well, I’ll take some of ‘em with me,’ he said quietly.

His calmness seemed to drive her nearer to the edge of hysteria. ‘They’ll never stop,’ she shouted. ‘Not now! Not till they’ve hanged you as high as the highest tree they can find! They’ll never stop till they kill you!’

She rose to her feet and before he could reach her, she was scrambling out of the rocky little valley.

‘Polly!’

‘I wouldn’t stay here for anything now,’ she shouted. ‘Not after what you’ve done!’

As she began to run down the slope in and out of the rocks, wrenching her dress free with a despairing movement every time it snagged on thorns, a shot rang out and a bullet whined away above them. Polly fell on her face in terror, sliding in the dust, sobbing and shrieking at the same time, then someone below shouted and the shooting stopped at once and she was on her feet again, her dress torn, her hair loose and falling round her neck.

Sammy stood up. ‘Polly,’ he shouted. ‘Polly!’

As someone took a pot shot at him, he ducked quickly behind his pile of rocks and lay staring between the chinks, sick with misery and a sudden new loneliness, watching Polly stumbling and running and falling down the slope.

‘Don’t shoot,’ she was shrieking. ‘I’m on your side! I’m on your side!’

Sammy lay motionless, the truth of what she had told him suddenly coming home to him. There was no going back now. He couldn’t expect mercy and they could keep coming at him again and again and again, and for every bullet he fired they’d be less likely to let him go in peace. His eyes narrowed as he realised he was face to face with inevitable, remorseless and unswerving fate.

As Polly reached the bottom, a man who looked like Le Roux, rose up from behind a rock and, grabbing her round the waist, fell with her out of sight again, and immediately the shooting started once more.

At once the desperate need to survive was borne in on Sammy. His eyes were bright and sharp again, suddenly clean and competent, the hunter turned the hunted.

‘I’ll give ‘em something to think about,’ he said aloud.

He scooped up the Henry and a handful of cartridges and rising to his feet, ran stooping behind the rocks out of sight. By this time, more men had emerged from shelter, growing more confident as he didn’t fire on them, and when he flung himself down again it was well to the right of his original position. Rolling on his stomach, he pushed the weapon forward and pulled the trigger quickly, without aiming. The Henry barked, and he pumped the weapon. The men below began to run immediately, weaving and dodging and diving for shelter once more.

The Henry roared once, twice, three times, again and again, as fast as he could eject the cartridges, then he scrambled to his feet again and hurried, bent low, back to his original hide-out.

He could hear shouts from below now and saw men pointing to the spot where he had fired the Henry.

‘He’s up there!’ He heard the words come clearly in the crystal air. ‘I saw the smoke!’

A veritable fusillade of fire was directed to the spot he had just left and he saw the bullets chipping the rocks and sending the dust spurting. A red-hot ricochet singed his hat and went on to strip the bark off a thorn bush behind him.

Several of the men below were firing steadily now at the point where he had made his brief stand, then, while they kept up their fusillade, half a dozen more of them rose to their feet and began to climb rapidly up the slope. As they approached, Sammy raised the Mauser and carefully pushed it through a cleft in the rock. He was quite calm and in complete control of himself.

The man in the lead, a grey-shirted man smoking a pipe, was climbing quickly, pushing his rifle ahead of him. Sammy raised the Mauser and the sights came into line, fixed on the centre of the climber’s shirt where his cartridge belt crossed his breast bone. There it stayed, for a second, unwavering, then Sammy remembered Polly alongside him, staring down with a fascinated disgust and her outburst of shocked loathing, and abruptly he moved the sight a fraction of an inch and squeezed the trigger.

The man in the grey shirt stopped dead, flung back a step or two as the bullet hit him high on the right shoulder. He dropped the rifle and clutched at the wound with his left hand, then he sat down abruptly, an expression of acute bewilderment on his face.

The scrambling men had stopped, staring round at him, then they started immediately for the bottom of the kopje again, out of sight behind the rocks. The firing continued desultorily for a few seconds, then that died away too as the marksmen realised there was nothing for them to fire at.

Kitto was crouching behind a rock, watching his attack peter out, his face livid as he realised it was not going to be as simple as he had hoped and expected. A man so accurate with a rifle as Sammy Schuter was, could take severe toll of a small group of men climbing awkwardly towards him.

The battle had suddenly reached a ridiculous stalemate which neither side was able to break off. The boy couldn’t move and they, unable to dislodge him, were held there by their pride and their humiliation.

‘Get ‘em spread out, Romanis,’ he called. ‘We’re all going up this time. The lot of us.’

‘What,
again?’
Romanis stared.

‘Yes, and I don’t want any hanging back. But we’ve got to be well deployed.’

‘I’ll stay back and guard the girl,’ Le Roux grinned, one big hand on Polly’s shoulder.

She sat with her back to a rock, staring at his flat ugly face, hypnotised with fear, the print frock stained with dust from her descent and torn away at the shoulder where he had grabbed her and flung her to the ground beneath him.

‘Shut up, Le Roux,’ Kitto snapped. ‘Less of that talk!’

‘Wouldn’t do any harm to throw her to the boys, man,’ Le Roux growled. He reached out for Polly and received a stinging clout on the ear as she came to life.

He grinned and shoved her down with his hand on her chest, holding her there easily. ‘It isn’t as though she wouldn’t know what it was all about,’ he said.

‘Hold your damned tongue,’ Kitto snapped. ‘You’re not a bloody savage!’

Le Roux subsided, growling, his eyes still on Polly, and under shelter of the rocks, Kitto spread the troopers over a distance of fifty yards in a big half-circle round the bottom of the kopje and gave the word to advance.

Once again, however, he over-estimated the agility of his men. With those sheer-faced rocks at the base of Sheba, it was impossible to move forward quickly, except through the spaces of open ground between them. And where these spots occurred Sammy had thoughtfully placed the fragments of his bandanna.

He had selected a hollow beneath two great rocks that leaned together like spires, leaving a narrow fissure between them, which was screened from below by cactus and low mimosa thorn. Cautiously he moved the rifle, watching carefully, the scattered shade of the low tree acting as a camouflage for him, spotting him with its indeterminate shadow like the rocks about him.

As the line of heads below him started moving forward again, he knocked the hat off the nearest with his first shot, then the other heads grew into shoulders and bodies and legs which moved upwards towards him, rising upright as they tried to scramble across the granite boulders, making short rushes through the clear patches of ground but still moving forward at a painfully slow pace. He worked the bolt and fired slowly and deliberately, waiting until a man heaved himself up from behind a sheltering rock before he pulled the trigger. After two more shots the attack died away, none of them wishing to expose himself deliberately, and two more men were moaning and holding wounded limbs.

He had deliberately avoided killing. The memory of Polly alongside him, her fists jammed against her teeth to stop herself screaming, had restrained him. But he had done enough. The survivors below were back behind cover now and lay without attempting to move forward again, firing wildly so that the clatter and rattle of musketry began to echo in every cranny and hollow of Sheba.

The firing was aimless, however, for no one had any idea even now of his hiding place. At a distance of two hundred yards, it required a keen eye to see a dust-smeared rifle muzzle firing modern smokeless ammunition in a thicket of cactus and thorn, and an inch or two of eye behind it.

Bullets began to whine overhead in the hot morning air, scarring the dust, sending chips of rock flying as they struck the granite boulders and stripping fragments off the cactus. None of them came anywhere near Sammy. They were still firing in the general direction of the hollow along the slope where he had used the Henry.

Coolly, dispassionately, he waited until he could see an exposed leg or a shoulder, then took careful aim and fired, moving cautiously to avoid being seen, and as the shots echoed wildly round the slopes, there was nothing in the sound to indicate his position to the men below who could peer over their shelters only with the greatest haste.

Gradually the firing died down again, and silence descended once more on Sheba. The sun clawed its way higher and the rocks began to take on a sharp unreality as they began to shimmer in the heat haze of the sun.

Winter heard the crackle of musketry die away while he was still eight or nine miles from Sheba. He could see the ragged edge of its slopes in the distance, blue against the sky, its base concealed by a shallow fold in the ground.

He had been driving at a breakneck speed over the rolling ground ever since he had heard the firing start twenty minutes before, and the Vauxhall was rattling over the stony surface as though it would fall apart. He was sick with fear at what he might find, for the firing had already told him he might be too late, and he clung desperately to the wheel, half-choked and blinded with dust, his brain numbed by the noise of the engine, his nerves on edge with the jolting.

As he breasted the first of the rises that brought him to the plain before Sheba, he became aware of another cloud of dust over on his right, rising out of the valley and moving up to the fold of ground he was crossing himself. He slowed down and swung the Vauxhall in a wide circle and turned in the seat to peer into the sun.