It was a daily ritual to which Ralph had to be driven by his father's threats, and to which Jordan hurried with the same enthusiasm as he did to the sorting-table after school was out. With his angelic looks, and the intense interest in the written word that Aletta had germinated in him, Jordan was instantly missis Gander's darling.
She made no effort to conceal her preference. She called him "Jordie-dear" and gave to him the task of wiping clean the blackboard, which immediately made it an honour for which the dozen other children in the class would have scratched out his lovely densely-lashed angel eyes.
There was a pair of twins in missis Gander's class. The tough sons of a tough out-of-luck digger from the Australian opal fields, they were a matched pair, with shaven heads to inhibit the breeding of lice, bare-footed, for their father was working a poor claim on the eastern edge of the diggings, their braces supporting patched canvas breeches over faded and frayed shirts. Henry and Douglas Stewart made a formidable pair, acting in complete concert, quick with a cruel jibe too soft for missis Gander to hear or a crafty jab with the elbow or a tug of the hair too quick for her to see.
Jordan was natural prey. "Jordie-girl" they christened him, and his soft curls felt good between their fingers, and his tears were enormously satisfying, especially when they realized that Jordan for some strange reason of pride would not appeal to his big brother for protection.
"You tell Goosie-Gander that I've a belly ache," Ralph instructed Jordan. "And that Papa says I am too sick to come to class."
"Where are you going?" Jordan demanded. "What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to the nest, I think the chicks may be ready." Ralph had discovered a lanner falcon's nest on the top ledge of a rocky kopje five miles out on the Cape road. He was planning to take the chicks and train them as hunting falcons. Ralph always had exciting plans; it was one of the many reasons why Jordan adored him.
"Oh, let me come with you. Please, Ralph."
"You're still just a baby, Jordie."
"I'm nearly eleven."
"You're only just ten," Ralph corrected him loftily, and from experience Jordan knew there was no profit in arguing.
Jordan delivered Ralph's lie for him in such sweet piping tones and with such a guileless flutter of the long lashes, that it never occurred to missis Gander to doubt it, and the Stewart twins exchanged a quick glance of complete accord.
There was a latrine at the back of the church, a sentry box of corrugated iron, a boxwood seat with an oval cut from it suspended over a galvanized steel bucket. The heat in the tiny room was ovenlike and the contents of the bucket ripened swiftly. The twins trapped Jordan there in the midmorning break.
They had hold of an ankle each and were standing on the wooden seat, the hole between them, and Jordan was dangling upside down, clinging desperately to the boxwood seat as they tried to force his head and shoulders through the opening and into the brimming bucket.
"Stamp on his fingers," Douglas panted. Jordan had offered unexpected opposition. Douglas had a red scratch down his neck, and they had had to pry Jordan's jaws open to release their grip on Henry's thumb. The injuries had changed the mood of the twins. They had started out with laughter, spiteful laughter, but laughter all the same; now they were angry and vicious, their self-esteem smarting as much as their injuries.
"Shut up, you little sissy," blurted Henry, as he obeyed his brother and brought down his horny heel on Jordan's white knuckles. Jordan's shrieks of agony and horror and terror reverberated in the tiny iron shed as he kicked and fought.
Against their combined strength, Jordan's wildest efforts were ineffectual. His fingernails scratched white splinters from the wooden seat, and his shrieks mounted hysterically, but his head was forced down. The stench was suffocating, the disgust choked his throat and strangled his cries.
At the moment that he felt the cold wet filth soaking into his golden curls the door of the shed was wrenched open and missis Gander's motherly bulk filled the opening.
For a moment she stared incredulously, and then she began to swell with outrage. Her right arm, muscled from kneading bread and pounding wet washing, flew out in a round open-handed blow that knocked both twins flying into a corner of the latrine, and she gathered Jordan up, holding him at arms" length. With her flushed face wrinkling at the smell of his soaked curls, she rushed out with him, shouting to her husband to bring a bucket of precious water and a bar of the yellow and blue mottled soap.
Half an hour later Jordan reeked of carbolic soap and his curls were fluffing out again as the sun dried them into a shining halo, and from behind the closed doors of the vestry the yells of pain emitted by the twins were punctuated by the clap of the Reverend Gander's Malacca cane walkingstick as his wife urged him on to greater endeavour.
Around the whittled remains of Colesberg kopje had grown up a miniature range of man-made hillocks. These were the tailings from the diamond cradles, dumped haphazardly on the open ground beyond the settlement.
Some of these artificial hills were already twenty feet high, and they formed a wasteland where no tree nor blade of grass grew. A maze of narrow footpaths laced the area, made by the daily pilgrimage of hundreds of black workers to the pit.
The shortcut between the Lutheran church and Zouga's camp followed one of these footpaths, and in the heat-hushed hour of noon, the labourers were still in the workings and the hills were deserted. The sun directly overhead threw only narrow black strips of shade below the mounds of loose gravel as Jordan hurried along the dusty path, his eyes still red-rimmed with weeping the tears of humiliation and stinging from the foam of carbolic soap.
"Hello jordie-girl." Jordan recognized the voice instantly, and it stopped him dead, blinking his swimming eyes in the sunlight, peering up at the summit of one of the gravel mounds beside the path.
one of the twins stood silhouetted against the pale blue noon sky.
His thumbs hooked into his braces, his shaven head thrust forward, his eyes with their thin colourless lashes as vicious as those of a ferret.
"You told, Jordie-girlie," the twin accused flatly.
"I never told," Jordan denied, his voice squeaking uncertainly.
"You screamed. That's the same as telling, and now you are going to scream again, but this time there isn't going to be anyone to hear you, jordie-girl."
Jordan spun around, and in the same movement he was running with all the desperation and speed of a gazelle pursued by a hunting cheetah; but he had not gone a dozen frantic paces when the second twin slid down the sloping bank, the gravel hissing around his bare feet, full into the narrow pathway ahead of Jordan, his arms spread in welcome, his mouth twisted into a grin of anticipation.
They had laid the trap with care. They had caught him in a narrow place, where the gravel banks were highest, and behind him the first twin slid adroitly down to block the path, keeping his balance on the little avalanche of rolling gravel under his bare feet until he hit the level pathway.
jordie-dear," called one twin.
jordie-girl," echoed the other, and they closed from each side, slowly, tantalizing themselves, so that Henry giggled almost breathlessly.
"Little girls shouldn't tell tales."
"I'm not a girl," whispered Jordan, backing away from him.
"Then you shouldn't have curls; only girls have curls."
Douglas groped in his pocket and brought out a bonehandled clasp knife. He opened the blade with his teeth.
"We are going to turn you into a boy, jordie-girl."
"Then we are going to teach you not to tell tales."
Henry brought out his hand from behind his back. He had cut a camel-thorn branch, and stripped the bunches of lacy leaves, but not the thorns. "We are going to do the same to you as old Goosey-Gander did to us. Fifteen cuts each. That's thirty for you, jordie-girl."