Twice they had sighted quarry, small groups, but each time the quarry had scattered at the first approach.
Zouga was getting desperate. His claims were lying abandoned in the New Rush workings, the level of the surrounding claims would be sinking swiftly, making his more difficult to work and every day increasing the danger of rock slide. Those claims had already killed five men. Jock Danby had warned him.
He was lying now, belly down, on a tiny rocky kopje fifty miles north of the Vaal river, eighty miles from New Rush, and he was still not certain when he could finish this business and turn southwards again.
Jan Cheroot and the two boys were farther down the slope with the horses, holding them in a shallow ravine that was choked with scrub thorn. Jordan's girlish tones carried to where Zouga sat, blending with the cries of circling birds, and Zouga lowered the binoculars to rest his eyes and to listen to his son's voice.
He had worried about taking the boy on this rough journey, especially so soon after that bout of camp fever, but there had been no alterative, no safe place to leave him. Once again Jordan's stamina had belied his delicate looks. He had ridden hard and kept up well with his brother, at the same time recovering the flesh that the fever had burned from his body; and in the last days the deathly pallor of his skin had been gilded to velvety peach.
Thinking about Jordan led directly to memories of Aletta, memories still so filled with sorrow and raw guilt that he could not bear them and he lifted the binoculars again and raked the plain, seeking distraction. He found it with relief.
There was unusual movement far out on the wide plain. Through the lens Zouga picked up a herd of a hundred wildebeest, the "wild cattle" of the Boers. These ungainly animals, with their mournful Roman noses and scraggly beards, were the clowns of the veld. They chased each other in aimless circles, nose to earth and heels kicking at the sky, then abruptly they ceased this lunatic cavorting and stood snorting at one another with wild-eyed expressions of amazement.
Beyond them Zouga caught a flicker of other movement: until that moment it had been hidden by the dust kicked up by the splayed wildebeest hooves. Carefully he adjusted the bevelled focus ring of his binoculars, and the heat mirage trembled and melted before his gaze, turning the movement into a serpentine wriggle that seemed to float above the plain on a lake of silver shimmering water.
,"Ostriches!" he thought disgustedly. The distant shapes seemed to wriggle like long black tadpoles in the watery wavering mirage of distance. The long-legged birds seemed to float free of the earth, blooming miraculously in the tortured air above the plain. Zouga tried to count them, but they changed shape and coagulated into a dark wavering mass, their plumed backs bobbing.
Suddenly Zouga sat up. He dropped the binoculars and polished the lens with the tail of the silk bandanna around his throat, then quickly lifted them to his eyes again. The grotesque dark shapes had separated, the lumpy wriggling bodies fined down, the elongated legs had assumed normal proportions.
"Men!" whispered Zouga, and counted them eagerly, as eagerly as he had ever made a first sighting of the huge ivory-carrying grey bull elephants in the hunting veld.
He reached eleven before another layer of heated air intervened and altered the distant man-shapes to grotesque unsteady monsters once again.
Zouga slung the binoculars over his shoulder and went down the slope with the loose scree rolling under his boots. Jan Cheroot and the boys lay in the bottom of the ravine on their saddle blankets, their saddles propped behind them as bolsters.
Zouga slid down the bank and landed between them before they had returned from the fairyland that Jan Cheroot had been spinning for them.
"A good bunch," he told Jan Cheroot.
Zouga reached down and withdrew the short Martinihenry carbine from the leather bucket of Ralph's saddle.
He levered the breech-block down and checked the weapon was empty.
"We aren't after springbuck. Don't you load until either Jan Cheroot or I tell you," he ordered sternly.
Jordan was still too little to handle the heavy rifle, but he rode well enough to make the encircling sweep with which they would try to close the net.
"Remember, Jordie, that you stay close enough to Jan Cheroot to hear what he tells you," Zouga told him, glancing up at the sun as he did so.
It was well past noon; he would have to move fairly soon, for if they could not surround the little band of black men at the first attempt, if they did not achieve surprise, then it would be the old time-consuming business of spooring them down individually. So far attempts at doing so had always been interrupted by the sudden African nightfall.
"Saddle up," Zouga ordered, and they scrambled to their horses.
Zouga swung up onto the bay gelding and glared sternly at Ralph.
"Now you do what you are told, or I'll warm your tail feathers for you, young man."
He swung the horse's head and pointed it down the ravine, while behind his back Ralph grinned at Jan Cheroot conspiratorially, his face flushed with excitement, and the little Hottentot closed one eyelid briefly but kept his flat wrinkled oriental features expressionless.
Zouga had chosen the kopje with care; from it a ravine meandered out across the plain in an approximate east to west direction, and he followed it now, slouching in the saddle to keep his head below the level of the banks and keeping the gelding down to a walk so as not to raise dust.
After half a mile he removed the wide-brimmed hat from his head and raised himself cautiously in the stirrups until his eyes were just above the bank, and he darted a quick glance into the north and then immediately ducked down again.
"Station here," he told Ralph. "And don't move until I do."
They moved on down the ravine, while Zouga placed Jan Cheroot and Jordan side by side in a bend of the ravine where the bank had collapsed and formed an easy ramp up which they could launch their charge.
"Keep Jordie close," Zouga cautioned Jan Cheroot, and swung the gelding around with the saddlery creaking as the animal turned in the narrow gut of the ravine; then Zouga trotted back until he was in the centre. of the waiting line, and there he halted and contained his impatience, glancing up repeatedly at the lowering sun.
There would probably not be another chance for many days, and each day was vital for those untended claims.
Zouga jerked the rifle from the leather bucket at his knee, selected a cartridge from the bandolier around his waist and slipped it into the breech. Then he returned the weapon uncocked to the bucket. It was merely a precaution, but he had no means of knowing what manner of men those approaching figures were.
Even if their intentions were peaceable, and their ultimate object identical to Zouga's own, yet they would be armed and nervous, so nervous that they had avoided the road from the north and were travelling over the open veld. They were in company for defence, and Zouga knew they would have been harassed often along the way, by black men and white: the black men trying to rob and cheat them of their meagre possessions, the white men of something infinitely more valuable, their right to contract their labour to the highest bidder.
On the day that Zouga thanked Neville Pickering for his tuition and began preparing to work the Devil's Own claims for his personal account, he had faced the problem that was already wracking the entire sub-continent.
Only black men could stand the conditions of physical labour in the diggings. Only black men would work for a wage that made the diggings profitable, and even that beggarly wage was many times more than the Boer f armers of the surrounding backveld republics could afford to Day.