When the Lion Feeds

by Wilbur Smith

  He looked at the coloured girl standing resolute in the doorway, determined to carry out her instructions. He thought of poor Duff doing his duty like a man, he could do no less. He swallowed down the thick clinging oil with his eyes closed then went back to his book. He slept uneasily starting up occasionally to look at the empty bed across the tent. The medicine drove him out into the cold at half past two in the morning.

  Mbejane was curled up next to the fire and Sean scowled at him. His regular contented snoring seemed a calculated mockery. A jackal yelped miserably up on the ridge, expressing Sean’s feelings exactly, and the night wind fanned his bare buttocks.

  Duff came home in the dawning. Sean was wide awake.

  Well, what happened? he demanded.

  Duff yawned. At one stage I began to doubt whether I was man enough.

  However, it worked out to the satisfaction of all concerned. What a woman! He pulled off his shirt and Sean saw the scratches across his back.

  Did she give you any castor oil? Sean asked bitterly.

  I m sorry about that Duff smiled at him sympathetically. I tried to dissuade her, truly I did. She’s a very motherly person. Most concerned about your stomachYou still haven’t answered my question. Did you make any progress with the claims? Oh that -, Duff pulled the blankets up under his chin. We disposed of that early on in the proceedings. She’ll take a down payment of ten pounds each on them and give us an option to buy the lot at any time during the next two years for ten thousand. We arranged that over dinner. The rest of the time was devoted, in a manner of speaking, to shaking hands over the deal.

  Tomorrow afternoon, or rather this afternoon, you and I’ll ride across to Pretoria and get a lawyer to write up an agreement for her to sign.

  But right now I need some sleep. Wake me at lunch time. Goodnight, laddie. Duff and Sean brought the agreement back from Pretoria the following evening. It was an impressive four-page document full of in so much as and party of the first part. Candy led them to her bedroom and they sat around anxiously while she read it through twice.

  She looked up at last and said, That seems all right but there is just one other thing. Sean’s heart sank and even Duff’s smile was strained.

  It had all been too easy so far.

  Candy hesitated and Sean saw with faint surprise that she was blushing.

  It was a pleasant thing to see the peach of her cheeks turning to ripe apple and they watched it with interest, their tension lessening perceptibly. I want the mine named after me.

  They nearly shouted with relief. An excellent idea! How about the Rautenbach Reef Mine? Candy shook her head. I’d rather not he reminded of him, we’ll leave him out of it Very well, let’s call it the Candy Deep. A little premature, I suppose, as we are still at ground level, but pessimism never pays, suggested Duff. Yes, that’s lovely, Candy enthused, flushing again but this time with pleasure. She scrawled her name across the bottom of the document while Sean fired out the cork of the champagne which Duff had bought in Pretoria. They clinked glasses and Duff gave the toast To Candy and the Candy Deep, may one grow sweeter and the other deeper with each passing day. We’ll need labour, about ten natives to start with. That’ll be your problem, Duff told Sean. It was the following morning and they were eating breakfast in front of the tent. Sean nodded but didn’t try to answer until he had swallowed his mouthful of bacon. I’ll get Mbejane onto that right away.

  He’ll be able to get us Zulus, even if he has to drive them here with a spear at their backs. Good, in the meantime you and I’ll ride back to Pretoria again to buy the basic equipment. Picks, shovels, dynamite and the like. Duff wiped his mouth and filled his coffee cup. I’ll show you how to start moving -the overburden and stacking the ore in a dump.

  We’ll pick a site for the mill and then I’ll leave you to get on with it while I head south for the Cape to see my farmer friend. God and. the weather permitting ours will be the second mill working on these fields.

  They brought their purchases back from Pretoria in a small ox wagon.

  Mbejane had done his work well. There were a dozen Zulus lined up for Sean’s approval next to the tent with Mbejane standing guard over them like a cheerful sheepdog. Sean walked down the line stopping to ask each man his name and joke with him in his own language. He came to the last in the line. How are you called? My name is Blubi, Nkosi. Sean pointed at the man’s well-rounded paunch bulging out above his loincloth. If you come to work for me, we’ll soon have you delivered of your child They burst out in delighted laughter and Sean smiled at them affectionately: proud simple people, tall and bigmuscled, completely defenceless against a well-timed jest. Through his mind flashed the picture of a hill in Zululand, a battlefield below it and the flies crawling in the pit of an empty stomach. He shut the picture out quickly and shouted above their laughter. So be it then, sixpence a day and all the food you can eat. Will you sign on to work for me? They chorused their assent and climbed up onto the back of the wagon. Sean and Duff took them out to the candy Deep and they laughed and chattered like children going on a picnic.

  it took another week for Duff to instruct Sean in the use of dynamite, to explain how he wanted the first trenches dug and to mark out the site for the mill and the dump. They moved the tent up to the mine and worked twelve hours every day. At night they rode down to Candy’s Hotel to eat a full meal and then Sean rode Home alone. He was so tired by evening that he hardly envied Duff the comfort of Candy’s bedroom; instead he found himself admiring Duff’s stamina Each morning he looked for signs of fatigue in his partner but, although his face was lean and punt as ever, his eyes were just as clear and his lopsided smile just as cheerful. How you do it beats me, Sean told him the day they finished marking out the mill site.

  Duff winked at him. Years of practice, laddie, but between you and me the ride down to the Cape Will be a welcome rest! When are you going? Sean asked. Quite frankly I think that every day I stay on here increases the risk of someone else getting in before us.

  Mining machinery is going to be at a premium from now on. You have got things well in hand now... What do you say? I was starting to think along the same lines, Sean agreed. They walked back to the tent and sat down in the camp chairs, from where they could look down the length of the valley. The week before about two dozen wagons had been outspanned around Candy’s Hotel, but now there were at least two hundred and from where they sat they could count another eight or nine encampments, some even larger than the one around Candy’s place.

  Wood and iron buildings were beginning to replace the canvas tents and the whole veld was crisscrossed with rough roads along which mounted men and wagons moved without apparent purpose.

  The restless movement, the dust clouds raised by the passage of men and beasts, and the occasional deep crump, crump of dynamite firing in the workings along the Banket, all heightened the air of excitement, of almost breathless expectancy that hung over the whole goldfleld.

  I’ll leave at first light tomorrow, Duff decided. Ten days, riding to the railhead at Colesberg and another four days by train will get me there. With luck I’ll be back under two months. He wriggled round in his chair and looked directly at Sean. After paying Candy her two hundred pounds and with what I spent in Pretoria I’ve only got about a hundred and fifty left. Once I get to Paarl I’ll have to pay out three or four hundred for the Mill, then I’ll need to hire twenty or thirty wagons to bring it up here, say eight hundred pounds altogether to be on the safe side. Sean looked at him. He had known this men a few short weeks. Eight hundred was the average man’s earnings for three years.

  Africa was a big land, a man could disappear easily. Sean loosened his belt and dropped it onto the table; he unbuttoned the money pouch.

  Give me a hand to count it out, he told Duff. Thanks, said Duff and he was not talking about the money. With trust asked for so simply and given so spontaneously the last reservations in their friendship shrivelled and died.

  When Duff had gone Sean drove himself and
his men without mercy. They stripped the overburden off the Reef and exposed it across the whole length of the Candy claims, then they broke it up and started stacking it next to the mill site. The dump grew bigger with every twelve-hour day worked. There was still no trace of the Leader Reef but Sean found little time to worry about that. At night he climbed into bed and slept away his fatigue until another morning called him back to the workings.

  On Sundays he rode across to Francois’s tent and they talked mining and medicines. Francois had an enormous chest of patent medicines and a book titled The Home Physician. His health was his hobby and he was treating himself for three major ailments simultaneously. Although he was occasionally unfaithful, his true love was sugar diabetes.

  The page in The Home Physician which covered this subject was limp and grubby from the touch of his fingers.

  He could recite the symptoms from memory and he had all of them. His other favourite was tuberculosis of the bone; this moved around his body with alarming rapidity taking only a week to leave his hip and reach his wrist.

  Despite his failing health, however, he was an expert on mining and Sean picked his brain shamelessly. Francois’s sugar diabetes did not prevent him from sharing a bottle of brandy with Sean on Sunday evenings. Sean kept away from Candy’s Hotel, that shiny blonde hair and peach skin would have been too much temptation. He couldn’t trust himself not to wreck his new friendship with Duff by another importunate affair, so instead he sweated away his energy in the trenches of the Candy Deep.

  Every morning he set his Zulus a task for the day, always just a little more than the day before. They sang as they worked and it was very seldom that the task was not complete by nightfall. The days blurred into each other and turned to weeks which quadrupled like breeding amoebae and became months. Sean began to imagine Duff giving the Capetown girls a whirl with his eight hundred pounds. One evening he rode south for miles along the Cape road, stopping to question every traveller he met and when he finally gave up and returned to the goldfields he went straight to one of the canteens to look for a fight.

  He found a big, yellow-haired German miner to oblige him. They went outside and for an hour they battered each other beneath a crisp Transvaal night sky surrounded by a ring of delighted spectators. Then he and the German went back into the canteen, shook each others bleeding hands, drank a vow of friendship together and Sean returned to the Candy Deep with his devil exorcized for the time being The next afternoon Sean was working near the north boundary of the claims, at this point they had burrowed down about fifteen feet to keep contact with the reef.

  Sean had just finished marking the shot holes for the next blast and the Zulus were standing around him taking snuff and spitting on their hands before attacking the rock once more. Mush, you shag-eared villains.

  What’s going on here, a trade union meeting? The familiar voice came from above their heads, Duff was looking down at them. Sean scrambled straight up the side of the trench and seized him in a bear hug. Duff was thinner, his jowls covered with a pale stubble and his curly hair white with dust.

  When the fury of greeting had subsided a little Sean demanded, Well, where’s the present you went to fetch me? Duff laughed, Not far behind, all twenty-five wagons full of it. You got it then? Sean roared.

  You’re damn right I did! Come with me and I’ll show you. # Duff’s convoy was strung out four miles across the veld, Most Of the wagons double-teamed against the enormous weight of the machinery. Duff pointed to a rust-streaked cylinder that completely filled one of the leading wagons. That is my particular cross, seven tons of the most spiteful, stubborn and evil boiler in the world. if it’s broken the wagon axle once it’s broken it a dozen times since we left Colesberg, not to mention the two occasions on which it capsized itself, once right in the middle of a river.

  They rode along the line of wagons. Good God! I didn’t realize there’d be so much. Sean shook his head dubiously. Are you sure you know how it all fits together? Leave it to your Uncle Duff. Of course, it’s going to need a bit of work done on it, after all it’s been lying out in the open for a couple of years. Some of it was rusted up solid, but the judicious use of grease, new paint and the Charleywood brain will see the Candy Deep plant breaking rock and spitting out gold within a month.

  Duff broke off and waved to a horseman coming towards them. This is the transport contractor. Frikkie Malan, Mr Courtney, my partner. The contractor pulled up next to, them and acknowledged the introduction. He wiped the dust off his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Gott, man, Mr Charleywood, I don’t mind telling you that this is the hardest money I’ve ever worked for.

  Nothing personal, but I’ll be vragtig glad to see the last of this load.

  Duff was wrong, it took much longer than a month. The rust had eaten deep into parts of the machinery and each bolt they twisted open was red with the scaly cancer.

  They worked the usual twelve-hour day chipping and scraping filing and greasing, knuckles knocked raw against steel and palms wet and red where the blisters had burst.

  Then one day suddenly and miraculously they were finished. Along the ridge of the Candy Deep, neat and sweet smelling in its new paint, thick with yellow grease and waiting only to be fitted together, lay the dismembered mill.

  How long has it taken us so far? Duff asked. It seems like a hundred years. Is that all? Duff feigned surprise. Then I declare a holiday, two day’s of meditation. You meditate, brother, I’m going to do some carousing., That’s an excellent alternative, let’s go! They started at Candy’s place but she threw them out after the third fight so they moved on. There were a dozen places to drink at and they tried them all. Others were celebrating, because the day before old Kruger, the President of the Republic, had given official recognition to the goldfields. This had the sole effect of diverting the payments for mining licences from the pockets of the farmers who owned the land into the Government coffers. No one worried about that, except possibly the farmers. Rather it was an excuse for a party. The canteens were packed with swearing, sweating men. Duff and Sean drank with them.

  The Crown and Anchor boards were doing a steady business in every bar and the men who crowded around them were the new population of the goldfields. Diggers bare to the waist and caked with dirt, salesmen with loud clothes and louder voices selling everything from dynamite to dysentery cure, an evangelist peddling salvation, gamblers mining pockets, gentlemen trying to keep the tobacco juice off their boots, boys new-flown from home and wishing themselves back, Boers bearded and drabsuited, drinking little but watching with inscrutable eyes the invaders of their land. Then there were the others, the clerks and farmers, the rogues and contractors listening greedily to the talk of gold.

  The coloured girl, Martha, came to find Sean and Duff on the afternoon of the second day. They were in a mudbrick and thatch hut called The Tavern of the Bright Angels. Duff was doing a solo exhibition of the Dashing White Sergeant partnered by a chair; Sean and the fifty or so other customers were beating the rhythm on the bar counter with glasses and empty bottles.

  Martha skittered across to Sean, slapping at the hands that tried to dive up her skirts and squealing sharply every time her bottom was pinched. She arrived at Sean’s side flushed and breathless. Madame says you must come quickly, there’s big trouble, she gasped and started to run the gauntlet back to the door. Someone flipped up her dress behind and a concerted masculine roar approved the fact that she wore nothing under the petticoats.

  Duff was so engrossed in his dancing that Sean had to carry him bodily out of the bar and dip Ins head in the horse through outside before he could gain his attention. What the hell did you do that for? spluttered Duff and swung a round-arm punch at Sean’s head. Sean ducked under it and caught him about the body to save him falling on his back. Candy wants us, she says there’s big trouble. Duff thought about that for a few seconds, frowning with concentration, then he threw back his head and sang to the tune of London’s Burning, Candy wants us, Candy wants u
s We don’t want Candy, we want brandy.

  He broke out of Sean’s grip and headed back for the bar.

  Sean caught him again and pointed him in the direction of the Hotel.

  Candy was in her bedroom. She looked at the two of them as they swayed arm-in-arm in the doorway. Did you enjoy your debauch? she asked sweetly.

  Duff mumbled and tried to straighten his coat. Sean tried to steady him as his feet danced an involuntary sideways jig. What happened to your eye? she asked Sean and he fingered it tenderly; it was puffed and blue. Candy didn’t wait an answer but went on, still sweetly:Well, if you two beauties want to own a mine by tomorrow you’d better sober up.

  They stared at her and Sean spoke deliberately but nevertheless indistinctly. Why, what’s the matter? They’re going to jump the claims, that’s the matter.

  This new proclamation of a State goldfield has given the drifters the excuse they’ve been waiting for. About a hundred of them have formed a syndicate. They claim that the old titles aren’t legal any more; they are going to pull out the pegs and put in their own. Duff walked without a stagger across to the washbasin beside Candy’s bed; he splashed his face, towelled it vigorously then stooped and kissed her.

  Thanks, my sweet. Duff, please be careful, Candy called after them.

  Let’s see if we can’t hire a few mercenaries, Sean suggested. Good idea, we’ll try and find a few sober characters there should be some in Candy’s dining-room. They made a short detour on their way back, to the mine and stopped at Francois’s tent; it was dark by then and Francois came out in a freshly ironed nightshirt. He raised an eyebrow when he saw the five heavily armed men with Sean and Duff.