"Ballantyne 02 - Men of Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

"You ever thought of selling out?" Zouga asked him, and immediately Jock's fear faded to be replaced by a sly expression.

"Why, mister? You thinking of buying?" Jock straightened. "Let me give you a little tip for free. Don't even think about it, not unless you got six thousand pounds to do the talking for you."

He peered up at Zouga hopefully, and Zouga stared back at him without expression.

"Thank you for your time, sir, and for your sake I hope the gravel lasts."

Zouga touched the wide brim of his hat and sauntered away. Jock Danby watched him go, then spat viciously on the yellow ground at his feet and swung the shovel at it as though it were a mortal enemy.

As he walked away Zouga felt a strange sense of elation. There was a time when he had lived by the turn of a card and the fall of a dice, and he felt the gambler's instinct now. He knew the gravel would not pinch out.

He knew it sank down, pure and rich into the depths.

He knew it with a deep unshakable certainty, and he knew something else with equal certainty.

"The road to the north begins here." He spoke aloud, and felt his blood thrill in his veins. "This is where it begins."

He felt the need to make an act of faith, of total affirmation, and he knew what it must be. The price of livestock on the diggings was vastly inflated, and his oxen were costing him a guinea a day to water. He knew how to close the road back.

By midafternoon he had sold the oxen: a hundred pounds a head, and five hundred for his wagon. Now he was committed, and he felt the currents of excitement coursing through his body as he paid the gold coin over the raw wooden counter of the tin shack that housed the branch of the Standard Bank.

The road back was cut. He was chancing it all on the yellow gravel and the road northwards.

"Zouga, you promised," Aletta whispered when the buyer came to Zouga's camp to collect the oxen. "You promised that in one week -" Then she fell silent when she saw his face. She knew that expression. She drew the two boys to her and held them close.

Jan Cheroot went to each of the animals in turn and whispered to them as tenderly as a lover, and his stare was reproachful as he turned to Zouga while the span was led away.

Neither man spoke, and at last Jan Cheroot dropped his gaze and walked away, a slight, bare-footed, bowlegged little gnome.

Zouga thought he had lost him, and he felt a rush of distress, for the little man was a friend, a teacher and a companion of twelve years.

It was Jan Cheroot who had tracked his first elephant, and stood shoulder to shoulder with him as he shot it down. Together they had marched and ridden the breadth of a savage continent. They had drunk from the same bottle and eaten from the same pot at a thousand camp fires. Yet he could not bring himself to call him back. He knew that Jan Cheroot must make his own decision.

He need not have worried. When "dop" time came that evening, Jan Cheroot was there to hold out his chipped enamel mug. Zouga smiled and, ignoring the line that measured his daily ration of brandy, he filled the mug to the brim.

"It was necessary, old friend," he said, and Jan Cheroot nodded gravely. "They were good beasts," he said. "But then I have had many fine beasts go from my life, fourlegged and two-legged ones." He tasted the raw spirit.

"After a little time and a dram or two, it does not matter so much."

Aletta did not speak again until the boys were asleep in the tent.

"Selling the oxen and the wagon was your answer," she said.

"It cost a guinea a day to water them, and the grazing has been eaten flat for miles about."

"There have been three more deaths in the camp. I counted thirty wagons leaving today. It's a plague camp."

"Yes." Zouga nodded. "Some of the claim holders are getting nervous. A claim that I was offered for eleven hundred pounds yesterday was sold for nine hundred today."