The Luck of Gerard Ridgeley Part 8

"Anstey's relative! So?" they said. "Looking him up, maybe?"

Gerard explained his exact position with regard to Anstey. He noticed that the significance of the look exchanged between the pair did not decrease. The Zulu, however, seemed to receive the answer with but little interest. He made one or two ineffectual attempts at Gerard's name, but the recurring "r"--a letter which none of the Bantu races can p.r.o.nounce, always in fact making it a sort of guttural aspirate--baffled him, and he gave it up. Then, with a sonorous farewell, he took his departure.

"If all Zulus are like him, they must be a splendid race," said Gerard, gazing after the retreating figure. "That's the first real one I've seen, to my knowledge."

"Ungrateful beggar!" commented one of the men, angrily. "Why, he hardly took the trouble to say 'Thankee.' He deserved to have been let go over the fall."

"I'm afraid I'm nearly as bad," said Gerard. "I don't--or rather I do-- know where I should be if it hadn't been for you."

"That's nothing, mister," was the prompt rejoinder. "Help one another's the rule of the road--eh, George?"

"_Ja_, that's so," a.s.sented George again.

They chatted on for a while, and smoked a sociable pipe, and Gerard accepted an invitation to accompany his friends in need to their waggons--which were standing waiting for them at the drift higher up-- and take a gla.s.s of grog, which, with the torrid heat of the sun, combined to keep off any chill which might result from his wetting.

Then with much mutual good will they separated.

Gerard held on his way, pondering over his adventure, which indeed was a pretty stirring one, and the first he had ever had. He was bound on an errand of partly business, partly pleasure; namely, to visit some people he did not greatly care for on some business of Anstey's. Still the change from the sedentary round of the store was something, and, hot as it was, he enjoyed the ride. It was Sunday, and thus a sort of holiday, though even on the Sabbath we fear that trade was not altogether at a standstill.

That day, however, was destined to be one of incident, of adventure.

His visit over, he was riding home in the cool of the evening. The sun was just touching the western sky-line, flooding with a golden light the open, rolling plains. There was nothing specially beautiful in the landscape, in fact it was rather monotonous, but the openness of it gave an idea of free and sweeping s.p.a.ce, and the almost unearthly glow of a perfect evening imparted a charm that was all its own. The uncongenial circ.u.mstances of his present life faded into insignificance. Gerard felt quite hopeful, quite elated. He felt that it was good even to live.

Suddenly a hubbub of voices rose upon the evening air--of native voices, of angry voices--and mingled with it the jarring clash of kerries.

Spurring his horse over the slight eminence which rose in front, the cause of it became manifest. A small native kraal stood just back from the road. Issuing from this were some half-dozen figures. A glance served to show that they were engaged in a highly congenial occupation to the savage mind--fighting, to wit.

It was a running fight, however, and an unequal one. A tall man was retreating step by step, holding his own gallantly against overwhelming odds. He was armed with nothing but a k.n.o.bkerrie, with which he struck and parried with lightning-like rapidity. His a.s.sailants were mostly armed with two kerries apiece, and were pressing him hard; albeit with such odds in their favour they seemed loth to come to close quarters, remaining, or springing back, just beyond the reach of those terrible whirling blows. To add to the shindy, all the women and children in the kraal were shrilly yelling out jeers at the retreating adversary, and three or four snarling curs lent their yapping to the uproar.

"_Yauw_! great Zulu!" ran the jeers. "We fear you not! Why should we?

Ha-ha! We are free people-free people. We are not Cetywayo's dogs.

Ha-ha!"

"Dogs!" roared the tall man, his eyes flashing with the light of battle.

"Dogs of _Amakafula_! By the head-ring of the Great Great One, were I but armed as ye are, I would keep the whole of this kraal howling like dogs the long night through--I, Sobuza, of the Aba Qulusi--I alone.

Ha!"

And with a ferocious downward sweep of his kerrie, he knocked the foremost of his a.s.sailants off his legs, receiving in return a numbing blow on the shoulder from the stick of another. All the warrior blood of the martial Zulu was roused, maddened, by the shock. He seemed to gain in stature, and his eyes blazed, as roaring out the war-shout of his race, the deep-throated "Usutu!" he abandoned the offensive and hurled himself like a thunderbolt upon his four remaining adversaries.

These, not less agile than himself, scattered a moment previous to closing in upon him from all sides at once. At the same time he was seen to totter and pitch heavily forward. The man whom he had previously swept off his feet had, lying there, gripped him firmly by the legs.

Nothing could save him now! With a ferocious shout the others sprang forward, their kerries uplifted. In a moment he would be beaten to a jelly, when--

Down went the foremost like a felled ox, before the straight crushing blow of an English fist; while at the same time a deft left-hander met the next with such force as to send him staggering back a dozen paces.

Wrenching the two sticks from the fallen man, Gerard pushed them into the hands of the great Zulu. The latter, finding himself thus evenly armed, raised the war-shout "Usutu!" and charged his two remaining a.s.sailants. These, seeing how the tables had been turned, did not wait.

They ran away as fast as their legs could carry them.

"_Whou_!" cried the Zulu, the ferocity which blazed from his countenance fading into a look of profound contempt. "They show their backs, the cowards. Well, let them run. Ha! they have all gone," he added, noticing that the others, too, had sneaked quietly away. "_Whau_!"

The last e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n was a staccato one of astonishment. For he recognised in Gerard his rescuer of the morning.

"I say, friend, you floored those two chappies neatly. By Jove, you did!"

Both turned towards the voice. It proceeded from a light buggy, which stood drawn up on the road behind them. In this were seated a young man some three or four years older than himself, and an extremely pretty girl, at sight of whom Gerard looked greatly confused, remembering the circ.u.mstances under which she had beheld him.

"It was an A1 row," continued the former. "We saw the whole of it.

_Allamaghtaag_! but I envy the way in which you spun those two to the right and left."

"Well, I had to," answered Gerard. "It was five to one. That's not fair play, you know." And his eyes met the blue ones of the young lady in the buggy, and were inclined to linger there, the more so that the said blue orbs seemed to beam an approval that was to the last degree heterodox in one of the tenderer s.e.x and therefore, theoretically, an uncompromising opponent of deeds of violence.

"Who's your long-legged friend?" went on the young man, proceeding to address a query or two to the Zulu, in the latter's own language, but in a tone that struck even Gerard as a trifle peremptory. "He's a surly dog, anyhow," he continued, annoyed at the curtness of the man's answer.

"He's a Zulu--a real Zulu--and his name's Sobuza," said Gerard.

"A Zulu, is he? Do you know him, then?" was the surprised rejoinder.

"I didn't before this morning. But I happen to have got him out of one little difficulty already to-day. I never expected to see him again, though."

"The deuce you did! Was he engaged in the congenial pastime of head-breaking then, too?"

"N-no. The fact is--" And then Gerard blushed and stuttered, for he saw no way out of trumpeting his own achievements, and somehow there was something about those blue eyes that made him shrink instinctively from anything approaching this. "The truth is he got into difficulties in the river--a bit of string or something twisted round his legs in the water so that he couldn't swim, and I helped him out."

The girl's face lighted up, and she seemed about to say something; but the other interrupted--

"By Jove, we must get on. It'll be dark directly, and looks like a storm in the offing, and we've a good way to go. Well, ta-ta to you, sir. So long!" And the buggy spun away over the flat.

Gerard followed it with his glance until it was out of sight. Then he turned to the Zulu. That worthy was seated on the ground, calmly taking snuff.

"Ha, _Umlungu_!" [white man] he exclaimed, as, having completed that operation, he replaced his horn snuff-tube in the hole cut out of the lobe of his ear for that purpose. "This has been a great day--a great day. Surely my _inyoka_ has taken your shape. Twice have you helped me this day. Twice in the same day have you come to my aid. Wonderful-- wonderful! The death of the water--to pa.s.s through the mighty fall to the Spiritland--that is nothing. It is a fitting end for a warrior.

But that I, Sobuza, of the Aba Qulusi, of the people of Zulu--that I, Sobuza, the second fighting captain of the Udhloko regiment--should be 'eaten up' by four or five miserable dogs of _Amakafula_ [Note 2].

_Whau_! that were indeed the end of the world. I will not forget this day, _Umlungu_. Tell me again thy name."

Gerard, who although he understood by no means all of this speech, had picked up sufficient Zulu to grasp most of its burden, repeated his names, slowly and distinctly, again and again. But Sobuza shook his head. He could not p.r.o.nounce them. The nearest he could come was a sort of Lewis Carrollian contraction of the two--"U' Jeriji,"

p.r.o.nouncing the "r" as a guttural aspirate.

"I shall remember," he said; "I shall remember. And now, Jeriji, I journey to the northward to the land of the Zulu. Fare thee well."

Instinctively Gerard put forth his hand. With a pleased smile the warrior grasped it in a hearty muscular grip. Then with a sonorous "_Hlala gahle_," (or farewell), he turned and strode away over the now fast darkening _veldt_.

The occupants of the buggy, speeding too on _their_ way, were engaged in something of an altercation.

"It was too provoking of you, Tom," the girl was saying, "to rush me away like that."

"So? Well, we've no time to spare as it is. And that cloud-bank over there means a big thunderstorm, or I'm a Dutchman."

"I don't care if it does. And we never found out his name--who he is."

"No more we did, now you mention it," said the other in a tone of half-regretful interest. "But, after all, we can survive the loss."

"But--he was such a nice-looking boy."

"Oho!" was the rejoinder, accompanied by a roar of laughter. "So that's the way the cat jumps!"