Shout at the Devil

But Santa Claus's bag, or, more accurately, his tobacco pouch, was soon empty and Sebastian was at a loss for some way to help alleviate the misery and poverty he saw in each village. He considered issuing indulgences from future tax... the bearer is hereby excused from the payment of hut tax for five years... but realized that this was a lethal gift. He shuddered at what Herman Fleischer might do to anybody he caught in possession of one of these.

Finally he struck on the solution. These people were starving. He would give them food. He would give them meat.

In fact, this was one of the most desirable commodities Sebastian could have offered. Despite the abundance of wild life, the great herds of game that spread across the plains and hills, these people were starved for protein. The primitive hunting methods they employed were so ineffectual, that the killing of a single animal was an event that happened infrequently, and then almost by accident. When the carcass was shared out among two or. three hundred hungry mouths, there was only a few ounces of meat for each. Men and women would risk their lives in attempting to drive a pride of lions from their kill, for just a few mouthfuls of this precious stuff.

Sebastian's Askari joined in the sport with delight. Even old Mohammed perked up a little. Unfortunately, their marksmanship was about the same standard as Sebastian's own, and a day's hunting usually resulted in the expenditure of thirty or forty rounds of Mauser ammunition, and a bag of sometimes as little as one half-grown zebra. But there were good days also, like the memorable occasion when a herd of buffalo virtually committed suicide by running down on the line of Askari. In the resulting chaos one of Sebastian's men was shot dead by his comrades, but eight full-grown buffalo ri)llowed him to the happy hunting grounds.

So Sebastian's tax tour proceeded triumphantly, leaving behind a trail of empty cartridge cases, racks of meat drying in the sun, full bellies, and smiling faces.

Three months after crossing the Rovuma river, Sebastian found himself back at the village of his good friend, M'tapa. He had bypassed Saali's in order to avoid the offended Gita.

Sitting alone in the night within the hut that M'tapa placed at his disposal, Sebastian was having his first misgivings. On the morrow, he would begin the return to Lolapanzi, where Flynn O'Flynn was waiting for him. Sebastian was acutely aware that from Flynn's point of view the expedition had not been a success and Flynn would have a great deal to say on the subject. Once more Sebastian puzzled on the fates which took his best intentions, and manipulated them in such a manner that they became completely unrecognizable from the original.

Then his thoughts kicked off at a tangent. Soon, the day after tomorrow, if all went well, he would be back with Rosa. The deep yearning that had been his constant companion these last three months throbbed through Sebastian's whole body. Staring into the wood-fire on the hearth of the hut, it seemed as though the embers formed a picture of her face, and in his memory he heard her voice again.

"Come back, Sebastian. Come back soon."

And he whispered the words aloud, watching her face in the fire. Gloating on each detail of it. He saw her smile, and her nose wrinkled a little, the dark eyes slanted upwards at the corners.

"Come back, Sebastian."

The need of her was a physical pain so intense that he could hardly breathe, and his imagination reconstructed every detail of their parting beside the waterfall. Each subtle change and inflection of her voice, the very sound of her breathing, and the bitter salt taste of her tears upon his lips.

He felt again the touch of her hands, her mouth and through the wood-smoke that filled the hut, his nostrils flared at the warm woman smell of her body.

"I'm coming, Rosa. I'm coming back, he whispered, and stood up restlessly from beside the fire. At that moment his attention was jerked back to the present by a soft scratching at the door of the hut.

"Lord. Lord. "He recognized old M'tapa's hoarse croaking.

"What is it?"

"We seek your protection."

"What is the trouble?" Sebastian crossed to the door and lifted the cross-bar. "What is it?"

In the Moonlight M'tapa stood with a skin blanket draped -around his frail shoulders. Behind him a dozen of the villagers huddled in trepidation.

"The elephant are in our gardens. They will destroy them before morning. There will be nothing, not a single stalk of millet left standing." He swung away and stood with his head cocked. "Listen, you may hear them now."

It was an eerie sound in the night, the high-pitched elephant squeal, and Sebastian's skin crawled. He could feel the hair on his forearms become erect.

"There are two of them." M'tapa's voice was a scratchy whisper. "Two old bulls. We know them well. They came last season and laid waste our corn. They killed one of my sons who tried to drive them off." In entreaty, the old man clawed hold of Sebastian's arm and tugged at it. "Avenge my son, lord. Avenge my son for me, and save our millet that the children will not go hungry again this year."

Sebastian responded to the appeal in the same manner that St. George would have done.

In haste he buttoned his tunic and went to fetch his rifle.

On his return he found his entire command armed to the teeth, and as eager for the hunt as a pack of foxhounds.

Mohammed waited at their head.

"Lord Manali, we are ready."

"Now, steady on, old chap." Sebastian had no intention of sharing the glory. "This is my show. Too many cooks, what?"

M'tapa stood by, wringing his hands with impatience, listening alternately first to the distant sounds of the garden raiders feeding contentedly in his lands, and then to the undignified wrangling between Sebastian and his Askari, until at last he could bear it no longer. "Lord, already half the millet is eaten. In an hour it will all be gone."

"You're right," Sebastian agreed, and turned angrily on his men. "Shut up, all of you. Shut up!"

They were unaccustomed to this tone of command from Sebastian, and it surprised them into silence.

"Only Mohamed shall accompany me. The rest of you go to your huts and stay there."

It was a working compromise, Sebastian now had Mohamed as ally. Mohammed turned on his comrades and scattered them before falling in beside Sebastian.

"Let us go."

At the head of the main gardens, high on its stilts of poles, stood a rickety platform. This was the watch-tower from which, night and day, a guard was kept over the ripening millet. It was now deserted, the two young guards had left hurriedly at the first sight of the garden raiders. Kudu or waterbuck were one thing, a pair of bad-tempered old elephant bulls were another matter entirely.

Sebastian and Mohammed reached the watch-tower and paused beneath it. Quite clearly now they could hear the rustling and ripping sound of the millet stalks being torn up and trampled.

"Wait here, whispered Sebastian, slinging his rifle over his shoulder, as he turned to the ladder beside him. He climbed slowly and silently to the platform, and from it, looked out over the gardens.

The moon was so brilliant as to throw sharply defined shadows below the tower and the trees. Its light was a soft silver that distorted distance and size, reducing all things to a cold, homogeneous grey.

Beyond the clearing the forest rose like frozen smoke clouds, while the field of standing millet moved in the small night wind, rippling like the surface of a lake.

Humped big and darker grey, standing high above the millet, two great islands in the soft sea of vegetation, the old bulls grazed slowly. Although the nearest elephant was two hundred paces from the tower, the moon was so bright that Sebastian could see clearly as he reached forward with his trunk, coiled it about a clump of the leafy stalks and plucked them easily. Then swaying gently, rocking his massive bulk lazily from side to side, he beat the millet against his lifted foreleg to shake the clinging earth from the roots before lifting it and stuffing it into his mouth. The tattered banners of his ears flapped gently, an untidy tangle of millet leaves hanging from his lips between the long curved shafts of ivory, he moved on, feeding and trampling so that behind him he left a wide path of devastation.

On the open plat-form of the tower, Sebastian felt his stomach contracting, convulsing itself into a hard ball, and his hands on the rifle were unsteady; his breathing whistled softly in his own ears as the elephant thrill came upon him.

Watching those two- huge beasts, he found himself held motionless with an almost mystic sense of awe; a realization of his own insignificance, his presumption in going out against them, armed with this puny weapon of steel and wood. But beneath his reluctance was the tingle of tight nerves that strange blend of fear and eagerness the age-old lust of the hunter. He roused himself and climbed down to where Mohammed waited.

Through the standing corn that reached above their heads, stepping with care between the rows so that they disturb not a single leaf, they moved in towards the centre of the garden. Ears and eyes tuned to their finest limit, breathing controlled so that it did not match the wild pump of his heart, Sebastian homed in on the crackle and rustle made by the nearest bull.

Even though the millet screened him, he could feel the weak wash of the wind move his hair softly, and the first whiff of elephant smell hit him like an open-handed blow in the face. He stooped so suddenly that Mohammed almost bumped into him from behind. They stood crouching, peering ahead into the moving wall of vegetation. Sebastian felt Mohammed lean forward beside him, and heard his whisper breathed softer than the sound of the wind. "Very close now."

Sebastian nodded, and then swallowed jerkily. He could hear clearly the soft slithering scrape of leaves brushing against the rough hide of the old bull. It was feeding down towards them. They were standing directly in the path of its leisurely approach, at any moment now at any moment!

Standing with the rifle lifted protectively, sweat starting to prickle his forehead and upper lip in the cool of the night, his eyes watering with the intensity of his gaze, Sebastian was suddenly aware of massive movement ahead of him. A solid shape through the bank of dancing leaves, and he looked up. High above him it loomed, black and big so that the night sky was blotted out by the spread of its ears, so near that he stood beneath the forward thrust of its tusks, and he could see the trunk uncoil like a fat grey python and grope forward blindly towards him; and ANN beneath it the mouth gaped a little, spilling leaves at the corners.

He lifted the rifle, pointing it upwards without aiming, almost touching the elephant's hanging lower lip with the muzzle, and he fired. The shot was a blunt burst of sound in the night.

The bullet angled up through the pink palate of the animal's mouth, up through the spongy bone of the skull;

mushrooming and exploding, it tore into the fist-sized cell that contained the brain, and burst it into a grey jelly.

Had it passed four inches to either side; had it been deflected by one of the larger bones, Sebastian would have died before he had time to work the bolt of the Mauser, for he stood directly below the outstretched tusks and trunk.

But the old bull reeled backwards from the shot, his trunk falling flabbily against his chest, his forelegs spreading, and his head unbalanced by long tusks sagged forwards, knees collapsed suddenly under him, and he fell so heavily that they heard the thump in the village half a mile away.

"Son of a gun!" gasped Sebastian, staring in disbelief at the dead mountain of flesh. "I did it. Son of a gun, I did it!"

Jubilation, a delirious release from fear and tension, mounted giddily within him. He lifted an arm to hit Mohammed across the back, but he froze in that attitude.

Like the shriek of steam escaping from a burst boiler, the other bull squealed in the moonlight nearby. And they heard the crackling rush of his run in the corn.

"He's coming!" Sebastian looked frantically about him for the sound had no direction.

"No," squawked Mohammed. "He turns against the wind.

First he seeks for the smell of us, and then he will come."

He grabbed Sebastian's arm and clung to him, while they listened to the elephant circling to get down-wind of them.

"Perhaps he will run," whispered Sebastian.

"Not this one. He is old and evil-tempered, and he has killed men before. Now he will hunt us." Mohammed pulled at Sebastian's arm. "We must get out into the open. In this stuff we will have no chance, he will be on tOp Of us before we see him."

They started to run. There is no more piquant sauce for fear than flying feet. Once he starts to run, even a brave man becomes a coward. Within twenty paces, both of them were in headlong flight towards the village. They ran without regard for stealth, fighting their way through the tangle of leaves and stalks, panting wildly. The noise of their flight blanketed the sounds made by the elephant, so they lost all idea of his whereabouts. This sharpened the spurs of terror that drove them, for at any moment he might loom over them.

At last they stumbled out into the open, and paused, panting, sweating heavily, heads swinging from side to side as they tried to place the second bull.

"There!" shouted Mohammed. "He comes," and they heard the shrill pig-squealing, the noisy rush of his charge through the millet.

"Run!" yelled Sebastian, still in the grip of panic, and they ran.

Around a freshly lit bonfire at the edge of the village, waited the rejected Askari and a hundred of Wtopo's men.

They waited in anxiety for they had heard the shot and the fall of the first bull but since then, the squealing and shouting and crashing had left them in some doubt as to what was happening in the gardens.

This doubt was quickly dispelled as Mohammed, closely followed by Sebastian, came down the path towards them, giving a fair imitation of two dogs whose backsides had been dipped in turpentine. A hundred yards behind them the bank of standing millet burst open, and the second bull came out in full charge.

Immense in the firelight, hump-back, shambling in the deceptive speed of his run, streaming his huge ears, each squeal of rage enough to burst the eardrums he bore down on the village.

"Get out! Run!" Sebastian's shouted warning was as wheezy as it was unnecessary. The waiting crowd was no longer waiting, it scattered like a shoal of sardines at the approach of a barracuda.

I Men threw aside their blankets and ran naked; they fell over each other and ran headlong into trees. Two of them ran straight through the middle of the bonfire and emerged on the other side trailing sparks with live coals sticking to their feet. In a wailing hubbub they swept back through the village, and from each hut women with infants bundled under their arms, or slung over their backs, scurried out to join the terrified torrent of humanity.

Still making good time, Sebastian and Mohammed were passing the weaker runners among the villagers, while from behind, the elephant was gaining rapidly on all of them.

With the force and velocity of a great boulder rolling down a steep hillside, the bull reached the first hut of the village and ran into it. The flimsy structure of grass and light poles exploded, bursting asunder without diminishing the fury of the animal's charge. A second hut disintegrated, then a third, before the elephant caught the first human straggler.

She was an old woman, tottering on thin legs, the empty pouches of her breasts flopping against her wrinkled belly, a long monotonous wail of fear keening from the toothless pit of her mouth as she ran.

The bull uncoiled his trunk from his chest, lifted it high above the woman and struck her across the shoulder.

The force of the blow crumpled her, bones snapped in her chest like old dry sticks, and she died before she hit the ground.

The next was a girl. Groggy with sleep, yet her naked body was silver-smooth and graceful in the moonlight, as she emerged from a hut into the path of the bull's charge.

Lightly the thick trunk enfolded her, and then with an effortless flick threw her forty feet into the air.

She screamed, and the sound of the scream knifed through Sebastian's panic. He glanced over his shoulder in time to see the girl thrown high in the night sky. Her limbs were spread-eagled and she spun in the air like a cartwheel before she dropped back to earth falling heavily so that the scream was cut off abruptly. Sebastian stopped running.

Deliberately the elephant knelt over the girl's feebly squirming body, and driving down with his tusks, impaled her through the chest. She hung from the shaft of ivory, squashed and, broken, no longer recognizable as human, until the elephant shook his head irritably and threw her off.

It needed a sight as horrible as this to rally Sebastian's shattered nerves to summon the reserves of his manhood from the far places that fear had scattered them. The rifle was still in his hands, but he was shaking with fear and exertion; sweat had drenched his tunic and plastered his curly hair on to his forehead, and his breath sawed hoarsely in his throat. He stood irresolute, fighting the driving urge to run again.

The bull came on, and now his one tusk was painted glistening black with the girl's blood, and gouts of the same stuff were splattered across his bulging forehead and the bridge of his trunk. It was this that changed Sebastian's fear first to disgust, and then to anger.

He lifted the rifle and it weaved unsteadily in his hands.

He sighted along the barrel and suddenly his vision snapped into sharp focus and his nerves stilled their clamour. He was a man again.

Coldly he Moved the blob of the foresight on to the bull's head, holding it on the deep lateral crease at the root of the trunk, and he squeezed the trigger. The butt jumped solidly into his shoulder, the report stung his eardrums, but he saw the bullet strike exactly where he had aimed it a spurt of dust from the crust of dried mud that caked the animal's head and the skin around it, twitched, the eyelids quivered shut for an instant, then blinked open again.

Without lowering the rifle Sebastian jerked the bolt open, and the empty case ejected crisply, pinging away into the dust. He levered another cartridge into the breach and held his aim into the massive head. Again he fired and the elephant staggered drunkenly. The ears which had been cocked half back, now fanned open and the head swung vaguely in his direction.

He fired again, and the bull winced as the bullet lanced into the bone and gristle of his head, then he turned and came for Sebastian but there was a slackness, a lack of determination in his charge. Aiming now for the chest, handling the rifle with cold method, Sebastian fired again and again, leaning forward against the recoil of the rifle, sighting every shot with care, knowing that each of them was raking the chest Cavity, tearing through lung and heart and liver.

And the bull broke his run into a shuffling, uncertain walk, losing direction, turning away from Sebastian to stand broadside, the barrel of his chest heaving against the agony of his torn vitals.

Sebastian lowered the rifle and with steady fingers pressed fresh cartridges down into the empty magazine. The bull groaned softly and from the tip of his trunk, blood hosed up from the haemorrhaging lungs.

Without pity, cold in his anger, Sebastian lifted the reloaded rifle, and aimed for the dark cavity that nestled in the centre of the huge ear. The bullet struck with the sharp thwack of an axe swung against a tree trunk, and the elephant sagged and fell forward to the brain shot. His weight drove his tusks into the earth, burying them to the lip.

Flour tons of meat delivered fresh to the very centre of the village was good value. The price paid was not exorbitant, M'tapa decided. Three huts could be rebuilt in two days, and only four acres of millet had been destroyed. Furthermore, of the women who had died, one was very old and the other, although she was almost eighteen years old, had never conceived. There was good reason, therefore, to believe she was barren and not a great loss to the community.

Warmed by the early sun, M'tapa was a satisfied man.

With Sebastian beside him, he sat on his carved wooden stool and grinned widely as he watched the fun.

Two dozen of his men, armed with short-handled, long bladed spears, and divested of all clothing, were to act as Bluchers. They were gathered beside the mountainous carcass arguing good-naturedly as they waited for Mohammed and his four assistants to remove the tusks.

Around them, in a wider circle, waited the rest of the Villagers, and while they waited, they sang. A drum hammered out the rhythm for them, and the clap of hands and the stamp of feet confirmed it. The masculine bass was a foundation from which the clear, sweet soprano of the women soared, and sank, and soared again.

Beneath Mohammed's patiently chipping axe, first the one tusk and then the other were freed from the bone that held them, and, with two Askari staggering under the weight, they were carried to where Sebastian sat, and laid with ceremony at his feet.

It occurred to Sebastian that four big tusks carried home to Lalapanzi might in some measure mollify Flynn O'Flynn.

They would at least cover the costs of the expedition. The thought cheered him up considerably, and he turned to M'tapa. "Old one, you may take the meat."

"Lord." In gratitude, M'tapa clapped his hands at the level of his chest, and then turned to squawk an order at the waiting Bluchers.

A roar of excitement and meat hunger went up from the crowd as one of them scrambled up on to the carcass, and drove his spear through the thick grey hide behind the last rib. Then walking backwards, he drew it down towards the haunch and the razor steel sliced deep. Two others made the lateral incisions, opening a square flap a trapdoor into the belly cavity from which the fat coils of the viscera bulged, pink and blue and glossy wet in the early morning sunlight. In mounting eagerness, four others dragged from the square hole the contents of the belly, and then, while Sebastian stared in disbelief, they wriggled into the opening and disappeared. He could hear their muffled shouts reverberating within the carcass as they competed for the prize of the liver. Within minutes one of them reappeared, clutching against his chest a slippery lump of tattered, purple liver. Like a maggot, he came squirming out of the wound, painted over-all with a thick coating of dark red blood. It had matted in the woolly cap of his hair, and turned his face into a gruesome mask from which only his teeth and his eyes gleamed white. Carrying the mutilated liver, laughing in triumph, he ran through the crowd to where Sebastian sat.. The offering embarrassed Sebastian. More than that, it made his gorge rise, and he felt his stomach heave as it was thrust almost into his lap.

"Eat," M'tapa encouraged him. "It will make you strong.

It will sharpen the spear of your manhood. Ten, twenty women will not tire you."

It was M'tapa's opinion that Sebastian needed this type of tonic. He had heard from his brother Saali, and from the chiefs along the river, about Sebastian's lack of initiative.

"Like this." M'tapa cut a hunk of the liver and popped it into his mouth. He chewed heartily, and the juice wet his lips as he grinned in appreciation. "Very good." He thrust a piece into Sebastian's face. "Eat."

"No." Sebastian's gorge pressed heavily on the back of his throat, and he stood up hurriedly. M'tapa shrugged, and ate it himself. Then he shouted to the Bluchers to continue their work.

In a miraculously short space of time the huge carcass disintegrated under the blades of the spears and machetes.

It was a labour in which the entire village joined. With a dozen strokes of the knife, a Blucher would free a large hunk of flesh and throw it down to one of the women. She, in turn, would hack it into smaller pieces and pass these on to the children. Squealing with excitement, they would run with them to the hastily erected drying racks, deposit them and come scampering back for more.

Sebastian had recovered from his initial revulsion and now he laughed to see how every mouth was busy, chewing as they worked and yet at the same time managing to emit a surprising volume of noise.

Among the milling feet the dogs snarled and yipped, and gulped the scraps. Without interrupting their feeding, they dodged the casual kicks and blows that were aimed at them.

Into the midst of this cosy, domestic scene entered Commissioner Herman Fleischer with ten armed Askari.

erman Fleischer was tired and there were blisters on his feet from the series of forced marches that had brought him to M'tapa's village.

A month before he had left his headquarters at Mahengeto begin the annual tax tour of his area. As was his custom, he had started in the northern province, and it had been an unusually successful expedition. The wooden chest with the rampant black eagle painted on its lid had grown heavier with each day's journey. Herman had amused himself by calculating how many more years service in Africa would be necessary before he could resign and return home to Plaven and settle down on the estate he planned to buy.

Three more years as fruitful as this, he decided, would be sufficient. It was a bitter shame that he had not been able to capture O'Flynn's dhow on the Rufiji thirteen months previously that would have advanced his date of departure by a full twelve months. Thinking about it stirred his residual anger at that episode, and he placated it by doubling the hut tax on the next village he visited. This raised such a howl of protest from the village headman that Herman nodded at his sergeant Of Askari, who began ostentatiously to unpack the rope from his saddlebag.

"O fat and beautiful bull elephant," the headman changed his mind hastily. "If you will wait but a little while, I will bring the money to you. There is a new hut, without lice or fleas, in which you may rest Your lovely body, and I will send a young girl to you with beer for Your thirst."

"Good," agreed Herman. "While I rest, my Askari will stay with you." He nodded at the sergeant to bind the chief, then waddled away to the hut.

The headman sent two of his sons to dig beneath a certain tree in the forest, and they returned an hour later with mournful faces, carrying a heavy skin bag.

Contentedly Herman Fleischer signed an official receipt for ninety per cent of the contents of the bag Fleischer allowed himself a ten per cent handling fee and the headman, who could not read a word of German, accepted it with relief.

"I will stay tonight in your village," Herman announced.

"Send the same girl to cook my food."

The runner from the South arrived in the night, and disturbed Herman Fleischer at a most inopportune moment.

The news he carried was even more disturbing. From his description of the new German commissioner who was doing Herman's job for him in the southern province, and shooting up the countryside in the process, Herman immediately recognized the young Englishman whom he had last seen on the deck of a dhow in the Rufiji delta.

Leaving the bulk of his retinue, including the bearers of the tax chest, to follow him at their best speed, Herman mounted at midnight on his white donkey and, taking ten Askari with him, he rode southwards on a storm patrol.

Five nights later, in those still dark hours that precede the dawn, Herman was camped near the Rovuma river when he was awakened by his sergeant.

"What is it?" Grumpy with fatigue, Herman sat up and lifted the side of his mosquito net.

"We heard the sound of gunfire. A single shot."

"Where?" He was instantly awake, and reaching for his boots.

"From the South, towards the village of M'tapa on the Rovuma."

Fully dressed now, Herman waited anxiously, straining his ears against the small sounds of the African night. "Are you sure... he began as he turned to his sergeant, but he did not finish. Faintly, but unmistakable in the darkness, they heard the pop, pop, pop of a distant rifle a pause and then another shot.

"Break camp," bellowed Herman. "Rasch! You black heathen. Rasch!"

The sun was well up by the time they reached M'tapa's village. They came upon it suddenly through the gardens of tall millet that screened their approach. Herman Fleischer paused to throw out his Askari in a line of skirmishers before closing in on the cluster of huts, but when he reached the fringe, he stopped once more in surprise at the extraordinary spectacle which was being enacted in the open square of the village.

The dense knot of half-naked black people that swarmed over the remains of the elephant was perfectly oblivious of Herman's presence until at last he filled his lungs, and then emptied them again in a roar that carried over the hubbub of shouts and laughter. Instantly a vast silence fell upon the gathering, every head turned towards Herman and from each head eyes bulged in horrific disbelief

"Bwana intarnbu," a small voice broke the silence at last.

"Lord of the rope. "They knew him well.

"What?" Herman began, and then gasped in outrage as he noticed in the crowd a black man he had never seen before, dressed in the full uniform of German Askari. "You!"

he shouted, pointing an accusing finger, but the man whirled and ducked away behind the screen of blood smeared black bodies. "Stop him!" Herman fumbled with the flap of his holster. Movement caught his eye and he turned to see another pseudo-Askari running away between the huts. "There's another one! Stop him! Sergeant, Sergeant, get your men here!"

The initial shock that had held them frozen was now past, and the crowd broke and scattered. Once again, Herman Fleischer gasped in outrage as he saw, for the first time, a figure sitting on a carved native stool on the far side of the square. A figure in an outlandish uniform of bright but travel-stained blue, fragged with gold, his legs clad in high jackboots, and on his head the dress helmet of an illustrious Prussian regiment.

"Englishman!" Despite the disguise, Herman recognized him. He had finally succeeded in unbuttoning the flap of his holster, and now he withdrew his Luger. "Englishman!"

He repeated the insult and lifted the pistol.

With the quickness of mind for which he was noted, Sebastian sat bewildered by this unforeseen turn of events, but when Herman showed him the working end of the Luger, he realized that it was time to take his leave, and he attempted to leap nimbly to his feet. However, the spurs on his boots became entangled once more and he went backwards over the stool. The bullet hissed harmlessly through the empty space where he would have been standing.

"God damn!" Herman fired again, and the bullet kicked a burst of splinters out of the heavy wooden stool behind which Sebastian was lying. This second failure aroused in Herman Fleischer the blinding rage which spoiled his aim for the next two shots he fired, as Sebastian went on hands and knees around the corner of the nearest hut.

Behind the hut, Sebastian jumped to his feet and set off at a run. His main concern was to get out of the village and into the bush. In his ears echoed Flynn O'Flynn's advice.

"Make for the river. Go straight for the river."

And he was so occupied with it that, when he charged around the side of the next hut, he could not check himself in time to avoid collision with one of Herman Fleischer's Askari, who was coming in the opposite direction. Both of them went down together in an untidy heap, and the steel helmet fell forward over Sebastian's eyes. As he struggled into a sitting position, he removed the helmet and found the man's woolly black head in front of him. It was ideally positioned and Sebastian was holding the heavy helmet above it. With the strength of both his arms, he brought the helmet down again, and it clanged loudly against the Askari's skull. With a grunt the Askari sagged backwards and lay quietly in the dust. Sebastian placed the helmet over his sleeping face, picked up the man's rifle from beside him and got to his feet once more.

He stood crouching in the shelter of the hut while he tried to make sense of the chaos around him. Through the pandemonium set up by the panic-stricken villagers, who were milling about with all the purpose of a flock of sheep attacked by wolves, Sebastian could hear the bellowed commands of Herman Fleischer, and the answering shouts of the German Askari. Rifle-fire cracked and whined, to be answered by renewed outbursts of screaming.

Sebastian's first impulse was to hide in one of the huts but he realized this would be futile. At the best it would only delay his capture.

No, he must get out of the village. But the thought of covering the hundred yards of open ground to the shelter of the nearest trees, while a dozen Askari shot at him, was most unattractive.

At this moment Sebastian became aware of an unpleasant warmth in his feet, and he looked down to find that he was standing in the live ashes of a cooking fire. The leather of his jackboots was already beginning to char and smoke. He stepped back hurriedly, and the smell of burning leather acted as a laxative for the constipation of his brain.

From the hut beside him he snatched a handful of thatch and stooped to thrust it into the fire. The dry grass burst into flame, and Sebastian held the torch to the wall of the hut. Instantly fire bloomed and shot upwards. With the torch in his hand, Sebastian ducked across the narrow opening to the next hut and set fire to that also.

"Son of a gun!" exulted Sebastian as great oily billows of smoke obscured the sun and limited his field of vision to ten paces.

Slowly he moved forward in the rolling cloud of smoke, setting fire to each hut he passed, and delighted in the frustrated bellows of Germanic rage he heard behind him.

Occasionally ghostly figures scampered past him in the acrid half-darkness but none of them paid him the slightest attention, and each time Sebastian relaxed the pressure of his forefinger on the trigger of the Mauser, and moved on.

He reached the last hut and paused there to gather himself for the final sprint across open ground to the edge of the millet garden. Through the eddying bank of smoke, the mass of dark green vegetation from which he had fled in terror not many hours before, now seemed as welcoming as the arms of his mother.

Movement near him in the smoke, and he swung the Mauser to cover it; he saw the square outline of a kepi and the sparkle of metal buttons, and his finger tightened on the trigger.

"Manalli!"

"Mohammed! Good God, I nearly killed you." Sebastian threw up the rifle barrel as he recognized him.

"Quickly! They are close behind me." Mohammed snatched at his arm and dragged him forward. The jackboots pinched his toes and thumped like the hooves of a galloping buffalo as Sebastian ran. From the huts behind them a voice shouted urgently and, immediately afterwards, came the vicious crack of a Mauser and the shrill whinny of the ricochet.

Sebastian had ale ad of ten paces on Mohammed as he plunged into the bank of leaves and millet stalks.

What should we do now, Manali?" Mohammed asked, and the expression on the faces of the two other men echoed the question with pathetic trust. A benevolent chance had reunited Sebastian with the remnants of his command. During the flight through the millet gardens, with random rifle-fire clipping the leaves about their heads, Sebastian had literally fallen over these two. At the time they were engaged in pressing their bellies and their faces hard against the earth, and it had taken a number of lusty kicks with the jackboot to get them up and moving.

Since then Sebastian, mindful of Flynn's advice, had cautiously and circuitously led them down to the landing place on the bank of the Rovuma. He arrived to find that Fleischer's Askari, by using the direct route and without the necessity of concealing themselves, had arrived before him.

From the cover of the reed-banks Sebastian watched dejectedly, as they used an axe to knock the bottoms out of the dug-out canoes that were drawn up on the little white beach.

"Can we swim across?" he asked Mohammed in a whisper, and Mohammed's face crumpled with horror, as he considered the suggestion. Both of them peered out through the reeds across a quarter of a mile of deep water that flowed so fast, its surface war-dimpled with tiny whirlpools.

"No,"said Mohammed with finality.

"Too far? "asked Sebastian hopelessly.

"Too far, Too fast. Too deep. Too many crocodiles,"

agreed Mohammed, and in an unspoken but mutual desire to get away from the river and the Askari, they crawled out of the reed-bank and crept away inland.

In the late afternoon they were lying up in a bushy gully about two miles from the river and an equal distance from M'tapa's village.

"What should we do now, Manali?" Mohammed repeated his question, and Sebastian cleared his throat before answering.

"Well..." he said and paused while his wide brow wrinkled in the agony of creative thought. Then it came to him with all the splendour of a sunrise. "We'll just jolly well have to find some other way of getting across the river." He said it with the air of a man well pleased with his own perspicacity. "What do you suggest, Mohammed?"

A little surprised to find the ball returned so neatly into his own court, Mohammed remained silent.

"A raft?" hazarded Sebastian. The lack of tools, material and opportunity to build one was so obvious, that Mohammed did not deign to reply. He shook his head.

"No," agreed Sebastian. "Perhaps you are right." Again the classic beauty of his features was marred by a scowl of concentration. At last he demanded, "There are other villages along the river?"

"Yes," Mohammed conceded. "But the Askari will visit each of them and destroy the canoes. Also they will tell the headmen who we are, and threaten them with the rope."

"But they cannot cover the whole river. It has a frontier of five or six hundred miles. We'll just keep walking until we find a canoe. It may take us a long time but we'll find one eventually."

"If the Askari don't catch us first."

"They'll expect us to stay close to the border. We'll make a detour well inland, and march for five or six days before we come back to the river again. We'll rest now and move tonight."

Heading on a diagonal line of march away from the Rovuma and deeper into German territory, moving north-west along a well defined footpath, the four of them kept walking all that night. As the slow hours passed so the pace flagged and twice Sebastian noticed one or other of his men wander off the path at an angle until suddenly they started and looked about in surprise, before hurrying back to join the others. It puzzled him and he meant to ask them what they were doing, but he was tired and the effort of speech was too great. An hour later he found the reason for their behaviour.

Plodding along, with the movement of his legs becoming completely automatic, Sebastian was slowly overcome by a state of gentle well-being. He surrendered to it and let the warm, dark mists of oblivion wash over his mind.

The sting of a thorn branch across his cheek jerked him back to consciousness and he looked about in bewilderment.

Ten yards away on his flank, Mohammed and the two gun boys walked along the path in single file, their faces turned towards him with expressions of mild interest in the moonlight. It took some moments for Sebastian to realize that he had fallen asleep on his feet. Feeling a complete ass, he trotted back to take his place at the head of the line.

When the fat silver moon sank below the trees, they kept going by the faint glow of reflected light, but slowly that waned until the footpath hardly showed at their feet.

Sebastian decided that dawn could be only an hour away and it was time to halt. He stopped and was about to speak when Mohammed's clutching hand on his shoulder prevented him.

"Manali!" There was a to tie in Mohammed's whisper that cautioned him, and Sebastian felt his nerves jerk taut.

"What is it?" he breathed, protectively unslinging the Mauser.

"Look. There ahead of us."

Screwing up his eyes Sebastian searched the blackness ahead, and it was a long time before the faint ruddiness in the solid blanket of darkness registered itself upon the exhausted retinas of his eyes. "Yes!" he whispered. "What is it?"

"A fire," breathed Mohammed. "There is someone camped across the path in front of us."

"Askari?"asked Sebastian.

"Perhaps."

Peering at the ruby puddle of dying coals, Sebastian felt the hair on the back of his neck stir and come erect with alarm. He was fully awake now. "We must go around them."

"No. They will see our spoor in the dust of the path and they will follow us," Mohammed demurred.

"What then?"

"First let me see how many there are."

Without waiting for Sebastian's permission, Mohammed slipped away and disappeared into the night like aleopard.

Five anxious minutes Sebastian waited. Once he thought he heard a scuffling sound but he was not certain.

Mohammed's shape materialized again beside him. "Ten of them," he reported. "Two Askari and eight bearers. One of the Askari sat guard by the fire. He saw me, so I killed him."

"Good God!" Sebastian's voice rose higher. "You did what?"

"I killed him. But do not speak so loud."

"How?"

"With my knife."

"Lest he kill me first."

"And the other?"

"Him also."

"You killed both of them?" Sebastian was appalled.

"Yes, and took their rifles. Now it is safe to go on. But the bearers have with them many cases. It comes to me that this party follows after Bwana Intambu, the German commissioner, and that they carry with them all his goods."

"But you shouldn't have killed them," protested Sebastian. "You could have just tied them up or something."

"Manali, you argue like a woman," Mohammed snapped impatiently, and then went on with his original line of thought. "Among the cases is one that by its size I think is the box for the tax money. The one Askari slept with his back against it as though to give it special care."

"The tax money?"

"Yes.

"Well, son of a gun!" Sebastian's scruples dissolved and in the darkness his expression was suddenly transformed into that of a small boy on Christmas morning.

They woke the German bearers by standing over them and prodding them with the rifle barrels. Then they hustled them out of their blankets and herded them into a small group, bewildered and shivering miserably in the chill of dawn. Wood was heaped on the fire; it burned up brightly, and by its light Sebastian examined the booty.

The one Askari had bled profusely from the throat on to the small wooden chest. Mohammed took him by the heels and dragged him out of the way, then used his blanket to wipe the chest clean.

"Manali," he said with reverence. "See the big lock. See the bird of the Kaiser painted on the lid..." He stooped over the chest and took a grip on the handles, but most of all, feel the weight of it."

Amongst the other equipment around the fire, Mohammed found a thick coil of one-inch manila rope. A commodity which was essential equipment on any of Herman Fleischer's safaris. With it, Mohammed roped the bearers together, at waist level, allowing enough line between each of them to make concerted movement possible but preventing individual flight.

"Why are you doing that?" Sebastian asked with interest, through a mouthful of blood sausage and black bread. Most of the other boxes were filled with food, and Sebastian was breakfasting well and heartily.

"So they cannot escape."

"We're not taking them with us are we?"

"Who else will carry all this? "Mohammed asked patiently.

Five days later Sebastian was seated in the bows of a long dug-out canoe, with the charred soles of his boots set firmly on the chest that lay in the bilges. He was eating with relish a thick sandwich of polo ny and picked onions, wearing a change of clean underwear and socks that were a few sizes too large, and there was clutched in his left hand an open bottle of Hansa beer all these with the courtesy of Commissioner Fleischer.

The paddlers were singing with unforced gaiety, for the hiring fee that Sebastian had paid them would buy each of them a new wife at least.

Hugging the bank of the Rovurna on the Portuguese side, driven on by willing paddles and the eager current, in twelve hours they covered the distance that it had taken Sebastian and his heavily-laden bearers five days on foot.

The canoe deposited Sebastian's party at the landing opposite M'tapa's village, only ten miles from Lalapanzi.

They walked that distance without resting and arrived after nightfall.

The windows of the bungalow were darkened, and the whole camp slept. After cautioning them to silence, Sebastian drew his depleted band up on the front lawn with the tax chest set prominently in front of them. He was proud of his success and wanted to achieve the appropriate mood for his home-coming. Having set the stage, he went up on to the stoep, of the bungalow and tip, toed towards the front door with the intention of awakening the household by hammering upon it dramatically.

However, there was a chair on the stoep, and Sebastian tripped over it. He fell heavily. The chair clattered and the rifle slipped from his shoulder and rang on the stone flags.

Before Sebastian could recover his feet, the door was flung open and through it appeared Flynn O'Flynn in his night-shirt and armed with a double-barrelled shotgun.

"Caught you, you bastard! "he roared and lifted the shotgun.

Sebastian heard the click of the safety-catch and scrambled to his knees. "Don't shoot! Flynn, it's me."

The shotgun wavered a little. "Who are you and what do you want?"

"It's me Sebastian."

"Bassie?" Flynn lowered the shotgun uncertainly. "It can't be. Stand up, let's have a look at yOU."

Sebastian obeyed with alacrity.

"Good God," Flynn swore in amazement, "It is you. Good God! We heard that Fleischer caught you at M'tapa's village a week ago. We heard he'd nob bled you for keeps!" He came forward with his right hand extended in welcome. "You made it, did you? Well done, Bassie boy."

Before Sebastian could accept Flynn's hand, Rosa came through the doorway, brushed past Flynn, and almost knocked Sebastian down again. With her arms locked around his chest and her cheek pressed to his unshaven cheek, she kept repeating, "You're safe! Oh Sebastian, you're safe."

Acutely aware of the fact that Rosa wore nothing under the thin night-gown, and that everywhere he put his hands they came in contact with thinly-veiled warm flesh, Sebastian grinned sheepishly at Flynn over her shoulder.

"Excuse me, he said.

His first two kisses were off target for she was moving around a lot. One caught her on the eye, the next on her eyebrow, but the third was right between the lips.

When it last they were forced to separate or suffocate,

Rosa gasped, "I thought YOu were dead."

"All right, missie," growled Flynn. "You can go and put some clothes on now."

Breakfast at Lalapanzi that morning was a festive affair.

Flynn took advantage of his daughter's weakened condition and brought a bottle of gin to the table. Her protests were half-hearted, and later with her own hands she poured a little into Sebastian's tea to brace it.

They ate on the stoep in golden sunshine that filtered through the bougainvillaea creeper. A flock of glossy starlings hopped and chirruped on the lawns, and an oriel sang from the wild fig-trees. All nature conspired to make Sebastian's victory feast a success, while Rosa and Nanny did their best from the kitchen drawing upon the remains of Herman Fleischer's supplies that Sebastian had brought home with him.

Flynn O'Flynn's eyes were bloodshot and underhung with plum-coloured pouches, for he had been up all night counting the contents of the German tax chest and working out his accounts by the light of a hurricane lamp. Nevertheless, he was in a merry mood made merrier by the cups of fortified tea on which he was breakfasting. He joined warmly in the chorus of praise and felicitation to Sebastian Old, smith that was being sung by Rosa O'Flynn.

"You turned up one for the book, so help me, Bassie," he chortled at the end of the meal. "I'd just love to hear how Fleischer is going to explain this one to Governor Schee.

Oh, I'd love to be there when he tells him about the tax money son of a gun, it'll nigh kill them both."

"While you're on the subject of money," Rosa smiled at Flynn, "have you worked out how much Sebastian's share comes to, Daddy?" Rosa only used Flynn's paternal title when she was extremely well-disposed towards him.

"That I have," admitted Flynn, and the sudden shiftiness of his eyes aroused Rosa's suspicions. Her lips pursed a little.

"And how much is it? "she asked in the syrupy tone which Flynn recognized as the equivalent of the blood roar of a wounded lioness.

"Sure now, and who wants to be spoiling a lovely day with the talking of business?" Under pressure, Flynn exaggerated the brogue in his voice in the hope that Rosa would find it beguiling. A forlorn hope.

"How much? "demanded Rosa, and he told her.

There was a sickly silence. Sebastian paled under his sunburn and opened his mouth to protest. On the strength of his half share, he had the previous night made to Rosa O'Flynn a serious proposal, which she had accepted.

"Leave this to me, Sebastian," she whispered and laid a restraining hand on- his knee as she turned back to her father. "You'll let us have a look at the accounts, won't you?"

Still syrupy sweet.

"Sure and I will. They're all straight and square."

The document that Flynn O'Flynn produced under the main heading, "Joint Venture Between F. O'Flynn, Esq and S. Oldsmith, Esq and Others. German East Africa. Period May 15, 1913, to August 21, 1913," showed that he belonged to an unorthodox school of accountancy.

The contents of the tax chest had been converted to English sterling at the rates laid down by Pear's Almanac for lyp, 1893. Flynn set great store by this particular publication.

From the gross proceeds of 4,652 pounds Flynn had deducted his own fifty per cent share and the ten per cent of the other partners the Portuguese Chef D'Post and the Governor of Mozambique. From the balance he had then deducted the losses incurred on the Rufiji expedition (for which separate account addressed to German East African Administration). From there he had gone on to charge the expenses of the second expedition, not forgetting such items as:

To L. Parbhoo (Tailor) 15.10 pounds. To One German Dress HelmetE 5.10 pounds To Five Uniforms (Askari)

2.10 pounds each 12.10 pounds. To Five Mauser Rifles 10 pounds each 50 pounds. -.

To Six Hundred and Twenty-Five Rounds 7men Ammunition E22.10 To Advance re travelling expenses, One Hundred Escudos made to S. Oldsmith, Esq. f, 1. 5.

Finally, Sebastian's half share of the net losses amounted to a little under twenty pounds.

"Don't worry," Flynn assured him magnanimously. "I don't expect you to pay it now we'll just deduct it from your share of the profits of the next expedition."

"But, Flynn, I thought you said well, I mean, you told me I had a half share."

"And so you have, Bassie, and so you have."

"You said we were equal partners."

"You must have misunderstood me, boy. I said a half share and that means after expenses. It's just a great pity there was such a large accumulated loss to bring forward."

While they discussed this, Rosa was busy with a stub of a pencil on the reverse side of the account.

A few minutes later she thrust the result across the breakfast table at Flynn. She said, "And that's the way I work it out."

Rosa O'Flynn was a student of the "One-for-you-one-for, me" school, and her reckonings were much simpler than those of her father.

With a cry of anguish, Flynn O'Flynn lodged objection.

"You don't understand business."

"But I recognize crookery when I see it," Rosa flashed back.

"You'd call your old father a crook?"

"Yes."

"I've a damn good mind to take the kiboko to you. You're not too big and Uppity that I can't warm your tail up good."

"You just try id' said Rosa, and Flynn back pedalled

"Anyway, what would Bassie do with all that money? It's no good for a youngster. It would spoil him."

"He'd marry me with it. That's what he'd do with it."

Flynn made a noise as though there were a fish-bone stuck in his throat, his face mottled over with emotion and he swung ominously in Sebastian's direction. "So!"he rasped.

"I thought so!"

"Now steady on, old chap," Sebastian tried to soothe him.

"You come into my home and act like the king of bloody England. You try to fraudulently embezzle my money but that's not enough! Oh no! That's not a bloody "enough.

You've also got to start tampering with my daughter just to round things off."

"Don't be coarse," said Rosa.

"That's rich don't be coarse, she says, and just what exactly have you two been up to behind my back?"

Sebastian stood up from the breakfast table with dignity.

"I will not have you speak so of a lady in my presence, sir.

Especially of the lady who has done me the great honour of consenting to become my Wife." He begun unbuttoning his jacket. "Will you step into the garden with me, and give me satisfaction?"

"Come along, then." As Flynn lumbered out of his chair he made as if to pass Sebastian, but at that moment Sebastian's arms were behind him, still bound by the sleeves of his jacket as he attempted to shrug it off. Flynn sidestepped swiftly, paused a moment as he took his aim, and then drove his left fist into Sebastian's stomach.

"Oaf!" said Sebastian, and leaned forward involuntarily to meet Flynn's other fist as it came up from the level of his knees. It took Sebastian between the eyes, and he changed direction abruptly and ran backwards across the veranda.

The low Wooden railing caught him behind the knees and he toppled slowly into the flower-beds below the stoep.

"You've killed him, , wailed Rosa, and picked up the heavy china tea-pot.

"I hope so," said Flynn, and ducked as the pot flew towards his head, passed over it and burst against the wall of the stoep, spraying tea and steam.

There was an ominous stirring among the flowers.

presently Sebastian's head emerged with blue hydrangea petals festively strewn in his hair and the skin around both eyes fast swelling and chameleoning to a creditable match with the petals. "I say, Flynn. That wasn't fair," he announced.

"He wasn't looking," Rosa accused. "You hit him before he was ready."

"Well, he's looking now," roared Flynn and went down the veranda stairs like a charging hippopotamus. From the hydrangeas, Sebastian rose to meet him and took up the classic stance of the ring fighter. "Marquis of Queensberry rules? he cautioned as Flynn closed in.

Flynn signified his rejection of the Marquis's code by kicking Sebastian on the shin. Sebastian yelped and hopped one-legged out of the flower-bed, while Flynn pursued him with a further series of lusty kicks. Placing his boot twice in succession into Sebastian's posterior, the third kick, however, missed and the force behind it was sufficient to throw Flynn on to his back. He sprawled on the lawn, and the pause while he scrambled to his knees gave Sebastian respite to ready himself for the next round.

Both his eyes had puffed and he was experiencing discomfort from his rear end; nevertheless, he stood once again with his left arm extended and the right crossed over his chest. Glancing beyond Flynn, Sebastian saw his fiancee descending from the veranda. She was armed with a bread knife

"Rosa!" Sebastian was alarmed. It was clear that Rosa would not stop at patricide to protect her love. "Rosa! What are you doing with that knife?"

"I'm going to stick him with it!"

"You'll do no such thing," said Sebastian, but Flynn did not have the same faith in his daughter's restraint. Very hurriedly, he moved into a defensive position behind Sebastian. It took a a full minute for Sebastian to persuade Rosa that her assistance was not necessary and that he was capable of handling the situation on his own. Reluctantly, Rosa retreated to the veranda.

"Thanks, Bassie," said Flynn, and kicked him in his already bruised behind. It was extremely painful.

Very few people had ever seen Sebastian Oldsmith lose his temper. The last time it had happened was eight years previously; the two sixth-formers who had invoked it by forcing Sebastian's head into a toilet bowl and flushing the cistern, were both hospitalized for a short period.

This time there were more witnesses. Attracted by the cries and crash of breaking crockery, Flynn's entire following, including Mohammed and his Askari, had arrived from the compound and were assembled at the top of the lawn.

They watched in breathless wonder.

From the grandstand of the veranda, Rosa, her eyes sparkling with the strange feminine ferocity that arises in even the mildest women when their man fights for them, exhorted Sebastian to even greater violence.

Like all great storms, it did not last long, and when it was over the silence was appalling. Flynn lay stretched full length on the lawn. His eyes closed, his breathing snored softly in his throat, bursting from his nose in a froth of red bubbles.

Mohammed and five of his men carried him towards the bungalow. He lay massive on their shoulders with the bulge of his belly rising and falling softly, and an expression of unuSUal peace on his bloody face.

Standing alone on the lawn, Sebastian's features were contorted with savagery and his whole body shook as though he was in high fever. Then, watching them carry the huge, inert body, suddenly Sebastian's mood was past. His expression changed first to concern, and then to gentle dismay. "I say..." his voice was husky and he took a pace after them. "You shouldn't have kicked me." His hands opened helplessly, and he lifted them in a gesture of appeal.

"You shouldn't have done it."

Rosa came down from the veranda and walked slowly towards him. She stopped and looked up at him, half in awe, half in glowing pride. "You were magnificent," she whispered. "Like a lion." She reached up with both arms around his neck, and before she kissed him she spoke again.

"I love you, "she said.

Sebastian had very little luggage to take with him. He was wearing everything he possessed. Rosa on the other hand had boxes of it, enough to give full employment to the dozen bearers that were assembled on the lawn in front of the bungalow.

"Well," murmured Sebastian, "I suppose we should start moving."

"Yes," whispered Rosa, and looked at the gardens of Lalapanzi. Although she had suggested this departure, now that the time had come she was uncertain. This place had been her home since childhood. Here she had spun a cocoon that had shielded and protected her, and now that the time had come to emerge from it, she was afraid. She took Sebastian's arm, drawing strength from him.

"Don't you want to say good-bye to your father?" Sebastian looked down at her with the tender protectiveness that was such a new and delightful sensation for him.

Rosa hesitated a moment, and then realized that it would take very little to weaken her resolve. Her dutiful affection for Flynn, which at the moment was submerged beneath the tide of anger and resentment, could easily re-emerge should Flynn employ a little of his celebrated blarney. "No,"

she said.

"I suppose it's best! Sebastian agreed. He glanced guiltily towards the bungalow where Flynn was, presumably, still lying in state attended by the faithful Mohammed. "But do yOU think he'll be all right? I mean, I did hit him rather hard, you know."

"He'll be all right," Rosa said without conviction, and tugged at his sleeve. Together they moved to take their places at the head of the little column of bearers.

Kneeling on the floor of the bedroom, below the window sill, peering with one swollen eye through a slit in the curtain, Flynn saw this decisive move. "My God," he whispered in concern. "The young idiots are really leaving."

Rosa O'Flynn was his last link with that frail little Portuguese girl. The one person in his life that Flynn had truly loved. Now that he was about to lose her also, Flynn was suddenly aware of his feeling for his daughter. The prospect of never seeing her again filled him with dismay.

As for Sebastian Oldsmith, here no sentiment clouded his reasoning. Sebastian was a valuable business asset.

Through him, Flynn could put into operation a number of schemes that he had shelved as involving disproportionate personal risk. In these last few years Flynn had become singly aware of the depreciation that time and large inc rea quantities of raw spirit had wrought in his eyes and legs and nerves. Sebastian Oldsmith had eyes like a fish eagle, legs like a prize fighter, and no nerves at all that Flynn could discern. Flynn needed him.

Flynn opened his mouth and groaned. It was the throaty death rattle of an old bull buffalo. Peering through the curtain, Flynn grinned as he saw the young couple freeze, and stand tense and still in the sunlight. Their faces were turned towards the bungalow, and in spite of himself, Flynn had to admit they made a handsome pair; Sebastian tall above her with the body of a gladiator and the face of a poet; Rosa small beside him but with the full bosom and wide hips of womanhood. The slippery black cascade of her hair glowed in the sun, and her dark eyes were big with concern.

Flynn groaned again but softly this time. A breathless, husky sound, the last breath of a dying man, and instantly Rosa and Sebastian were running towards the bungalow.

Her skirts gathered up above her knees, long legs flying, Rosaled Sebastian up onto the veranda.

Flynn had just sufficient time to return to his bed and compose his limbs and his face into the attitude of one fast sinking towards the abyss.

"Daddy!" Rosaleaned over him, and Flynn opened his eyes uncertainly. For a moment he did not seem to recognize her, then he whispered, "My little girl," so faintly she hardly caught the words.

"Oh, Daddy, what is it?" She knelt beside him.

"My heart." His hand crawled up like a hairy spider across his belly and clutched weakly at his hairy chest. "Like a knife. A hot knife."

There was a terrible silence in the room, and then Flynn spoke again. "I wanted to... give you my... my blessing. I wish happiness for you... wherever you go. "The effort of speech was too mUch, and for a while he lay gasping. "Think of your old Daddy sometimes. Say a prayer for him."

A fat, tiny tear broke from the corner of Rosa's eye and slid down her cheek.

"Bassie, my boy." Slowly Flynn's eyes sought him, found him, and focused with difficulty. "Don't blame yourself for this. I was an old man anyway I've had my life." He panted a little and then went on painfully. "Look after her. Look after my little Rosa. You are my son now. I've never had a son."

"I didn't know... I had no idea that your heart... Flynn, I'm dreadfully sorry. Forgive me."

Flynn smiled, a brave little smile that just touched his lips. He lifted his hand weakly and held it out towards Sebastian. While Sebastian clasped his hand, Flynn considered offering him the money that had been the cause of the dispute as a dying man's gift but he manfully restrained himself from such extravagance. Instead he whispered, "I would like to have seen my grandson, but no matter. Good, bye, my boy."

"You'll see him, Flynn. I promise you that. We'll stay, won't we, Rosa? We'll stay with him."

"Yes, we'll stay, said Rosa. "We won't leave you, Daddy."

"My children." Flynn sank back and closed his eyes.

Thank God, he hadn't offered the money. A peaceful little smile hovered around his mouth. "You've made an old man very happy."

Flynn made a strong come-back from the edge of death, so strong, in fact, that it aroused Rosa's suspicions. However, she let it pass for she was happy to have avoided the necessity of leaving Lalapanzi. In addition, there was another matter which was taking up a lot of her attention.

Since she had said good-bye to Sebastian at the start of his tax tour, Rosa had been aware of the cessation of certain womanly functions of her body. She consulted Nanny who, in turn, consulted the local nungane who, in his turn, opened the belly of a chicken, and consulted its entrails.

His findings were conclusive, and Nanny reported back to Rosa, without disclosing the source of her information, for Little Long Hair had an almost blasphemous lack of faith in the occult.

Delighted, Rosa took Sebastian for a walk down the valley, and when they reached the waterfall where it had all begun, she stood on tip-toe, put both arms around his neck and whispered in his ear. She had to repeat herself for her voice was muffled with breathless laughter.

"You're joking," gasped Sebastian, and then blushed bright crimson.

"I'm not, you know."

"Good grief," said Sebastian; and then, groping for some, thing more expressive, "Son of a gunV

"Aren't you pleased?" Rosa pouted playfully. "I did it for you.

"But we aren't even married."

"That can be arranged."

"And quickly, too," agreed Sebastian. He grabbed her wrist. "Come on!"

"Sebastian, remember my condition."

"Good grief, I'm sorry."

He took her back to Lalapanzi, handing her over the rough ground with as much care as though she was a case of sweating gelignite.

"What's the big hurry?" asked Flynn jovially at dinner that evening. "I've got a little job for Bassie first. I want him to slip across the river..

"No, you don't," said Rosa. "We are going to see the priest at Beira."

"It Would only take Bassie a couple of weeks. Then we could talk about it when he gets back."

"We are going to Beira tomorrow!"

"What's the rush?" Flynn asked again.

"Well, the truth is, Flynn, old boy.. Wriggling in his chair, colouring up vividly, Sebastian relapsed into silence.

"The truth is I'm going to have a baby," Rosa finished for him.

"You're what?" Flynn stared at her in horror.

"You said that you wanted to see your grandchild," Rosa pointed out.

"But I didn't mean you to start work on it right away,"

roared Flynn, and he rounded on Sebastian. "You dirty young bugger!"

"Father, your heard" Rosa restrained him. "Anyway, don't pick on Sebastian, I did my share as well."

"You shameless... You brazen little -."

Rosa reached behind the seat cushion where Flynn had hidden the gin bottle. "Have a little of this it will help calm you."

They left for Beira the following morning. Rosa was carried in a maschille with Sebastian trotting beside it in anxious attendance, ready to help ease the litter over the fords and rough places, and to curse any of the bearers who stumbled.

When they left Lalapanzi, Flynn O'Flynn brought up the rear of the column, lying in his maschille with a square faced bottle for company, scowling and muttering darkly about fornication and sin."

But both Rosa and Sebastian ignored him, and when they camped that night the two of them sat across the camp-fire from him, and whispered and laughed secretly together. They pitched their voices at such a tantalizing level that even by straining his ears, Flynn could not overhear their conversation. It infuriated him to such an extent that finally he made a loud remark about beating the hell out of the person who had repaid his hospitality by violating his daughter."

Rosa said that she would give anything to see him try it again. In her opinion it would be better than a visit to the circus. And Flynn gathered his dignity and his gin bottle and stalked away to where Mohammed had laid out his bedding under ale an-to of thorn bushes.

During the dark hours before dawn they were visited by an old lion. He came with a rush from the darkness beyond the fire-light, grunting like an angry boar, the great black bush of his mane erect, snaking with incredible speed towards the huddle of blanket-wrapped figures about the fire.

Flynn was the only one not asleep. He had waited all night, watching Sebastian's reclining figure; just waiting for him to move across to the temporary thorn-bush shelter that gave Rosa privacy. Lying beside Flynn was his shotgun, dOUble-loaded with big loopers, lion shot, and he had every intention of using it.

When the lion charged into the camp, Flynn sat up quickly and fired both barrels of the shotgun at point-blank range into the lion's heead and chest, killing it instantly. But the momentum of its rush bowled it forward, sent it sliding full into Sebastian, and both of them rolled into the camp-fire.

Sebastian awoke to lion noises, and gun-fire, and the violent collision of a big body into his, and red-hot coals sticking to various parts of his anatomy. With a single bound, and a wild cry, he threw off his blanket, came to his feet, and went into such a lively song and dance routine, yodelling and high-kicking, and striking out at his imaginary assailants that Flynn was reduced to a jelly of helpless laughter.

The laughter, and the praise and thanks showered on him by Sebastian, Rosa, and the bearers, cleared the air.

"You saved my life, "said Sebastian soulfully.

"Oh Daddy, you're wonderful," said Rosa. "Thank you.

Thank you," and she hugged him.

The mantle of the hero felt snug and comfortable on Flynn's shoulders. He became almost human and the improvement continued as each day's march brought them closer to the little Portuguese port of Beira, for Flynn greatly enjoyed his rare visits to civilization.

The last night they camped a mile from the outskirts of the town, and after a private conference with Flynn, old Mohammed went ahead armed with a small purse of escudos to make the arrangements for Flynn's formal entry on the morrow.

Flynn was up with the dawn, and while he shaved with care, and dressed in clean moleskin jacket and trousers, one of the bearers polished his boots with hippo fat, and two others scaled the tall bottle palm tree near the camp and cut fronds from its head.

All things being ready, Flynn ascended his maschille and lay back elegantly on the leopard-skin rugs. On each side of Flynn a bearer took his position, armed with a palm-frond, and began to fan him gently. Behind Flynn, in single file, followed other servants bearing tusks of ivory and the still green lion skin. Behind this, with instructions from Flynn not to draw undue Attention to themselves, followed Sebastian and Rosa and the baggage bearers.

With a languid gesture such as might have been used by Nero to signal the start of a Roman circus, Flynn gave the order to move.

Along the rough road through the thick coastal bush, they came at last to Beira and entered the main street in procession.

"Good Lord," Sebastian expressed his surprise when he saw the reception that awaited them, "where did they all come from?"

Both sides of the street were lined with cheering crowds, mainly natives, but with here and there a Portuguese or an Indian trader come out of his shop to find the cause of the disturbance.

"Fini!" chanted the crowd, clapping their hands in unison.

"Bwana Mkuba! Great Lord! Slayer of elephant. Killer of lions!"

"I didn't realize that Flynn was so well regarded." Sebastian was impressed.

"Most of them have never heard of him," Rosa disillusioned him. "He sent Mohammed in last night to gather a claque of about a hundred or so. Pays them one escudo each to come and cheer, they make so much noise that the entire population turns out to see what is going on. They fall for it every time."

"What on earth does he go to so much trouble for?"

"Because he enjoys it. just look at himV

Lying in his maschille, graciously acknowledging the applause, Flynn was very obviously loving every minute of it.

The head of the procession reached the only hotel in Beira and halted. Madame da Souza, the portly, well moustached widow who was the proprietress of the hotel, rushed down to welcome Flynn with a smacking kiss and usher him ceremoniously through the shabby portals. Flynn was the kind of customer she had always dreamed about.

When Rosa and Sebastian at last fought their way through the crowd into the hotel, Flynn was already seated at the bar counter and half way through a tall glass of Laurentia beer. The man sitting on the stool beside his was the Governor of Mozambique's aide-de-camp, who had come to deliver His Excellency's invitation for Flynn O'Flynn to dine at Government House that evening. His Excellency Jose De Clare Don Felezardo da Silva Marques had received from Governor Schee, in Dares Salaam, an agitated report, in the form of an official protest and an extradition demand. It was settlement day in the partnership of "Flynn O'Flynn and Others'. of the success of the partnership's operations during the last few months and His Excellency was delighted to see Flynn.

In fact, so pleased was His Excellency with the progress of the partnership's affairs, that he exercised his authority and waive the formalities required by law to precede a to marriage under Portuguese jurisdiction. This saved a week, and the afternoon after their arrival in Beira, Rosa and Sebastian stood befo " the altar in the stucco and thatch cathedral, while Sebastian tried with little success to remember enough of his schoolroom Latin to understand just what he was getting himself into.

The wedding veil, which had belonged to Rosa's mother, was yellowed by many years of storage under tropical conditions, but it served well enough to keep off the flies which were always bad during the hot season in Beira.

Towards the end of the long ceremony, Flynn was so overcome by the heat, the gin he had taken at lunch, and an unusually fine flood of Irish feeling, that he began snuffling loudly. While he mopped at his eyes and nose with a grubby handkerchief, the Governor's aide-de-camp patted his shoulder soothingly and murmured encouragement.

The priest declared them husband and wife, and the congregation launched into a faltering rendition of the Te Deum. His voice quivering with emotion and alcohol, Flynn kept repeating, "My little girl, my poor little girl." Rosa lifted her veil and turned to Sebastian who immediately forgot his misgivings as to the form of the ceremony, and enfolded her enthusiastically in his arms.

Still maintaining his chorus of "My little girl," Flynn was led away by the aide-de-camp to the hotel where the proprietress had prepared the wedding feast. In deference to Flynn O'Flynn's mood this started on a sombre note but as the champagne, which Madame da Souza had specially bottled the previous evening, started to do its work, so the tempo changed. Among his other actions, Flynn gave Sebastian a wedding present of ten pounds and poured a full glass of beer over the aide-de-camp's head.

When, later that evening, Rosa and Sebastian slipped away to the bridal suite above the bar, Flynn was giving lusty tongue in the chorus of "They are jolly good fellows', Madame da Souza was seated on his lap, and overflowing it in all directions. Every time Flynn pinched her posterior, great gusts of laughter made her shake like a stranded jellyfish.

Later the pleasure of Rosa and Sebastian's wedding-bed was disturbed by the fact that, in the bar-room directly below them, Flynn O'Flynn was shooting the bottles off the shelves with a double-barrelled elephant rifle. Every direct hit was greeted by thunderous applause from the other guests. Madame da Souza, still palpitating with laughter, sat in a corner of the bar-room dutifully making such entries in her notebook as, "One bottle of Grandio London Dry Gin

14.50 escudos; one bottle Grandio French Cognac Five Star

14.50 escudos; one bottle Grandio Scotch whisky 30.00 escudos; I magnum Grandio French Champagne 75.90 escudos."

"Grandio" was the brand-name of the house, and signified that the liquor each bottle contained had been brewed and bottled on the premises under the personal supervision of Madame da Souza.

Once the newly-wed couple realized that the uproar from the room below was sufficient to mask the protests of their rickety brass bedstead, they no longer grudged Flynn his amusements.

For everyone involved it was a night of great pleasure, a night to be looked back upon with nostalgia and wistful smiles.

Even at Flynn's prodigious rate of expenditure, his share of the profits from Sebastian's tax expedition lasted another two weeks.

During this period Rosa and Sebastian spent a little of their time wandering hand in hand through the streets and bazaars of Beira, or sitting, still hand in hand, on the beach and watching the sea. Their happiness radiated from them so strongly that it affected anyone who came within fifty feet of them. A worried stranger hurrying towards them along the narrow little street with his face creased in a frown would come under the spell; his pace would slacken, his step losing its urgency, the frown would smooth away to be replaced by an indulgent grin as he passed them. But mostly they remained closeted in the bridal suite above the bar entering it in the early afternoon and not reappearing until nearly noon the following day.

Neither Rosa nor Sebastian had imagined such happiness could exist.

At the expiry of the two weeks Flynn was waiting for them in the bar-room as they came down to lunch. He hurried out to join them as they passed the door. "Greetings!

Greetings!" He threw an arm around each of their shoulders.

"And how are you this morning?" He listened without attention as Sebastian replied at length on how well he felt, how well Rosa was, and how well both of them had slept.

"Sure! Sure!" Flynn interrupted his rhapsodizing. "Listen, Bassie, my boy, you remember that 10 pounds I gave you?"

"Yes. "Sebastian was immediately wary.

"Let me have it back, will you?"

"I've spent it, Flynn."

"You've what? "bellowed Flynn.

"I've spent it."

"Good God Almighty! All of it? You've squandered ten pounds in as many days?" Flynn was horrified by his son-inlaw's extravagance and Sebastian, who had honestly believed the money was his to do with as he wished, was very apologetic.

They left for Lalapanzi that afternoon. Madame da Souza had accepted Flynn's note of hand for the balance outstanding on her bill.

At the head of the column Flynn, broke to the wide, and nursing a burning hangover, was in evil temper. The line of bearers behind him, bedraggled and bilious from two weeks spent in the flesh-pots, were in similar straits. At the rear of the doleful little caravan, Rosa and Sebastian chirruped and cooed together an island of sunshine in the sea of gloom.

The months passed quickly at Lalapanzi during the monsoon of 1913. Gradually, as its girth increased, Rosa's belly became the centre of Lalapanzi. The pivot upon which the whole community turned. The debates in the servants'

quarters, led by Nanny, the accepted authority, dealt almost exclusively with the contents thereof. All of them were hot for a man-child, although secretly Nanny cherished a treacherous hope that it might be another Little Long Hair.

Even Flynn, during the long months of enforced inactivity while the driving monsoon rains turned the land into a quagmire and the rivers into seething brown torrents, felt his grand-paternal instincts stirred. Unlike Nanny, he had no doubts as to the unborn child's sex, and he decided to name it Patrick Flynn O'Flynn Oldsmith.

He conveyed his decision to Sebastian while the two of them were hunting for the pot in the kopjes above the homestead.

By dint of diligent application and practice, Sebastian's marksmanship had improved beyond all reasonable expectation. He had just demonstrated it. They were jurnpshooting in thick cat-bush among the broken rock and twisted ravines of the kopjes. Constant rain had softened the ground and enabled them to move silently down-wind along one of the ravines. Flynn was fifty yards out on Sebastian's right, moving heavily but deceptively fast through the sodden grass and undergrowth.

The kudu were lying in dense cover below the lip of the ravine. Two young bulls, bluish-gold in colour, striped with thin chalk lines across the body, pendulent dewlaps heavily fringed with yellow hair, two and a half twists in each of the corkscrew horns big as polo ponies but heavier. They broke left across the ravine when Flynn jumped them from their hide, and the intervening bush denied him a shot.

"Breaking your way, Bassie," Flynn shouted and Sebastian took two swift paces around the bush in front of him, shook the clinging raindrops from his lashes, and slipped the safety-catch. He heard the tap of big horn against a branch, and the first bull came out of the ravine at full run across his front. Yet it seemed to float, unreal, intangible, through the blue-grey rain mist. It blended ghostlike into the background of dark rain-soaked vegetation, and the clumps of bush and the tree trunks between them made it an almost impossible shot. In the instant that the bull flashed across a gap between two clumps of buffalo thorn, Sebastian's bullet broke its neck a hand's width in front of the shoulder.

At the sound of the shot, the second bull swerved in dead run, gathered its forelegs beneath its chest and went up in a high, driving leap over the thorn bush that stood in its path. Sebastian traversed his rifle smoothly without taking the butt from his shoulder, his right hand flicked the bolt open and closed, and he fired as a continuation of the movement.

The heavy bullet caught the kudu in mid-air and threw it sideways. Kicking and thrashing, it struck the ground and rolled down the bank of the ravine.

Whooping like a Red Indian, Mohammed galloped past Sebastian, brandishing a long knife, racing to reach the second bull and cut its throat, "before it died so that the dictates of the Koran might be observed.

Flynn ambled across to Sebastian. "Nice shooting, Bassie All boy. Salted and dried and pickled, there's meat there for a month."

And Sebastian grinned in modest recognition of the compliment. Together they walked across to watch Mohammed and his gang begin paunching and quartering the big animals.

With the skill of a master tactician, Flynn chose this moment to inform Sebastian of the name he had selected for his grandson. He was not prepared for the fierce opposition he encountered from Sebastian. It seemed that Sebastian had expected to name the child Francis Sebastian Oldsmith. Flynn laughed easily, and then in his most reasonable and persuasive brogue he started pointing out to Sebastian just how cruel it would be to saddle the child with a name like that.

It was a lance in the pride of the Oldsmiths, and Sebastian rose to the defence. By the time they returned to Lalapanzi, the discussion needed about six hot words to reach the stage of single combat.

Rosa heard them coming. Flynn's bellow carried across the lawns. "I'll not have my grandson called a pew ling milksop name like that!"

"Francis is the name of kings and warriors and gentlemen!" cried Sebastian.

"My aching buttocks, it is!"

Rosa came out on to the wide veranda and stood there with her arms folded over the beautiful bulge that housed the cause of the controversy.

They saw her and started an undignified race across the lawns, each trying to reach her first to enlist her support for their respective causes.

She listened to the pleadings, a small and secret smile upon her lips, and then said with finality, "Her name will be Maria Rosa Oldsmith."

Some time later Flynn and Sebastian were together on the veranda Ten days before the last rains of the season had come roaring in from the Indian Ocean and broken upon the unyielding shield of the continent. Now the land was drying out; the rivers regaining their sanity and returning, chastened, to the confines of their banks. New grass lifted from the red earth to welcome the return of the sun. For this brief period the whole land was alive and green; even the gnarled and crabbed thorn trees wore a pale fuzz of tender leaves. Behind each pair of guinea-fowl that clinked and scratched on the bottom lawns of Lalapanzi, there paraded a file of dappled chicks. Early that morning a herd of eland had moved along the skyline across the Varney, and beside each cow had trotted a calf Everywhere was new life, or the expectation of new life.

"Now, stop worrying!" said Flynn, as his impatient pacing brought him level with Sebastian's chair.

"I'm not worrying," Sebastian said mildly. "Everything will be all right."

"How do you know that? "challenged Flynn.

"Well..

"You know the child could be stillborn, or something."

Flynn shook his finger in Sebastian's face. "It could have six fingers on each hand how about that? I heard about one that was born with -."

While Flynn related a long list of horrors, Sebastian's expression of proud and eager anticipation crumbled slowly.

He rose from his chair and fell into step beside Flynn. "Have you got any gin left?" he asked hoarsely, glancing at the shuttered windows of Rosa's bedroom. Flynn produced the bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket.

An hour later, Sebastian was hunched forward in his chair, clutching a half-full tumbler of gin with both hands.

He stared into it miserably. "I don't know what I'd do if it was born with..." He could not go on. He shuddered and lifted the tumbler to his lips. At that instant a long, petulant wail issued from the closed bedroom. Sebastian leapt as though he had been bayoneted from behind, and spilled the gin down his shirt. His next leap was in the direction of the bedroom, a direction Flynn had also chosen. They collided heavily and then set off together at a gallop along the veranda. They reached the locked door and hammered upon it for admission. But Nanny, who had evicted them in the first instance, still adamantly refused to lift the locking bar or to give them any information as to the progress of the birthing. Her decision was endorsed by Rosa.

"Don't you dare let them in until everything is ready,"

she whispered huskily, and roused herself from the stupor of exhaustion, to help Nanny with washing and wrapping the infant.

When at last everything was ready, she lay propped on the pillows with her child held against her chest, and nodded to Nanny. "Open the door, she said.

The delay had confirmed Flynn's worst suspicions. The door flew open, and he and Sebastian fell into the room, wild with anxiety.

"Oh, thank God, Rosa. You're still alive!" Sebastian reached the bed and fell on his knees beside it.

"You check his feet," instructed Flynn. "I'll do his hands and head," and before Rosa could prevent him, he had lifted the infant out of her arms.

"His fingers are all right. Two arms, one head," Flynn muttered above Rosa's protests and the infant's muffled squawls of indignation.

"This end is fine. just fine!" Sebastian spoke in rising relief and delight. "He's beautiful, Flynn!" And he lifted the shawl that swaddled the child's body. His expression cracked and his voice choked. "Oh, my God!"

"What's wrong?" Flynn asked sharply.

"You were right, Flynn. he's deformed."

"What? Where?"

"There!" Sebastian pointed. "He hasn't got a whatchim-ca all-it," and they both stared in horror.

simultaneously It was many long seconds before they realized that the tiny cleft was no deformity but very much as nature had intended it.

"It's a girl!" said Flynn in dismay.

"A girl!" echoed Sebastian, and quickly pulled down the shawl to preserve his daughter's modesty.

"It's a girl, Rosa smiled, wan and happy.

"It's a girl," cackled Nanny in triumph.

Maria Rosa Oldsmith had arrived without fuss and with the minimum of inconvenience to her mother, so that Rosa was on her feet again within twenty-four hours. All her other activities were conducted with the same consideration and dispatch. She cried once every four hours; a single angry howl which was cut off the instant the breast was thrust into her mouth. Her bowel movements were equally regular and of the correct volume and consistency, and the rest of her days and nights were devoted almost entirely to sleeping.

She was beautiful; without the parboiled, purple look of most new-barns; without the squashed-in pug features or the vague, squinty eyes.

From the curly cap of silk hair to the tips of her pink toes, she was perfection.

It took Flynn two days to recover from the disappointment of having been cheated out of a grandson. He sulked in the arsenal or sat solitary at the end of the veranda. On the second evening Rosa pitched her voice just high enough to carry the length of the veranda.

"Don't you think Maria looks just like Daddy the same mouth and nose? Look at her eyes."

Sebastian opened his mouth to deny the resemblance emphatically but closed it again, as Rosa kicked him painfully on the ankle.

"She is the image of him. There's no doubting who her grandfather is."

"Well, I suppose... If you look closely," Sebastian agreed unhappily.

At the end of the veranda, Flynn sat with his head cocked in an attitude of attention. Half an hour later Flynn had sidled up to the cradle and was studying the contents thoughtfully. By the following evening he had moved his chair alongside and was leading the discussion with such remarks as, "There is quite a strong family resemblance.

Look at those eyes no doubt who her Granddaddy is!"

He interspersed his observations with warnings and instructions, "Don't get so close, Bassie. You're breathing germs all over her."

"Rosa, this child needs another blanket.

When did she have her last feed?"

It was not long before he started bringing pressure to bear on Sebastian.

"You've got responsibilities now. Have you thought about that?"

"How do you mean, Flynn?"

"Just answer me this. What have you got in this world?"

"Rosa and Maria," Sebastian answered promptly.

"Fine. That's just great! And how are you going to feed them and clothe them and... and look after them?"

Sebastian expressed himself well satisfied with the existing arrangements.

"I bet you are! It isn't costing you a thing. But I reckon it's about time you got up off your bum and did something."

"Like what?"

"Like going and shooting some ivory."

Three days later, armed and equipped for a "

poaching expedition, Sebastian led a column of gun-boys and bearers down the valley towards the Rovuma river.

Fourteen hours later, in the dusk of evening, he led them back.

"What in the name of all that's holy, are you doing back here?" Flynn demanded.

"I had this premonition." Sebastian was sheepish.

"What premonition?"

"That I should come back, "muttered Sebastian.

He left again two days later. This time he actually crossed the Rovuma before the premonition overpowered him once more, and he came back to Rosa and Maria.

"Well," Flynn sighed with resignation. "I reckon I'll just have to go along with you and make sure you do it." He shook his head. "You've been a big disappointment to me, Bassie." The biggest disappointment being the fact that he had hoped to have his granddaughter to himself for a few weeks.

"Mohammed" he bellowed. "Get my gear packed."

Flynn sent his scouts across the river and when they reported back that the far bank was clear of German patrols, Flynn made the crossing.

This expedition was a far cry from Sebastian's amiable and aimless wandering in German territory. Flynn was a professional. They crossed in the night. They crossed in strictest silence and landed two miles downstream from M'tapa's village. There was no lingering on the beach, but an urgent night march that began immediately and went on in grim silence until an hour before dawn; a march that took them fifteen miles inland from the river, and ended in a grove of elephant thorn, carefully chosen for the kopjes and ravines around it that afforded multiple avenues of escape in each direction.

Sebastian was impressed by the elaborate precautions that Flynn took before going into camp; the jinking and counter-marching, the careful sweeping of their spoor with brushes of dry grass, and the placing of sentries on the kopje above the camp.

During the ten days they waited there, not a single branch was broken from a tree, not a single axe-stroke swung to leave a tell-tale white blaze on the dark bush. The.

tiny night fire fed with dry trash and dead wood was carefully screened, and before dawn was smothered with sand so that not a wisp of smoke was left to mark them in the day.

Voices were never raised above conversational tones, and even the clatter of a bucket brought such a swift and ferocious reprimand from Flynn, that on all of them was a nervous awareness, an expectancy of danger, a tuning of the minds and bodies to action.

On the eighth night the scouts that Flynn had thrown out began drifting back to the camp. They came in with all the stealth and secrecy of night animals and huddled over the fire to tell what they had seen.

Last night three old bulls drank at the water-hole of the sick hyena. They carried teeth so, and so, and so..

showing the arm to measure the length of ivory, ". - - apart from them, ten cows left their feet in the mud, six of them with young calves. Yesterday, at the place where the hill of Inhosana breaks and turns its arms, I saw where another herd had crossed, moving towards the dawn; five young bulls, twenty-three cows and..

The reports were jumbled, unintelligible to Sebastian who did not carry a map of the land in his head. But Flynn, sittin beside the fire listening, fitted the fragments together and built them into an exact picture of how the game was moving. He saw that the big bulls were still separated from the breeding herds that they lingered on the high ground while the cows had started moving back towards the swamps from which the floods had driven them, anxious to take their young away from the dangers that the savannah forests would offer once the dry season set in.

He noted the estimates of thickness and length of tusk.

Immature ivory was hardly worth carrying home, good only for carving into billiard balls and piano keys. The market was glutted with it.

But on the other hand, a prime tusk, over one hundred pounds in weight, seven foot long and twice the thickness of a fat woman's thigh, would fetch fifty shillings a pound avoirdupois.

An animal carrying such a tusk in each side of his face was worth four or five hundred pounds in good, gold sovereigns.

One by one Flynn discarded the possible areas in which he would hunt. This year there were no elephant in the M'bahora hills. There was good reason for this; thirty piles of great sun-bleached bones lay scattered along the ridge, marking the path that Flynn's rifles had followed two years before. The memory of gun-fire was too fresh and the herds shunned that place.

There were no elephant on the Tabora escarpment. A

blight had struck the groves of mapundu trees, and withered the fruit before it could ripen. Dearly the elephant loved mapundu berries and they had gone elsewhere to find them.

They had gone up to the Sonia Heights, to Kilombera, and to the Salito hills.

Salito was an easy day's march from the German boma at Mahenge. Flynn struck it from his mental list.

As each of the scouts finished his report, Flynn asked the question which would influence his final decision.

"What of Plough the Earth?"

And they said, "We saw nothing. We heard nothing."

The last scout came in two days after the others. He looked sheepish and more than a little guilty.

"Where the hell have you been?" Flynn demanded, and the gun-boy had his excuse ready.

"Knowing that the great Lord Fini would ask of certain matters, I turned aside in my journey to the village of Yetu, who is my uncle. My uncle is a fundi. No wild thing walks, no lion kills, no elephant breaks a branch from a tree but my uncle knows of it. Thus I went to ask him of these things

"Thy uncle is a famous fundi, he is also a famous breeder of daughters," Flynn remarked drily. "He breeds daughters the way the moon breeds stars."

"Indeed, my uncle Yetu is a man of fame." Hurriedly the scout went on to turn Flynn aside from this line of discussion. "My uncle sends his greetings to the Lord Fini and bids me speak thus: "This season there are many fine elephants on the Sonia Heights. They walk by twos and threes. With my own eyes I have seen twelve which show ivory as long as the shaft of a throwing spear, and I have seen signs of as many more." My uncle bids me speak further: "There is one among them of which the Lord Fini knows for he has asked of him many times. This one is a bull among great bulls. One who moves in such majesty that men have named him Plough the Earth."

"You do not bring a story from the honey-bird to cool my anger against you?" Flynn demanded harshly. "Did you dream

"of Plough the Earth while you were ploughing the bellies of your uncle's many daughters?" His eagerness was soured by scepticism. Too many times he had followed wild stories in his pursuit of the great bull. He leaned forward across the fire to watch the gun-bearer's eyes as he replied, "It is true, lord." Flynn watched him carefully but found no hint of guile in his face. Flynn grunted, rocked back on his hams, and lowered his gaze to the small flames of the camp-fire.

For his first ten years in Africa, Flynn had heard the legend of the elephant whose tusks were of such length that their points touched the ground and left a double furrow along his spoor. He had smiled at this story as he had at the story of the rhinoceros who fifty years before had killed an Arab slaver, and now wore around his horn a massive gold bangle studded with precious stones. They said the bangle had lodged there as he gored the Arab. There were a thousand other romantic tales come out of Africa; from Solomon's treasure to the legend of the elephants" graveyard, and Flynn believed none of them.

Then he saw a myth come alive. One evening, camped near the Zambezi in Portuguese territory, he had taken a bird-gun and walked along the bank hoping for a brace of sand-grouse. Two miles from the camp he had seen a flight of birds coming in to the water, flying fast as racing pigeons, whistling in on backswept wings, and he had ducked into a thick bank of reeds and watched them come.

As they banked steeply overhead, dropping towards the sand-banks of the river, Flynn jumped to his feet and fired left and right, folding the lead bird and the second, so they crumpled in mid-air and tumbled, leaving a pale flurry of feathers to mark their fall.

But Flynn never saw the birds hit the ground. For, while the double blast of the shotgun still echoed along the river, the reed-bed below where he stood swayed and crashed and burst open, then an elephant came Out into the open.

It was a bull elephant that stood fourteen feet high at the shoulder. An elephant so old that his ears were shredded to half their original size. The hide that covered his body hung in folds and deep wrinkles, baggy at the knees and the throat. The tuft of his tail long ago worn bald. The rheumy tears of Lyreat aLye staining his seared and dusty cheeks.

He came out of the reed-bed in a shambling, humpbacked run, and his head was tilted at an awkward, unnatural angle.

Flynn could hardly credit his vision when he saw the reason why the old bull cocked his head back in that fashion. From each side of the head extended two identical shafts of ivory, perfectly matched, straight as the columns of a Greek temple, with not an inch of taper from lip to bluntly rounded tip. They were stained to the colour of tobacco juice, fourteen long feet of ivory that would have touched the ground, if the elephant had carried his head relaxed.

As Flynn stood frozen in disbelief, the bull passed him by a mere fifty yards and lumbered on into the forest.

It took Flynn thirty minutes to get back to camp and exchange the bird-gun for the double-barrelled Gibbs, snatch up a water bottle, shout for his gun-boys, and return to the river.

He put Mohammed to the spoor. At first there were only the round pad marks in the dusty earth, smooth pad marks the size of a dustbin lid; the graining on the old bull's hooves had long been worn away. Then after five miles of flight there were other marks to follow. On each side of the spoor a double line scuffed through dead leaves and grass and soft earth where the tips of the tusks touched, and Flynn learned why the old bull was called Plough the Earth.

They lost the spoor on the third day in the rain, but a dozen times in the years since then, Flynn had followed and lost those double furrows, and once, through his binoculars, he had seen the old bull again, standing dozing beneath a grove of morula trees at a distance of three miles, his eroded old head propped up by the mythical tusks. When Flynn reached the spot on which he had seen the bull, it was deserted.

In all his life Flynn had never wanted anything with such obsessive passion as he wanted those tusks.

Now he sat silently staring into the camp-fire, remembering all these things, and the lust within him was tighter and more compelling than he had ever felt for a woman.

At last he looked up at the scout and said huskily, "Tomorrow, with the first light, we will go to the village of Yetu, at Sonia."

A fly settled on Herman Fleischer's cheek and rubbed its front feet together in delight, as it savoured the prospect of drinking from the droplet of sweat that quivered precariously at the level of his ear lobe.

The Askari standing behind Herman's chair flicked the zebra tail switch with such skill, that not one of the long black hairs touched the Commissioner's face, and the fly darted away to take its place in the circuit that orbited around Herman's head.

Herman hardly noticed the interruption. He was sunk down in the chair, glowering at the two old men who squatted on the dusty parade ground below the veranda.

The silence was a blanket that lay on them all in the stupefying heat. The two headmen waited patiently. They had spoken, and now they waited for the Bwana Mkuba to reply.

"How many have been killed?" Herman asked at last, and the senior of the two headmen answered.

"Lord, as many as the fingers of both your hands. But these are the ones of which we are certain, there may be others."

Herman's concern was not for the dead, but their numbers would be a measure of the seriousness of the situation. Ritual murder was the first stage on the road to rebellion. It started with a dozen men meeting in the moonlight, dressed in cloaks of leopard skin, with designs of white clay painted on their faces. With the crude iron claws strapped to their hands, they would ceremoniously mutilate a young girl, and then devour certain parts of her body.

4, This was harmless entertainment in Herman's view, but when it happened more frequently, it generated in the district a mood of abject terror. This was the climate of revolt. Then the leopard priests would walk through the villages in the night, walk openly in procession with the torches burning, and the men who lay shivering within the barricaded huts would listen to the chanted instructions from the macabre little procession and they would obey.

It had happened ten years earlier at Salito. The priests had ordered them to resist the tax expedition that year.

They had slaughtered the visiting Commissioner and twenty of his Askari, and they cut the bodies into small pieces with which they festooned the thorn trees.

Three months later a battalion of German infantry had disembarked at Dares Salaam and marched to Salito. They burned the villages and they shot everything men, women, children, chickens, dogs and goats. The final casualty list could only be estimated, but the officer commanding the battalion boasted that they had killed two thousand human beings. He was probably exaggerating. Nevertheless, the Salito hills were still devoid of human life and habitation to this day. The whole episode was irritating and costly and Herman Fleischer wanted no repetition of it during his term of office.

On the principle that prevention was better than cure, he decided to go down and conduct a few ritual sacrifices of his own. He humped himself forward in his chair, and spoke to his sergeant of Askari.

"Twenty men. We will leave for the village of Yetu, at Sonia, tomorrow before dawn. Do not forget the ropes."

In the Sonia Heights, in the heat of the day, an elephant stood-under the wide branches of a wild fig-tree. He was asleep on his feet but his head was propped up by two long columns of stained ivory. He slept as an old man sleeps, fitfully, never sinking very deep below the level of consciousness. Occasionally the tattered grey ears flapped, and each time a fine haze of flies rose around his head. They hung in the hot air and then settled again.

The rims of the elephant's ears were raw where the flies had eaten down through the thick skin. The flies were everywhere. The humid green shade beneath the wild fig was murmurous with the sound of their wings.

Across the divide of the Sonia Heights, four miles from the spot where the old bull slept, three men were moving up one of the bush-choked gulleys towards the ridge.

Mohammed was leading. He moved fast, half-crouched to peer at the ground, glancing up occasionally to anticipate the run of the spoor he was following. He stopped at a place where a grove of mapundu trees had carpeted the ground beneath them with a stinking, jellified mass of rotten berries.

He looked back at the two white men and indicated the marks in the earth, and the pyramid of bright yellow dung that lay upon it. "He stopped here for the first time in the heat, but it was not to his liking, and he has gone on."

Flynn was sweating. It ran down his flushed jowls and dripped on to his already sodden shirt. "Yes," he nodded and a small cloud-burst of sweat scattered from his head at the movement. "He will have crossed the ridge."

"What makes you so certain?" Sebastian spoke in the same sepulchral whisper as the others.

"The cool evening breeze will come from the east he will cross to the other side of the ridge to wait for it." Flynn spoke with irritation and wiped his face on the short sleeve of his shirt. "Now, you just remember, Bassie. This is my elephant, you understand that? You try for it and, so help me God, I'll shoot you dead."

Flynn nodded to Mohammed and they moved on up the slope, following the spoor that meandered between outcrops of grey granite and scrub.

The crest of the ridge was well defined, sharp as the spine of a starving ox. They paused below it, squatting to rest in the coarse brown grass. Flynn opened the binocular case that hung on his chest, lifted out the instrument and began to polish the lens with a scrap of cloth.

"Stay he reP Flynn ordered the other two, then on his belly he wriggled up towards the skyline. Using the cover of a tree stump, he lifted his head cautiously and peered over.

Below him the Sonia Heights fell away at a gentle slope, fifteen hundred feet and ten miles to the plain below. The slope was broken and crenellated, riven into a thousand gulleys and ravines, covered over-all with a mantle of coarse brown scrub and dotted with clumps of bigger trees.

Flynn settled himself comfortably on his elbows and lifted the binoculars to his eyes. Systematically he began to examine each of the groves below him.

"Yes!" he whispered aloud, wriggling a little on his belly, staring at the picture puzzle beneath the spread branches of the tree, a mile away. In the shade there were shapes that made no sense, a mass too diffuse to be the trunk of the tree.

He lowered the glasses and wiped away the sweat that clung in his eyebrows. He closed his eyes to rest them from the glare, then he opened them again and lifted the glasses.

For two long minutes he stared before suddenly the puzzle made sense. The bull was standing half away from him, merging with the trunk of the wild fig, the head and half the body obscured by the lower branches of the tree and what he had taken to be the stem of alesser tree was, in fact, a tusk of ivory.

A spasm of excitement closed on his chest.

"Yes!"he said. "Yes!"

Flynn planned his stalk with care, taking every' precaution against the intervention of fate that twenty years of elephant hunting had taught him.

He had gone back to where Sebastian and Mohammed waited.

"He's there, "he told them.

"Can I come with you Sebastian pleaded.

"In a barrel you can," snarled Flynn as he sat and pulled off his heavy boots to replace them with the light sandals that Mohammed produced from the pack. "You stay here until you hear my shot. You so much as stick your nose over the ridge before that and, so help me God, I'll shoot it off."

While Mohammed knelt in front of Flynn and strapped the leather pads to his knees to protect them as he crawled over rock and Thorn, Flynn fortified himself from the gin bottle. As he re corked it, he glowered at Sebastian again.

"That's a promise! "he said.

At the top of the ridge Flynn paused again with only his eyes lifted over the skyline, while he plotted his stalk, fixing in his memory a procession of landmarks an ant-hill, an outcrop of white quartz, a tree festooned with weaver birds'

nests so that as he reached each of these he would know his exact position in relation to that of the elephant.

Then with the rifle cradled across the crook of his elbows he slid on his belly to begin the stalk.

Now, an hour after he had left the ridge, he saw before him through the grass a slab of granite like a headstone in an ancient cemetery. It stood square and weathered brown and it was the end of the stalk.

He had marked it from the ridge as the point from which he would fire. It stood fifty yards from the wild fig-tree, at a right angle from the old bull's position. It would give him cover as he rose to his knees to make the shot.

Anxious now, suddenly overcome with a premonition of disaster sensing that somehow the cup would he dashed from his lips, the maid plucked from under him before the moment of fulfilment, Flynn started forward. Slithering towards the granite headstone, his face set hard in nervous anticipation, he reached the rock.

He rolled carefully on to his side and, holding the heavy rifle against his chest, he slipped the catch across and eased the rifle open, so that the click of the mechanism was muted. From the belt around his waist he selected two fat cartridges and examined the brass casings for tarnish or denting; with relief he saw the fingers that held them were steadier. He slipped the cartridges into the blank eyes of the breeches, and they slid home against the seatings with a soft metallic plong. And now his breathing was faintly ragged at the end of each inhalation. He closed the rifle, and with his thumb pushed the safety-catch forward into the "fire'

position.

His shoulder against the rough, sun-heated granite, he drew up his legs against his belly and rolled gently on to his knees. With his head bowed low and the rifle in his lap, he knelt behind the rock, and for the first time in an hour he lifted his head. He brought it up with inching deliberation.

Slowly the crystalline texture of the granite passed before his eyes, then suddenly he looked across fifty yards of open ground at his elephant.

It stood broadside to him but the head was hidden by the leaves and branches of the wild fig. The brain shot was impossible from here. His eyes moved down on to the shoulder and he saw the outline of the bone beneath the thick grey skin. He picked out the point of the elbow and his eyes moved back into the barrel of the chest. He could visualize the heart pulsing softly there beneath the ribs, pink and soft and vital, throbbing like a giant sea anemone.

He lifted the rifle, and laid it across the rock in front of him. He looked along the barrels, and saw the blade of dry grass that was wound around the bead of the foresight, obscuring it. He lowered the rifle and with his thumb-nail he picked away the shred of grass. Again he lifted and sighted.

The black blob of the foresight lay snugly in the deep, wide vee of the backsight; he moved the gain, riding the bead down across the old bull's shoulder then back on to the chest. It lay there ready to kill, and he took up the slack in the trigger, gently, lovingly, with his forefinger.

The shout was faint, a tiny sound in the drowsy immensity of the hot African air. It came from the high ground above him.

Flynn!" and again, "Flynn!"

In an explosive burst of movement under the wild fig tree the old bull swung his body with unbelievable speed, his great tusks riding high. He went away from Flynn at an awkward shambling run, his flight covered by the trunk of the fig-tree.

For stunned seconds, Flynn crouched behind the boulder, and with each second the chances of a shot dwindled. Flynn jumped to his feet and ran out to one side of the fig-tree, opening his field of fire for a snap shot at the bull as he fled, a try for the spine where it curved down between the massive haunches to the tuft less tail.

Spiked agony stabbed up through the ball of his lightly shod foot, as he trod squarely on a three-inch buffalo thorn.

Red-tipped, wickedly barbed, it buried its full length in his flesh, and he stumbled to his knees crying a protest at the pain.

Two hundred yards away, the old bull disappeared into one of the wooded ravines, and was gone.

"Flynn! Flynn!"

Sobbing in pain and frustration, his injured foot twisted up into his lap, Flynn sat in the grass and waited for Sebastian Oldsmith to come down to him.

"I'll let him get real close," Flynn told himself. Sebastian was approaching with the long awkward strides of a man running downhill. He had lost his hat and the black tangled curls danced on his head at each stride. He was still shouting.

"I'll give it to him in the belly," Flynn decided. "Both barrels!" and he groped for the rifle that lay beside him.

Sebastian saw him and swerved in his run.

Flynn hefted the rifle. "I warned him. I said I'd do it," and his right hand settled around the pistol grip of the rifle, his forefinger instinctively hooking forward for the trigger.

"Flynn! Germans! A whole army of them. just over the hill. Coming this way."

"Christ!" said Flynn, immediately abandoning his homicidal intentions.

Lifting himself in the stirrups, Herman Fleischer reached behind to massage himself. His buttocks were of a plump, almost feminine, quantity and quality. After five hours in the saddle Herman longed to rest them. He had just crossed the ridge of the Sonia Heights on his donkey, and it was cool here beneath the outspread branches of the wild fig-tree. He flirted with the temptation, decided to indulge himself, and turned to give the order to the troop of twenty Askari who stood behind him. All of them were watching him avidly, anticipating the order that would allow them to throw themselves down and relax.

"Lazy dogs!" thought Herman as he scowled at them. He turned away from them, settled his aching posterior gently on to the saddle and growled. "Akwende! Let us go!" His heels thumped against the flanks of his donkey and it started forward at a trot.

From a crotch in the trunk of the fig-tree ten feet above Herman's head, Flynn O'Flynn viewed his departure over the double barrels of his rifle. He watched the patrol wind away down the slope and drop from sight over a fold in the ground before he put up the gun.

Thew! That was close." Sebastian's voice came from the leafy mass above Flynn.

"If he'd touched one foot to the ground, I'd have blown his bloody head off," said Flynn. He sounded as though he regretted missing the opportunity. "All right, Bassie, get me down out of this frigging tree."

Fully dressed, except for his boots, Flynn sat against the base of the fig-tree and proffered his right foot to Sebastian.

I had him right there in my sights."

Who?" asked Sebastian.

"The elephant, you idiot. For the first time I had him cold. And then... Yeow! What the hell are you doing?"

"I'm trying to get the thorn out, Flynn."

"Feels like you're trying to knock it in with a hammer."

"I can't get a grip on it."

"Use your teeth. That's the only way," Flynn instructed, and Sebastian paled a little at the thought. He considered Flynn's foot. It was a large foot; corns on the toes, flakes of loose skin and other darker matter between them. Sebastian could smell it at a range of three feet. "Couldn't you reach it with your own teeth, Flynn?"he hedged.

"You think I'm a goddamned contortionist?"

"Mohammed?" Sebastian's eyes lit up with relief as he turned on the little gun-bearer. In answer to. the question Mohammed drew back his lips in a death's head grin, exposing his smooth, pink toothless gums. "Yes," agreed

180 Sebastian. "I see what you mean." He returned his gaze to the foot, and studied it with sickened fascination His adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed.

"Get on with it," said Flynn, and Sebastian stooped.

There was a howl from Flynn, and Sebastian straightened up with the wet Thorn gripped in his teeth. He spat it out explosively, and Mohammed handed him the gin bottle.

Sebastian took a big swallow and as he brought the bottle to his lips again, Flynn laid a restraining hand on his forearm. "Now don't overdo it, Bassie boy," he remonstrated mildly, retrieved the bottle and placed it to his own mouth.

It seemed to refuel Flynn's anger, for when he removed the bottle his voice had fire in it. "That goddamn sneaking, sausage-eating slug. He spoiled the only chance I've ever had at that elephant." He paused to breathe heavily. "I'd like to do something really nasty to him, like... like..

he searched for some atrocity to commit upon Herman Fleischer, and suddenly he found one. "My God!" he said, and his scowl changed to a lovely smile. "That's it!"

"What?" Sebastian was alarmed. He was certain that he would be selected as the vehicle of Flynn's revenge. "What?"

he repeated.

"We will go..." said Flynn, to Mahenge!"

"Good Lord, that's the German headquarters!"

"Yes," said Flynn. "With no Commissioner and no Askari to guard it! They've just passed us, heading in the opposite direction."

"They hit Mahenge two hours before dawn, in that time of utter darkness when mankind's vitality is at its lowest ebb. The defence put up by the corporal and five Askari whom Fleischer had left to guard his headquarters was hardly heroic. In fact, they were only half awakened by the lusty and indiscriminate use of Flynn's boot, and by the time they were fully conscious, they found themselves securely locked behind the bars of the jail-house.

There was only one casualty. It was, of course, Sebastian Oldsmith, who, in the excitement, ran into a half-open door. It was fortunate, as Flynn pointed out, that he struck the door with his head, otherwise he might have done himself injury. But as it was, he had recovered sufficiently by sunrise to watch the orgy of looting and vandalism in which Flynn and his gun-bearers indulged themselves.

They began in the office of the Commissioner. Built into the thick adobe wall of the room was an enormous iron safe.

"We will open that first," decreed Flynn as he eyed it greedily. "See if you can find some tools."

Sebastian remembered the blacksmith shop at the end of the parade ground. He returned from there laden with sledge-hammers and crow-bars.

Two hours later they were sweating and swearing in an atmosphere heavy with plaster dust. They had torn the safe from the wall, and it lay in the centre of the floor. Three of Flynn's gun-boys were beating on it with sledge-hammers in a steadily diminishing display of enthusiasm, while Sebastian worked with a crow-bar at the hinge joints. He had succeeded in inflicting a few bright scratches upon the metal. Flynn was seated on the Commissioner's desk, steadily working himself into a fury of frustration; for the last hour his contribution to the assault on the safe had been limited to consuming half a bottle of schnapps that he had found in a drawer of the desk.

"It's no use, Flynn." Sebastian's curls were slick with perspiration, and he licked at the blisters on the palms of his hands. "We will just have to forget about it."

"Stand back!" roared Flynn. "I'll shoot the goddamned thing open." He rose from the desk wild-eyed, his double-barrelled Gibbs clutched in his hands.

"Wait!" shouted Sebastian and he and the gun-bearers scattered for cover.

The detonations of the heavy rifle were thunderous in the confined space of the office; gun-smoke mingled with the plaster dust, and the bullets ricocheted off the metal of the safe, leaving long smears of lead upon it, before whining away to embed themselves in the floor, wall and furniture.

This act of violence seemed to placate Flynn. He lost interest in the safe. "Let's go and find something to eat," he said mildly, and they trooped through to the kitchens.

Once Flynn had shot away the lock, Herman Fleischer's larder proved to be an Aladdin's cave of delight. The roof was hung with hams and polonies and sausages, there were barrels of pickled meats, stacks of fat round cheeses, cases of Hansa beer, cases of cognac, pyramids of canned truffles, asparagus tips, shrimps, mushrooms, olives in oil, and other rarities.

They stared at this profusion in awe, and then moved forward together. Each man to his own particular tastes, they fell upon Herman Fleischer's treasure house. The gun boys rolled out a cask of pickled pork, Sebastian started with his hunting knife on the cans, while Flynn devoted himself to the case of Steinhager in the corner.

It took two hours of dedicated eating and drinking for them to reach saturation point.

"We'd better get ready to move on now," Sebastian belched softly, and Flynn nodded owlish agreement, the movement spilling a little Steinhager down his bush jacket.

He wiped at it with his hand and then licked his fingers.

"Yep! Best we are gone before Fleischer gets home." He looked at Mohammed. "Make up loads of food for each of the bearers. What you can't carry away we'll dump in the latrine buckets." He stood up carefully. "I'll just have a look round, and make sure we haven't missed anything important," and he went out through the door with unsteady dignity.

In Fleischer's office he stood for a minute regarding the invulnerable safe balefully. It was certainly much too heavy to carry away, and abandoning the notion with regret, he looked around for some outlet for his frustration.

There was a portrait of the Kaiser on the entrance wall, a colour print showing the Emperor in full dress, mounted on a magnificent cavalry charger. Flynn picked up an indelible pencil from the desk and walked across to the picture. With a dozen strokes of the pencil he drastically altered the relationship between horse and rider. Then, beginning to chuckle, he printed on the whitewashed wall below the picture, "The Kaiser loves horses."

This struck him as being such a pearl of wit, that he had summon Sebastian and show it to him. "That's what you call being subtle, Bassie, boy. All good jokes are subtle."

It seemed to Sebastian that Flynn's graffiti were as subtle as the charge of an enraged rhinoceros but he laughed dutifully. This encouraged Flynn to a further essay in humour. He had two of the gun bearers carry in a bucket from the latrines, and under his supervision, they propped it above the half-open door of Herman Fleischer's bedroom.

An hour later, heavily laden with booty, the raiding party left Mahenge and began the first of a series of forced marches aimed at the Rovurna river.

In a state of mental confusion induced by a superfluity of adrenalin in the bloodstream, Herman Fleischer wandered through his ransacked boma. As he discovered each new outrage he regarded it with slitted eyes and laboured breathing. But first it was necessary to effect a jailbreak in reverse in order to free his own captive Askari.

When they emerged through the hole in the prison wall, Herman curtly ordered his sergeant to administer twenty strokes of the kiboko to each of them, as a token rebuke for their inefficiency. He stood by and drew a little comfort from the solid slap of the kiboko on bare flesh and the shrieks of the recipient.

However, the calming effect of the floggings evaporated when Herman entered the kitchen area of his establishment, and found that his larder of painstakingly accumulated foodstuffs was now empty. This nearly broke his spirit His jowls quivered with self-pity, and from under his tongue saliva oozed in melancholic nostalgia. It would take a month to replace the sausages alone, heaven knew how long to replace the cheeses imported from the fatherland.

From the larder he went through to his office and found Flynn's subtleties. Herman's sense of humour was not equal to the occasion.

"Pig-swine, English-bastard," he muttered dejectedly, and a dark wave of despair and fatigue washed over him as he realized the futility of setting out in pursuit of the raiders.

With two days start he could never hope to catch them before they reached the Rovurna. If only Governor Schee, who was so forthcoming with criticism, would allow him to cross the river one night with his Askari and visit the community at Lalapanzi. There would be no one left the following morning to make complaint to the Portuguese Government about breach of sovereignty.

Herman sighed. He was tired and depressed. He would go to his bed now and rest a while before supervising the tidying up of his headquarters. He left the office and plodded heavily along the stoep to his private quarters, and pushed open the door of his bedroom.

His bedroom temporarily uninhabitable, Herman reposed that night on the open stoep. But his sleep was disturbed by a dream in which he pursued Flynn O'Flynn across an endless plain without ever narrowing the gap between them, while above him circled two huge birds one with the austere face of Governor Schee, and the other with the face of the young English bandit at regular intervals these two voided their bowels on him. After the previous afternoon's experience the olfactory hallucinations which formed part of the dream were horribly realistic.

He was tactfully awakened by one of his household servants, and struggled up in bed with an ache behind his eyes and a foul taste in his mouth.

"What is it?" he growled.

"There is a bearer from Dodoma who brings a book with the red mark of the Bwana MkUba upon it."

Herman groaned. An envelope with Governor Schee's seal affixed to it usually meant trouble. Surely he could not so speedily have learned about Flynn O'Flynn's latest escapade.

"Bring coffee!"

"Lord, there is no coffee. It was all stolen," and Herman L groaned again.

"Very well. Bring the messenger." He would have to endure the ordeal of Governor Schee's rebukes without the fortifying therapy of a cup of coffee. He broke the seal and began to read:

4th August, 1914.

The Residency, da res Salaam.

To The Commissioner (Southern Province)

At: Mahenge.

Sir, It is my duty to inform you that a state of war now exists between the Empire and the Governments of England, France, Russia, and Portugal.

You are hereby appointed temporary Military Commander of the Southern Province of German East Africa, with orders to take whatever steps you deem necessary for the protection of our borders, and the confusion of the enemy.

In due course a military force, now being assembled at Dares Salaam, will be despatched to your area. But I fear that there will be a delay before this can he achieved.

In the meantime, you must operate with the force presently at your disposal.

There was more, much more, but Herman Fleischer read the detailed instructions with perfunctory attention. His headache was forgotten, the taste in his mouth unnoticed in the fierce surge of warrior passions that arose within him.

His chubby features" puckered with smiles, he looked up from the letter and spoke aloud. "Ja, O'Flynn, now I will pay you for the bucket."

He turned back to the first page of the letter, and his mouth formed the words as he read whatever steps you deem necessary for the protection of our borders, and the confusion of the enemy."

At last. At last he had the order for which he had pleaded so many times. He shouted for his sergeant.

perhaps they will come home tonight. "Rosa Oldsmith looked up from the child's smock, she was embroidering.

"Tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day," Nanny replied philosophically. "There is no profit in guessing at the coming or going of men. They all have worms in their heads," and she began again to rock the cradle, squatting beside it on the leopard-skin rugs like an animated mummy. The child snuffled a little in its sleep.

"I'm sure it will be tonight. I can feel it something good is going to happen." Rosa laid aside her sewing and crossed to the door that led out on to the stoep. In the last few minutes the sun had gone down below the trees, and the land was ghostly quiet in the brief African dusk.

Rosa went out on to the stoep, and hugging her arms across her chest at the chill of evening, she stared out down the darkening length of the valley. She stood there, waiting restlessly, and as the day passed swiftly into darkness, so her mood changed from anticipation to a formless foreboding.

Quietly, but with an edge to her voice, she called back into the room, "Light the lamps please, Nanny."

Behind her she heard the sounds of metal on glass, then the flare of a sulphur match, and a feeble yellow square of light was thrown out on to the veranda to fall around her feet.

The first puff of the night wind was cold on her bare arms. She felt the prickle of goose-flesh and she shivered unexpectedly.

"Come inside, Little Long Hair," Nanny ordered. "The night is for mosquitoes and leopards and other things."

But Rosa lingered, straining her eyes into the darkness until she could no longer see the shape of the fig-trees at the bottom of the lawn. Then abruptly she turned away and went into the bungalow. She closed the door and slid the bolt across.

Later she woke. There was no moon outside and the room was dark. Beside her bed she could hear the soft, piglet sounds that little Maria made in her sleep.

Again the disquieting mood of the early evening returned to her and she lay still in her bed, waiting and listening in the utter blackness, and the darkness bore down upon her so that she felt herself shrinking, receding, becoming remote from reality, small and lonely in the night.

In fear then she lifted the mosquito netting and groped for the cradle. The baby whimpered as she lifted her and brought her into the bed beside her, but Rosa's arms quietened her and soon she slept against the breast, and the warmth of the tiny body stilled Rosa's own agitation.

The shouting woke her, and she opened her eyes with a surge of joy, for the shouts would be Sebastian's bearers.

Before she was fully awake she had thrown aside the bedclothes, struggled out from under the mosquito netting, and was standing in her night-dress with the baby clasped to her chest.

It was then that she realized that the room was no longer in darkness. From the -window into the yard it was lit by a red-gold glow that flared, and flickered, and faded.

The last tarnish of sleep was cleaned from her brain, so she could hear that the shouts from outside were not those of welcome, and on a lower key, there were other sounds a whispering, rustling, and popping, that she could not identify.

She crossed to the window, moving slowly, with dread for what she might find, but before she reached it a scream froze her. It came from the kitchen yard, a scream that quivered on the air long after it had ended, a scream of terror and of pain.

"Merciful God!" she whispered, and forced herself to peer out.

The servants" quarters and the outhouses were on fire.

From the thatch of each the flames stood up in writhing yellow columns, lighting the darkness.

There were men in the yard, many men, and all of them wore the khaki uniform of German Askari. Each of them carried a rifle, and the bayonet blades glittered in the glare of the flames.

"They have crossed the river No, oh please God, no!"

and Rosa hugged the baby to her, crouching down below the window sill.

The scream rang out again, but weaker now, and she saw a knot of four Askari crowded around something that squirmed in the dust of the yard. She heard their laughter, the excited laughter of men who kill for fun, as they stabbed down on the squirming thing with their bayonets.

At that moment another of the servants broke from the burning outbuildings and ran for the darkness beyond the circle of the flames. Shouting again, the Askari left the dying man and chased the other. They turned him like a pack of trained greyhounds coursing a gazelle, laughing and shouting in their excitation, and drove him back into the daylight glare of the flames.

Bewildered, surrounded, the servant stopped and looked wildly about him, his face convulsed with terror. Then the Askari swarmed over him, clubbing and hacking with their rifles.

"Oh, oh God, no." Rosa's whisper sobbed in her throat, but she could not drag her eyes away.

Suddenly in the uproar she heard a new voice, a bull bellow of authority. She could not understand the words for they were shouted in German but from around the angle of the bungalow appeared a white man, a massive figure in the blue corduroy uniform of the German Colonial Service, with a slouch hat pulled low down on his head, and a pistol brandished in one hand. From the description that Sebastian had given her, she recognized the German Commissioner.

"Stop them!" Rosa did not speak aloud, the appeal was in her mind only. "Please, stop them burning and killing."

The white Man was railing at his Askari, his face turned towards where Rosa crouched and she saw it was round and pink like that of an overweight baby. In the fire-light it glistened with a fine sheen of sweat.

"Stop them. Please stop them," Rosa pleaded silently, but under the Commissioner's direction three of the Askari ran to where, in the excitement of the chase, they had dropped their torches of dry grass. While they lit them from the flaming outbuildings, the other Askari left the corpses of the two servants and spread out in a circle around the bungalow, facing inwards, with their rifles held at high port.

Most of the bayonets were dulled with blood.

"I want Fini and the Singese not bearers and gun-boys - I want the white men! Burn them oud shouted Fleischer, but Rosa recognized only her father's name. She wanted to cry out that he was not here, that it was only her and the child.

The three Askari were running in towards the bungalow now, sparks and fire smeared back from the torches they carried. In turn each man checked his run, poised himself like a javelin thrower, then hurled his torch in a high, smoking arc towards the bungalow. Rosa heard them thump, thump, on to the thatched roof above her.

"I must get my baby away, before the fire catches," and she hurried across the room" out to the wall until to the passage. It was she found the dark here and she groped along entrance to the main room. At the front door she fumbled with the bolts, and opened it a crack. Peering through to p, she saw the dark forms the fire-lit lawns beyond the stoe of Askari waiting there also, and she drew back.

The side windows of the kitchen," she told herself.

"They're closest to the bush. "That's the best chance," and she stumbled back into the passage.

Above her now there was a sound like high wind and water, a rushing sound blending with the crackle of burning thatch, and the first taint of smoke stung her nostrils.

"If only I can reach the bush," she whispered desperately, and the child in her arms began to cry.

"Hush, my darling, hush now," but her voice was scratchy with fear. Maria seemed to sense it; her petulant whimperings changed to lusty high-pitched yells and she struggled in Rosa's grasp.

From the side windows of the kitchen Rosa saw the familiar waiting figures of the Askari hovering at the edge of the fire-light. She felt despair catch her stomach in a cold grip and squeeze the resolve from her. Suddenly her legs were weak under her and her whole body was shaking.

From within the bungalow behind her there came a thunderous roar as part of the burning roof collapsed. A

blast of scalding air blew through the kitchen and the tall column of sparks and flames thrown up by the collapse lit the surroundings even more vividly. It showed another figure beyond the line of Askari, scampering in from the edge of the bush like a little black monkey, and Rosa heard Nanny's voice.

"Little Long Hair! Little Long Hair." A plaintive, ancient wail.

Nanny had escaped into the bush during the first minutes of the attack. She had lain there watching until the roof of e could no longer contain the bungalow fell in then she if. Insensible of her own danger, caring for nothing herself except her precious charges, she was coming back The Askari saw her also. Their rigid, well-spaced line d as all of thin ran to head her off. Suddenly the crumple ground between Rosa and the edge of the bush was clear.

Now there was a chance just the smallest chance that she could get the child away. She flung the window open and dropped through it to the earth.

One moment she hesitated and glanced towards the confusion of running men away on her right hand. In that moment she saw one of the Askari catch up with the old woman and lunge forward with his bayonet. Nanny reeled from the force of the blow in her back. Involuntarily her arms were flung wide open, and for a fleeting second Rosa saw the point of the bayonet appear miraculously from the centre of her chest, as it impaled her.

Then Rosa was running towards the wall of bush and scrub fifty yards ahead of her, while Maria howled in her arms. The sound attracted the attention of the Askari. One of them shouted a warning, and then the whole pack was after her in full tongue.

Rosa's senses were overwrought by her terror, so finely tuned that it seemed the passage of time was lagging.

Weighed down by the child, each pace she took dragged on for ever, as though she waded through waistdeep water.

The long nightdress around her legs hampered her, and there was rough stone and thorn beneath her bare feet. The wall of bush ahead of her seemed to come no closer, and she ran with the cold hand of fear squeezing her chest and cramping her breathing.

Then into her line of vision from the side came a man, an Askari, a big man bounding towards her with the long loping gallop of a bull baboon, cutting across her line of flight,

his open mouth an obscene pink pit in the shiny black of his face.

Rosa screamed and swung away from him. Now she was running parallel to the edge of the bush and behind her she heard the slap of feet upon the earth, closing fast, and the babbling chorus of the pursuit.

A hand snatched at her shoulder, and she twisted away from it,

feeling the stuff of her nightgown tear beneath the clutching fingers.

Blind with terror she stumbled a dozen paces back towards the burning homestead. She felt the vast waves of heat from it in her face and through her thin clothing and then a rifle butt struck her in the small of the back, and a bright burst of agony paralysed her legs. She dropped to her knees, still holding Maria.

They ringed her in, a palisade of human bodies and gloating,

blood-crazed faces.

The big one who had felled her with the rifle butt stooped over her and before she recognized his intention, he had snatched Maria from her arms and stepped back again.

He stood laughing, holding the child by her ankles, letting her swing head downwards, so her tiny face was suffused with blood, scarlet in the light of the flames.

"No, please, no! "Rosa crawled painfully towards the Man.

"Give her back to me. My baby. Please give her back," and she lifted her arms towards him.

The Askari dangled the child tantalizingly in front of her,

retreating slowly as she crawled towards him. The others were laughing, hoarse sensual laughter, crowding around her, faces contorted with enjoyment, and polished ebony black with the sweat of excitement,

as they jostled each other for a better view of the sport.

Then with a wild yell, the Askari swung Maria high, whirled her twice above his head as he pivoted to face the bungalow, and threw Maria up towards the burning roof. The tiny body flew with the looseness of a rag doll through the air, her night-dress fluttered as she dropped and struck the roof, rolled awkwardly down the slope of it with her clothing blooming into instant flame, until she reached a weak spot in the burning thatch. It sucked Maria in like a fiery mouth and blew a belch of sparks as it swallowed her.

that instant Rosa heard the voice of her child for the last time. It was a sound she was never to forget.

For a moment the men about her were hushed, and then as though wind blew through trees, they moved a little with a sound that was half sigh, half moan.

Still kneeling, facing the burning building which was now a pyre,

Rosa slumped forward and lifted her hands to cover her face as though in prayer.

The Askari who had thrown the child snatched up his rifle from where it lay at his feet and stood over her. He lifted it above his head the way a harpooner holds his steel with the point of the bayonet aimed at the base of Rosa's neck where her hair had fallen open to expose the pale skin.

In the moment that the Askari paused to take his aim, Herman

Fleischer shot him in the back of the head with the Luger.

"Mad dog!" the Commissioner shouted at the Askari's corpse. "I

told you to take them alive." Then, breathing like an asthma case from the exertion of his run to intervene, he turned to Rosa.

Frulein, my apologies," he doffed the slouch hat with ponderous courtesy, and spoke in German that Rosa did not understand. "We do not make war on women and babies." She did not look up at him. She was crying quietly into her cupped hands.

Early in the year for a bush fire," Flynn muttered. He sat with an enamel mug cupped in his hands and blew steam from the hot coffee. His blanket had slid down to his waist.

Across the camp-fire from him Sebastian was also sitting in a muddle of bedding, and cooling his own pre-dawm mug of coffee. At

Flynn's words he looked up from his labour, and out into the dark south.

False dawn had paled the sky just enough to define the hills below it as an undulating mass that seemed much closer than it was. That way lay Lalapanzi, , Maria. and Rosa and Without real interest Sebastian saw the radiated glow at one point along the spine of the ridge; a fan of pink light no larger than a thUmb-nail.

"Not a very big one, "he said.

"No," agreed Flynn. "Hope she doesn't spread though and he gulped noisily at his mug.

As Sebastian watched it idly, the glow diminished, shrinking into insignificance at the coming of the sun, and above it the stars paled out also.

"We'd best get moving. It's a long day's march and we've wasted enough time on this trip already." "You're a regular bloody fire-eater when it comes to getting your home comforts." Flynn feigned disinterest, yet secretly the thought of returning to his granddaughter had strong appeal. He hurried the coffee a little and scalded his tongue.

Sebastian was right- They had wasted a lot of time on the return trip from the Mahenge raid.

,44 First, there was a detour to avoid a party of German Askari that one of the native headmen had warned them was at M'tapa's village. They had trekked upstream for three days before finding a safe crossing, and a village willing to hire canoes.

Then there was the brush with the hippo which had cost them almost a week. As was usual practice, the four hired canoes, loaded to within a few inches of freeboard with Flynn, Sebastian, their retinue and loot, had slipped across the Rovuma and were hugging the Portuguese bank as they headed downstream towards the landing opposite M'tapa's village when the hippo had disputed their passage.

She was an old cow hippo who a few hours earlier had given birth to her calf in a tiny island of reeds, separated from the south bank by twenty feet of lily-padded water.

When the four canoes entered this channel in line astern with the paddlers chanting happily, she took it as a direct threat to her offspring and she threw a tantrum.

Two tons of hippo in a tantrum has the destructive force of a localized hurricane. Surfacing violently from under the leading canoe,

she had thrown Sebastian, two gun-boys, four paddlers, and all their equipment, ten feet in the air.

The canoe, rotted with beetle, had snapped in half and sunk immediately.

The mother hippo had then treated the three following canoes with the same consideration, and within the space of a few minutes, the canal was clogged with floating debris, and struggling, panic-stricken men. Fortunately they were ashore. None of them, however, was very far behind him, no more than ten feet from the bank. Sebastian was first and they all took off like the start of a cross-country race over the veld, when the hippo emerged from the river and signified that, not satisfied with wrecking the flotilla, she intended chopping a few of them in half with her guillotine jaws.

A hundred yards later she abandoned the pursuit, and trotted back to the water, wiggling her little ears and snorting in triumph. Half a mile farther on the survivors had stopped running.

They camped there that night without food, bedding or weapons, and the following morning, after a heated council Of war, Sebastian was elected to return to the river and ascertain whether the hippo was still in control of the channel. He came back at high speed to report that she was.

Three more days they waited for the hippo and her calf to move away- During this time they suffered the miseries of cold nights and hungry days, but the greatest misery was inflicted on Flynn O'Flynn whose case of gin was under eight feet of water and by the third morning he was threatening delyrium tremens again. just before

Sebastian set off for his morning reconnaissance of the channel, Flynn informed him agitatedly that there were three blue scorpions sitting on his head. After the initial alarm, Sebastian went through the motions of removing the imaginary scorpions and stamping them to death, and

Flynn was satisfied.

Sebastian returned from the river with the news that the % hippo and her calf had evacuated the island, and it was now possible to begin salvage operations.

Protesting mildly and talking about crocodiles, Sebastian was stripped naked and coaxed into the water. On his first dive, he retrieved the precious case of gin.

"Bless you, MY boy," Flynn murmured fervently as he eased the cork out of a bottle.

By the following morning Sebastian had recovered nearly all their equipment and booty, without being eaten by crocodiles, and they set off for Lalapanzi on foot.

Now they were in their last camp before Lalapanzi, and Sebastian felt his impatience rising. He wanted to get home to Rosa and baby

Maria. He should be home by evening.

"Come on, Flynn. Let's go." He flicked the coffee grounds from his mug, threw aside his blanket, and shouted to Mohammed and the bearers who were huddled around the other fire.

"Safari! Let us march." Nine hours later, with the daylight dying around him, he breasted the last rise and paused at the top.

All that day eagerness had lengthened his stride, and he had left

Flynn and the column of heavily laden bearers far behind.

Now he stood alone, and stared without comprehension at the smoke-blackened ruins of Lalapanzi from which a few thin tendrils of smoke still drifted.

"Rosa!" Her name was a harsh bellow of fear, and he ran wildly.

"Rosa!" he shouted as he crossed the scorched and trampled lawns.

"Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!" the echo from the kopje above the homestead shouted back.

"Rosa!" He saw something amongst the bushes at the edge of the lawn, and he ran to it. Old Nanny lying dead with the blood dried black on the floral stuff of her nightgown.

"Rosa!" He ran back towards the bungalow. The ash swirled in a warm mist around his legs as he crossed the stoep.

"Rosa!" His voice rang hollowly through the roofless shell of the house, as he stumbled over the fallen beams that littered the main room. The reek of burned cloth and hair and wood almost choked him, so that his voice was husky as he called again.

"Rosa!" He found her in the burnt-out kitchen block and he thought she was dead. She was slumped against the cracked and blackened wall.

Her night-gown was torn and scorched, and the snarled skeins of hair,

that hid her face, were powdered with white wood ash.

"My darling. Oh, my darling." He knelt beside her, and timidly touched her shoulder. Her flesh was warm and alive beneath his fingers, and he felt relief leap up into his throat, blocking it so he could not speak again. Instead, he brushed the tangle of hair from her face and looked at it.

Beneath the charcoal smears of dirt her skin was pale as grey marble. Her eyes, tight closed, were heavily underscored with blue,

and rimmed with crusty red.

He touched her lips with the tips of his fingers, and she opened her eyes, But they looked beyond him; unseeing, dead eyes. They frightened him. He did not want to look into them, and he drew her head towards his shoulder.

There was no resistance in her. She lay against him quietly, and he pressed his face into her hair. Her hair was impregnated with the smell of smoke.

"Are you hurt?" he asked her in a whisper, not wanting to hear the answer. But she made no answer, lying inert in his arms.

"Tell me, Rosa. Speak to me. Where is Maria?" At the mention of the child's name, she reacted for the first time. She began to tremble.

"Where is she?" more urgency in his voice now.

She rolled her head against his shoulder and looked across the floor of the room. He followed the direction of her gaze.

Near the far wall an area of the floor had been swept clear of debris and ash. Rosa had done it with her bare hands while the ash was still hot. Her fingers were blistered and burned raw in places, and her arms were black to the elbows. Lying in the centre of this cleared space was a small, charred thing.

"Maria?" Sebastian whispered, and Rosa shuddered against him.

"Oh, God," he said, and lifted Rosa. Carrying her against his chest, he staggered from the ruins of the bungalow out into the cool, sweet evening air, but in his nostrils lingered the smell of smoke and burned flesh. He wanted to escape from it. He ran blindly along the path and Rosa lay unresisting in his arms. The following day Flynn buried their dead on the kopje above

Lalapanzi. He placed a thick slab of granite over the small grave that stood apart from the others, and when it was done he sent a bearer to the camp to fetch Rosa and Sebastian.

When they came, they found him standing alone by Maria's grave under the man da trees. His face was puffy and purply red. The thinning grey hair hung limply over his ears and forehead, like the wet feathers of an old rooster. His body looked as though it was melting.

It sagged at the shoulders and the belly. Sweat had soaked through his clothing across the shoulders, and at the armpits and crotch.

He was sick with drink and sorrow.

Sebastian stood beside Rosa, and the three of them took their silent farewell of the child.

"There is nothing else to do now," Sebastian spoke huskily.

"Yes," said Flynn. He stooped slowly and took a handful of the new earth from the grave. "Yes, there is. "He crumbled the earth between his fingers. "We still have to find the man who did this and kill him." Beside Sebastian, Rosa straightened up. She turned to

Sebastian, lifted her chin, and spoke for the first time since he had come home.

"Kill him! "she repeated softly.

PART TWO

With his hands clasped behind his back, and his chin thrust forward aggressively, Rear-Admiral Sir Percy Howe sucked in his lower lip and nibbled it reflectively. What was our last substantiated sighting on Blitcher?"he asked at last.

"A month ago, sir. Two days before the outbreak of war.

Sighting reported by S.S. Tygerberg. Latitude 027N. Longitude 5"-16"E. Headed south-west; estimated speed, eighteen knots."

"And a hell of a lot of good that does us," Sir Percy interrupted his flag-captain and glared at the vast Admiralty plot of the Indian Ocean. "She could be back in Bremerhaven by now."

"She could be, sir," the flag-captain nodded, and Sir Percy glanced at him and permitted himself a wintry smile.

"But you don't believe that, do you, Henry?"

"No, sir, I don't.

During the last thirty days, eight merchantmen have disappeared between

Aden and Lourenco Marques. Nearly a quarter of a million tons of shipping.

That's the Blitcher's work."

"Yes, it's the Blitcher, all right,"

agreed the Admiral, and reached across the-plot to pick up the black counter labelled "Blitcher', that lay on the wide green expanse of the

Indian Ocean.

A respectful silence held the personnel of the plotting room South

Atlantic and Indian Oceans while they waited for the great man to reach his decision. It was a long time coming. He stood bouncing the

"counter in the palm of his right hand, his grey eyebrows erect like the spines of a hedgehog's back, as his forehead creased in thought.

A

full minute they waited.

"Refresh my memory of her class and commission." Like most successful men Sir Percy would not hurry a decision when there was time to think, and the duty lieutenant who had anticipated his request,

stepped forward with the German Imperial Navy list open at the correct page.

"Blitcher. Commissioned August 16, 1905. "B" Class heavy cruiser. Main armament, eight nine-inch guns. Secondary armament, six six-inch guns."" The lieutenant finished his reading and waited quietly.

"Who is her captain?" Sir Percy asked, and the lieutenant consulted an addendum to the list.

"Otto von Kleine (Count). Previously commanded the light cruiser

Sturm Vogel.""

"Yes," said Sir Percy. "I've heard of him," and he replaced the counter on the plot, keeping his hand on it. "A dangerous man to have here, south Of Suez," and he Pushed the counter up towards the Red Sea and the entrance to the canal, where the tiny red shipping lanes amalgamated or here," and he pushed it down into a thick artery, towards the Cape of Good Hope, around which were curved the same red threads that joined London to Australia and India. Sir Percy lifted his hand from the black counter and left it sitting menacingly upon the shipping lanes.

"What force have we deployed against him so far?" and in answer the flag-captain picked up a wooden pointer and touched in turn the red counters that were scattered about the Indian Ocean.

"Pegasus and Renounce in the north. Eagle and Plunger sweeping the southern waters, sir."

"What further force can we spare, Henry?"

"Well, sir, Orion and Bloodhound are at Simonstown," and 4, he touched the nose of the African continent with the pointer.

"Orion that's Manderson, isn't it?" "Yes, sir."

"And who has Bloodhound?"

"Little, sir."

"Good," Sir Percy nodded with satisfaction. "A six-inch cruiser and a destroyer should be able to deal with Bkicher," and he smiled again. "Especially with a hellion like Charles Little handling the Bloodhound. I played golf with him last summer he damn nigh drove the sixteenth green at St. Andrews!"

The flag-captain glanced at the Admiral and, on the strength of the destroyer captain's reputation, decided to permit himself an inanity.

"The young ladies of Cape Town will mourn his departure, sir."

"We must hope that KapitAn zur See Otto von Kleine will mourn his arrival, "chuckled Sir Percy.

"Daddy likes you very much."

"Your father is a man of exquisite good taste," Commander the Honourable Charles Little conceded gallantly, and rolled his head to smile at the young lady who lay beside him on a rug, in the dappled shade beneath the pine trees.

"Can't you ever be serious?"

"Helen, my sweet, at times I can be deadly serious."

"Oh, You!" and his companion blushed prettily as she remembered certain of Charles's recent actions, which would make her father hastily revise his judgement.

"I value your father's good opinion, but my chief concern is that you endorse it." The girl sat up slowly and while she stared at him her hands were busy, brushing the pine needles from the glorious tangle of her hair, readjusting the fastenings of her blouse, spreading the skirts of her riding-habit to cover sweet legs clad in dark, tall polished leather boots.

She stared at Charles Little and ached with the strength of her want. It was not a sensual need she felt, but an overpowering obsession to have this man as her very own. To own him in the same way as she already owned diamonds, and furs, and silk, and horses, and peacocks, and other beautiful things.

His body sprawled out on the rug with all the unconscious grace of a reclining leopard. A secret little smile tugged at the corners of his lips and his eyelids drooped to mask the sparkle of his eyes. His recent exertions had dampened the hair that flopped forward onto his forehead.

There was something satanical about him, an air of wickedness, and

Helen decided it was the slant of the eyebrows and the way his ears lay flat against his temples, but were pointed like those of a satyr, yet they were pink and smooth as those of an infant.

"think you have devil's ears, she said, and then she blushed again, and scrambled to her feet avoiding Charles's arm that reached out for her. "Enough of that!" she giggled and ran to the thoroughbred hunter that was tied near them in the forest. "Come on, "she called as she mounted.

Charles stood up lazily and stretched. He tucked the tail of his shirt into his breeches, folded the rug on which they had lain, and went to his own horse.

At the edge of the pine forest, they checked their mounts and sat looking down over the Constantia valley.

"Isn't it beaUtiful? she said.

"It is indeed, "he agreed.

"I meant the view."

"And so she did Twice in the six days he had known her, she had led him up this mountain and Subjected him to the temptation. Below them lay six thousand acres of the richest land in all of Africa.

"When my brother Hubert was killed there was no one left to carry it on. just my sister and I and we are only girls. Poor Daddy isn't so well any more he finds it such a strain." Charles let his eyes move lazily from the great squat buttress of Table Mountain on their left, across the lush basin of vineyards below them, and then on to where the glittering-wedge of False Bay drove into the mountains.

"Doesn't the "homestead look lovely from here?" Helen drew his attention to the massive Dutch-gabled residence, with its attendant outbuildings grouped in servility behind it.

"I am truly impressed by the magnificence of the stud fee,"

Charles murmured, purposefully slurring the last two words, and the girl glanced at him in surprise, beginning to bridle.

"I beg your pardon?"

"It is truly magnificent scenery," he amended. Her persistent efforts at ensnaring him were beginning to bore Charles.

He had teased and avoided more artful huntresses.

"Charles," she whispered. "How would you like to live here. I

mean, forever?" And Charles was shocked. This little provincial had no understanding whatsoever of the rules governing the game of flirtation.

He was so shocked that he threw back his head and laughed

When Charles laughed it sent shivers of delight through every woman within a hundred yards. It was a merry sound with underlying tones of sensuality. His teeth were very white against the sea-tan of his face, and the muscles of his chest and upper arms tensed into bold relief beneath the silk shirt he wore.

Helen was the only witness of this particular perform and she was helpless as a sparrow in a hurricane.

once, Eagerly she leaned across the space between their horses and touched his arm. "You would like it, Charles. Wouldn't you? She did not know that Charles Little had a private income of twenty thousand pounds a year, that when his father died he would inherit the title Viscount Sutherton and the estates that went with it.

She did not know that one of those estates would swallow her father's own three times over; nor did she know that Charles had passed by willing young ladies with twice her looks, ten times her fortune, and a hundred times her breeding.

"You would, Charles. I know you would!" So young, so vulnerable,

that he stopped the flippant reply before it reached his lips.

"Helen," he took her hand. "I am a sea creature. We move with the wind and the waves," and he lifted her hand to his lips.

A while she sat, feeling the warm pressure of his lips upon her flesh, and the burn of tears behind her eyes. Then she snatched her hand away, and wheeled her horse. She lifted the leather riding-crop and slashed the glossy black shoulder between her knees. Startled, the stallion jumped forward into a dead run back along the road towards the

Constantia valley.

Charles shook his head and grimaced with regret. He had not meant to hurt her. It had been an escapade, something to fill the waiting days while Bloodhound went through the final stages of her refit. But Charles had learned to harden himself to the ending of his adventures to the tears and tragedy.

"Shame on you, you heartless cad, he said aloud, and touching his mount with his heels ambled in pursuit of the galloping stallion.

He caught up with the stallion in the stable yards. A groom was walking it, and there were darker sweat patches on its coat, and the barrel of its chest still heaved with laboured breathing.

Helen was nowhere in sight, but her father stood at the stable gates, - a big man, with a square-cut black beard picked out with grey.

"Enjoy your ride?"

"Thank you, Mr. Uys." Charles was noncommittal,

and the older man glanced significantly at the blown stallion before going on.

"There's one of your sailors been waiting for you for an hour."

"Where is he?" Charles's manner altered abruptly, became instantly businesslike.

"Here, Mr." From the deep shade of the stable doorway, a young seaman stepped out into the bright sunlight.

"What is it, man?" Impatiently Charles acknowledged his salute.

"Captain Manderson's compliments, sir, and you're to report aboard

HMS. Orion with all possible speed. There's a motor car waiting to take you to the base, sir."

"An untimely summons, Commander." Uys gave his "opinion lounging against the worked stone gateway.

we will see no more of you for a long time." But Charles was not listening. His body seemed to quiver with suppressed excitement, the way a good gun dog reacts to the scent of the bird. "Sailing orders,"

he whispered, at last. At last!" There was a heavy south-east swell battering Cape Point, so the sea spray reached the beam of the lighthouse on the cliffs above. A flight of mal gas came in so high towards the land that they caught the last of the sun, and glowed pink above the dark water.

Bloodhound cleared Cape Hangklip and took the press of the South

Atlantic on her shoulder, staggered from it with a welter of white water running waist-deep past her foredeck gun-turrets. Then in retaliation she hurled herself at the next swell, and Charles Little on her bridge exulted at the vital movement of the deck beneath his feet.

"Bring her round to oh five, oh

"Oh-five, oh sir, "repeated his navigating lieutenant.

"Revolution s for seventeen knots, pilot." Almost immediately the beat of the engines changed, and her action through the water became more abandoned.

Charles crossed to the angle of the flimsy little bridge and looked back into the dark, mountain-lined maw of False Bay. Two miles astern the shape of HMS. Orion melted into the dying light.

"Come along, old girl. Do try and keep up," murmured Charles

Little with the scorn that a destroyer man feels for any vessel that cannot cruise at twenty knots. Then he looked beyond Orion at the land. Below the massif of Table Mountain, near the head of the

Constantia valley a single pin prick of light showed.

"There'll be fog tonight, sir," the pilot spoke at Charles's elbow, and Charles turned without regret to peer over the bows into the gathering night.

"Yes, a good night for pirates. "The fog condensed on the grey metal of the bridge, so the foot plates were slippery underfoot. It soaked into the overcoats of the men huddled against the rail, and it de wed in minute pearls on the eyebrows and the beard of Kapitan zur See

Otto von Kleine. It gave him an air of derring-do, the reckless look of a scholarly pirate.

Every few seconds Lieutenant Kyller glanced anxiously at his captain, wondering when the order to turn would come. He hated this business of creeping inshore in the fog, with a flood tide pushing them towards a hostile coast.

"Stop all engines," said von Kleine, and Kyller repeated the order to the helm with alacrity. The muted throbbing died beneath their feet, and afterwards the fog-blanketed air was heavy with a sepulchral hush.

Ask masthead what he makes of the land." Von Kleine spoke without turning his head, and after a pause Kyller reported back.

"Masthead is in the fog. No visibility." He paused.

Toredeck reports fifty fathoms shoaling rapidly." And von Kleine nodded. The sounding tended to confirm his estimate that they were sitting five miles off the breakwater of Durban harbour. When the morning wind swept the fog aside he hoped to see the low coastal hills of Natal ahead of him, terraced with gardens and whitewashed buildings but most of all he hoped to see at least six British merchantmen anchored off the beach waiting their turn to enter the congested harbOUr, plump and sleepy under the protection of the shore batteries;

unaware just how feeble was the protection afforded by half a dozen obsolete ten-pounders manned by old men and boys of the militia.

German naval intelligence had submitted a very detailed report of the de fences and conditions prevailing in Durban.

After careful perusal of this report, von Kleine had decided that he could trade certain betrayal of his exact position to the English for such a rich prize. There was little actual risk involved. One pass across the entrance of the harbour at high speed, a single broadside for each of the anchored merchantmen, and he could be over the horizon again before the shore gunners had loaded their weapons.

The risk, of course, was in showing Blitcher to the entire population of Durban city and thereby supplying the Royal Navy with its first accurate sighting since the declaration of war. Within minutes of his first broadside, the British squadrons, which were hunting him,

would be racing in from all directions to block each of his escape routes. He hoped to counter this by swinging away towards the south,

down into that watery wilderness of wind and ice below J latitude 40',

to the rendezvous with Esther, his supply ship.

Then on to Australia or South America, as the opportunity arose.

He turned to glance at the chronometer above the ship's compass.

Sunrise in three minutes, then they could expect the morning wind.

"Masthead reports the fog dispersing, sir," Von Kleine aroused himself, and looked out into the fog banks. They were moving now,

twisting upon themselves in agitation at the warmth of the sun. "All engines slow ahead together," he said.

Masthead," warbled one of the voice-pipes in the battery in front of Kyller. "Land bearing green four-oh. Range, ten thousand metres.

A big headland." That would be the bluff above Durban, that massive whale-backed mountain that sheltered the harbour. But in the fog von

Kleine had misjudged his approach; he was twice as far from the shore as he had intended.

"All engines full ahead together. New course. Oh-oh-six." He waited for the order to be relayed to the helm before strolling across to the voice-pipes. "Guns. Captain."

"Guns," the voice from far away acknowledged.

"I will be opening fire with high explosives in about ten minutes.

The target will he massed merchant shipping on an approximate mark of three hundred degrees. Range, five thousand metres, You may fire as soon as you bear."

"Mark three hundred degrees. Range, five thousand metres. Sir," repeated the pipe, and von Kleine snapped the voice-tube cover shut and returned to his original position, facing forward with his hands clasped loosely behind his back.

Below him the gun-turrets revolved ponderously and the long barrels lifted slightly, pointing out into the mist with impassive menace.

A burst of dazzling sunshine struck the bridge so fiercely that

Kyller lifted his hand to shield his eyes, but it was gone instantly as the Blucher dashed into another clammy cold bank of fog. Then as though they had passed through a curtain on to a brilliantly lit stage,

they came out into a gay summer's morning.

Behind them the fog rolled away in a sodden grey wall from horizon to horizon. Ahead rose the green hills of Africa, rimmed with white beach and surf and speckled with thousands of whiter flecks that were the buildings of Durban town. The scaffolding of the cranes along the harbour wall looked like derelict sets of gallows.

Humped on the smooth green mirror of water between them and the shore, lay four ungainly shapes looking like a troop of basking hippo.

The British merchantmen.

"Four only," muttered von Kleine in chagrin. "I had hoped for more." The forty-foot barrels of the nine-inch guns moved restlessly,

seeming to sniff for their prey, and the Blucher raced on, lifting a hissing white wave at her bows, vibrating and shuddering to the thrust of her engines as they built up to full speed.

"Masthead" the voice-tube beside Kyller squawked urgently.

Bridge," said Kyller but the reply was lost in the deafening detonation of the first broadside, the long thunderous roll of heavy gun-fire. He jumped involuntarily, taken unawares, and then quickly lifted the binoculars from his chest to train them on the British merchantmen.

All attention, every eye on the bridge was concentrated ahead,

waiting for the fall of shot upon the doomed vessels.

In the comparative silence that followed the bellow of the broadside, a shriek from the masthead voice-pipe carried clearly.

"Warships! Enemy warships dead astern!" "Starboard ten." Von Kleine raised his voice a little louder than was his wont, and still under full power, Blitcher swerved away from the land, leaning out from the turn, with her wake curved like an ostrich plume on the surface of the sea behind her, and ran for the shelter of the fog banks, leaving the rich prize of cargo shipping unscathed.

On her bridge von Kleine and his officers were staring aft, the merchantmen forgotten as they searched for this new threat.

"Two warships." The masthead look-our was elaborating his sighting report. "A destroyer and a cruiser. Bearing ninety degrees. Range,

five-oh, seven-oh. Destroyer leading." In the spherical field of von

Kleine's binoculars the neat little triangle of the leading destroyer's superstructure popped up above the horizon. The cruiser was not yet in sight from the bridge.

"If they'd been an hour later," lamented Kyller, "we'd have finished the business and..

"What does masthead see of the cruiser?" von Kleine interrupted him impatiently. He had no time to mourn this chance of fate his only concern was to evaluate the force that was pursuing him, and then make the decision whether to run, or to turn back and engage them immediately.

"Cruiser is a medium, six or nine-inch. Either "O" class, or an

"R". She's four miles behind her escort. Both ships still out of range." The destroyer was of no consequence; he could run down on her and blast her into a burning wreck, before her feeble little 4.7-inch guns were able to drop a shell within a mile of Blitcher, but the cruiser was another matter entirely. To tackle her, Blitcher would be engaging with her own class; victory would only be won after a severe mauling, and she was six thousand miles from the nearest friendly port where she could effect major repairs.

There was a further consideration. These two British ships might be the vanguard of a battle squadron. If he turned now and challenged action, engaged the cruiser in a single ship action, he might suddenly find himself pitted against imponderable odds. There could very well be another cruiser, or two, or three even a battleship, below the southern horizon.

His duty and his orders dictated instant flight, avoiding action,

and so prolonging Blitcher's fighting life.

"Enemy are streaming their colours, sir," Kyller reported.

Von Kleine lifted his binoculars again. At the destroyer's masthead flew the tiny spots of white and red. This time he must leave the challenge to combat unanswered. "Very well," he said, and turned away to his stool in the corner of the bridge. He slumped into it and hunched his shoulders in thought. There were many interesting problems to occupy him, not least of them was how long he could run at full speed towards the north while his boilers devoured coal ravenously, and each minute widened the gap between Blitcher and Esther.

He swivelled his stool and looked back over his stern.

The destroyer was visible to the unaided eye now, and von Kleine frowned at it in irritation. She would yap at his heels like a terrier, clinging to him and shouting his Course and speed across the ether to the hungry British squadrons, that must even now be closing with him from every direction.

For days now he Could expect to see her sitting in his wake.

Come on! Come on!" Charles Little slapped his hand impatiently against the padded arm of his stool as he watched Orion.

For a night and a day he had watched her gaining on Blitcher but so infinitesimally slowly that it required his range finder to confirm the gain every thirty minutes.

Orion's bows were unnaturally high, and the waves she lifted with the passage of her hull through the water were the white wings of a seagull in the tropical sunlight; for Manderson, her captain, had

Pumped out her forward freshwater tanks and fired away half the shell and explosive Propellant from her forward magazines. Every man whose presence in the front half of the ship was not essential to her operation had been ordered aft to stand on the open deck as human ballast all this in an effort to lift Orion's bows and to coax another inch of speed from the cruiser.

Now she faced the most dangerous hour of her life, for she was creeping within extreme range of Blucher's terrible nine-inch armament,

and, taking into account the discrepancy in their speeds, it would be another hour before she could bring her own six-inch guns to bear.

During that time she would be under fire from Blucher's after turrets and would have no answer to them.

It was heart-breaking for Charles to watch the chase, for

Bloodhound had not once been asked to extend herself.

Below there was a reserve of speed that would allow her to close with Blucher in fifty minutes of steaming always -A provided she was not smashed into a fiery shambles long before.

Thus the three vessels fled towards the ever-receding northern horizon. The two long shapes of the cruisers flying arrow straight,

solid columns of reeking smoke pouring from the triple funnels to besmear the gay, glittering surface of the sea with a long double bank of black that dispersed only slowly on the easterly breeze; while, like a wwater beetle, the diminutive Bloodhound circled out to the side of Blitcher from where, when the time came, she could spot the fall of

Orion's shells more accurately and signal the corrections to her. But always Bloodhound tactfully kept outside the fifteen-mile radius which marked the length of Blucher's talons.

"We can expect Blucher to open fire at any moment now, sir the navigating lieutenant commented as he straightened up from the sextant,

over which he had been measuring the angle subtended by the two cruisers.

Charles nodded in agreement. "Yes. Von Kleine must try for a few lucky hits, even at that range."

"This isn't going to be very pretty to watch."

"We'll just have to sit tight, keep our fingers crossed, and hope old Orion can,-" He stopped abruptly, and then "Hello! Blucher's up to something!" He Jumped Up from his stool.

The silhouette of the German cruiser had altered drastically in the last few seconds. The gap between her funnels widened and now

Charles could see the humped menace of her forward turrets.

"By God, she's altering course! The bloody bastard is bringing all his turrets to bear!" Lieutenant Kyller studied his captain's face.

In sleep there was an air of serenity about the man. It reminded

Kyller of a painting he had seen in the cathedral at Mirriberg, a portrait of Saint Luke by Holbein. The same fine bone structure, the golden-blond beard and mustache that framed the mobile and sensitive lips. He pushed the idea aside and leaned forward. Gently he touched von Kleine's shoulder.

"Captain. My Captain," and von Kleine opened his eyes.

They were smoky blue with sleep but his voice was crisp.

"What is it, Kyller?"

"The gunnery officer reports the enemy will be within range in fifteen minutes." Von Kleine swivelled his stool and looked quickly about his ship. Above him the smoke poured from every funnel, and from the mouth of each stack a volcano of sparks and shimmering heat blew steadily. The paint had blistered and peeled from the metal of the funnels and they glowed red hot, even in the sunlight.

Blitcher was straining herself far beyond the limits her makers had set. God alone knew what injury this constant running at full speed was doing her, and von Kleine winced as he felt her tremble in protest beneath him.

He turned his eyes astern. The British cruiser was hull up on the horizon now. The difference in their speeds must be a small fraction of a knot, but Blucher's superiority in fire power was enormous.

For a moment he allowed himself to ponder the arrogance of a nation that constantly, almost by choice, matched their men and ships against unnatural odds.

Always they sent terriers to fight against wolfhounds. Then he smiled, you had to be English or mad, to understand the English.

He glanced out to starboard. The British destroyer had worked out on to his flank. It could do little harm from there.

"Very well, Kyller.. He stood as he spoke.

"Bridge Engine Room," the voice-tube squealed.

"Engine Room Bridge. "Kyller turned to it.

"Our port main bearing is running red hot. I must shut down our port engine!" The words struck von Kleine like a bucket of iced water thrown down his back. He leaped to the voice tube

"This is the Captain. I must have full power for another hour!"

"I can't do it, siR. Another fifteen minutes and the main drive shaft will seize up. God knows what damage it will do." For five seconds von

Kleine hunched silently over the voice-tube. His mind raced. On one engine Blucher would lose ten knots on her speed. The enemy would be able to manoeuvre about him freely possibly hold off until nightfall and then... He must attack immediately; turn on them and press his attack home with all his armament.

"Give me full power for as long as you can," he snapped, and then turning to the gunnery officer's tube, "This is the Captain. I am turning four points to starboard, and will keep the enemy directly on our starboard beam for the next fifteen minutes. After that I will be forced to reduce speed.

Open fire when you bear." Von Kleine snapped the cover closed and turned to his yeoman of signals. "Hoist the battle ensign!" He spoke softly, without heat, but there were lights in his eyes like those in a blue sapphire.

here she goes!" whispered Charles Little without lowering his glasses. Upon the black turrets of the- gun-fire gleamed and sparkled without sound. Quickly he traversed his glasses across the surface of the sea until he found Orion. She was plunging in eagerly,

narrowing the gap very rapidly between herself and Blucher.

In another seven minutes she would be able to return the German's fire.

Suddenly, a quarter of a mile ahead of her, there rose from the sea a series of tall columns, stately as the columns of a Greek temple,

slender and beautiful, shining like white marble in the sun. Then slowly they dropped back.

"Short,"grunted the navigating lieutenant.

"Her guns are still cold," Charles commented. "Please God let old

Orion get within range." Again shells fell short, and short again, but each time they were closer to the low bulk of Orion, and the next broadside dropped all around her, partially screening her with spray, and Orion started to zigzag.

"Another three minutes," the navigating lieutenant spoke with tension making his voice husky.

At regular intervals of fifteen seconds the German salvos fell around Orion once within fifty feet of her bows so that as she tore into the standing columns of spray, they blew back over her and mingled with the black smoke of her funnels.

"Come on, old girl! Go in and get her. Go on! Go on.

Charles was gripping the rail in front of him and cheering like a maniac, all the dignity of his rank and his thirty-five years gone in the tense excitement of the battle. It had infected all of them on the bridge of the destroyer, and they capered and shouted with him.

There she blows! "howled the lieutenant.

She's opened fire!"

"Go it, Orion, go it!" On Orion's forward turrets gun-fire sparkled, then again and again. The harsh roll of the broadsides carried to them against the light wind.

"Short,"groaned Charles. "She's still out of range." Its short again!"

"Still short." Each time the call of shot was signalled by the chief yeoman at the Aldis lamp, and briefly acknowledged from Orion's bridge-works.

"Oh my God," moaned Charles.

"She's hit! "echoed his lieutenant.

A flat yellow glare, like sheet lightning on a summer's day, lit

Orion's afterdeck, and almost immediately a ball of yellowish grey smoke enveloped her. Through it Charles saw her after-funnel sag drunkenly and hang back at an unnatural angle.

"She's holding on!" Orion emerged from the shell smoke and dragged it after her like a funeral cloak, but her speed seemed unabated, and the regular salvos burned briefly and brightly on her forward turrets.

"Now she's hitting," exulted the lieutenant, and Charles turned quickly to see shell-fire burst on Blucher, and his wide grin split his face.

"Kill her! Kill her!" he roared, knowing that though Blitcher was better armed yet she was as vulnerable as Orion.

Her plating was egg-shell thin and the six-inch shells that crashed through it would be doing her terrible damage.

Now the two cruisers were pounding each other. The range was closing so rapidly that soon they must hit with every broadside. This was a contest from which only one ship, or neither of them, would emerge.

Charles was trying to estimate the damage that had been inflicted uupon Blitcher during the last few minutes. She was on fire forward.

Sulphur-yellow flames poured from her, her upper works were riven into a grotesque sculpture of destruction, a pall of smoke enveloped her, so her profile was an shadowy and vague, yet every fifteen seconds her turrets lit with those deadly little flashes.

Charles turned to assess the relative damage that Orion had suffered. He found and held her with his binoculars and at that moment

Orion ceased to exist.

Her boilers, pierced by high explosive shell, burst and tore her in half. A cloud of white steam spurted five hundred feet into the air, completely blanketing her. The steam hung for thirty seconds,

then sagged wearily, and rolled aside. Orion was gone. A wide circle of oil slick and floating debris marked her grave. The speed of her charge had run her clean under.

On the bridge of Bloodhound, the cheering strangled into deathly silence. The silence was not spoiled but rather accentuated by the mournful note of the wind in her rigging and the muted throb of her engines.

For eight long hours Charles Little had ridden his anger and his hatred, using the curb to hold it on the right side of madness,

resisting the consuming and suicidal urge to hurl his ship at the

German cruiser and die "as Orion had died.

Immediately after the sinking of Orion, the Blucher had reduced speed sharply and turned due south. With her fires still raging, she had limped along like a gun-shot lion. The battle ensigns at her masthead were tattered by shrapnel and blackened by smoke.

As soon as she had passed, Bloodhound altered course and cruised slowly over the area of water that was still rainbowed by floating oil and speckled with wreckage. There were no survivors from Orion; all of them had died with her.

Bloodhound turned and trailed after the crippled German cruiser and the hatred that emanated from the destroyer was of such strength that it should have reached out across the sea as a physical force and destroyed Blucher.

But as Charles Little stood at the rail of his bridge, he saw the smoke and flame upon Blucher's decks reduce perceptibly every minute as her damage control teams fought it to a standstill. The last wisp of smoke from her shrivelled.