The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 30

"I am taking two cubic centimetres," she murmured, as the line of moving red reached the graduation stamped in the brass, and she jerked the needle from the girl's skin and staunched the blood that followed it with the pressure of her thumb, dropped the syringe back into the bowl, and released the loop of the tourniquet.

"Juba," she said, "give her the quinine now and stay with her until she starts to sweat." Robyn rose with a swirl of skim, and the twins had to run to keep up with her as she crossed to her laboratory.

As soon as they were in the circular room, Robyn slammed the door. "We must be quick," she said, unbuttoning the cuff of her leg-of mutton sleeve, and rolling it high. "We must not allow any organisms in the blood to deteriorate." And she offered her arm to Vicky who looped the tourniquet around it and began twisting it up tightly.

"Make a-note of the time" Robyn ordered.

"Seventeen minutes past six," said Elizabeth, standing beside her and holding the enamel basin, while she stared with a controlled horror at the blue veins under the pale skin of her mother's arm.

"We will use the basilic vein," Robyn said in a matter-of fact tone, and took a fresh needle from the case on the desk. Robyn bit her lip at the prick, but went on probing gently down towards her own swollen vein until suddenly there was an eruption of blood from the open end of the needle, and Robyn grunted with satisfaction and reached for the charged syringe.

"Oh Mama!"cried Vicky, unable to restrain herself longer. "Do be quiet, Victoria." Robyn fitted the syringe into the needle, and without any dramatic pause or portentous words, expelled the still hot blood from the fever struck Matabele girl into her own vein.

She withdrew the needle, and rolled down her sleeve in businesslike fashion.

"All right," she said. "If I am right and I am we can expect the first paroxysm in forty-eight hours." The full-sized billiard table was the only one in Africa north of the Kimberley Club, and south of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. It had been transported in sections three hundred miles from the railhead, and Ralph Ballantyne's bill for cartage had been 1112. pounds However, the proprietor of the Grand Hotel had recouped his costs a dozen' times over since he had set up the massive slate top on its squat teak legs in the centre of his saloon bar.

The table was a'source of pride to every citizen of Bulawayo.

Somehow it seemed to symbolize the transition from barbarism to civilization, that subjects of Queen Victoria should be striking the ivory balls across the green baize on the same spot where a few short years previously a pagan black king had conducted his grisly "smelling-out" ceremonies and gruesome executions.

The crowd of spectators in the bar room, that lined all the walls and even stood on the long bar counter for a better view of the game, were nearly all men of substance, for they had won their grants and gold claims by riding into this land in Doctor Jim's conquering column.

They each owned three thousand acres of the sweet pastured veld, and their share of the herds of Lobengula's captured cattle grazed upon them. Many of them had already driven their claim pegs into the rich surface reefs in which visible gold gleamed in the white Matabeleland sunlight.

Of course some of the reefs were un payable stringers, yet already Ed Pearson had pegged an ancient working between the Hwe Hwe and Tshibgiwe rivers that had panned samples at five ounces the ton. He called it the "Globe and Phoenix, and Harry Mellow, acting on Mr. Rhodes" instructions, had surveyed the reef and estimated that there were 2 million tons of reserves, making it the richest gold mine in existence, except possibly for Ralph Ballantyne's Harkness Mine further south with its estimated 5 million tons of reserves at an incredible twenty ounces to the ton.

There was rich red gold and the good Lord alone knew what other treasure buried in this earth, and the mood was optimistic and boisterous. Bulawayo was a boom town, and the spectators encouraged the two billiard players with raucous banter and extravagant wagers.

General Mungo St. John chalked his cue carefully and then wiped the blue dust from his fingers with a silk handkerchief. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and narrow hips, but as he moved around the green table he favoured one long powerful leg, an old gunshot injury, an affliction that no man dared mention in his presence.

He was coat less with gold expanders holding his white linen shirtsleeves above the elbows, and his waistcoat was embroidered with silver and gold metallic thread. On a lesser man, such theatrical dress would have looked ostentatious, but on Mungo St. John it was correct as an emperor's ermine and purple.

He paused at the corner of the table and surveyed the lie of the ivory balls. His single eye had a predatory gleam to it, tawny yellow and strangely flecked, like the eye of an eagle. The empty socket of the other eye was covered with a black cloth patch and it gave him the air of a genteel pirate as he smiled across the table at his opponent.

"Cannon and losing hazard off red," Mungo St. John announced calmly, and there was a roar of comment in which a dozen voices were offering odds of five to one and better against the play, and Harry Mellow grinned boyishly, and tipped his head in reluctant admiration of the big man's audacity.

The game they were playing was "Zambezi nominated three cushion, which is as far from ordinary billiards as the little gecko lizards on the bar room rafters were from the big gnarled twenty-foot mugger crocodiles of the Zambezi pools. It was a local variation of the game, combining the most difficult elements of English and French billiards.

The player's cue ball had to strike three cushions of the table before completing a scoring coup, but in addition to this monstrous condition, the player had to announce beforehand exactly how he intended scoring.

This prevented him executing a fluke score, and if he did make an unannounced and therefore unintended winning stroke, he was penalized the points he should have won. It was a tough game. The stakes between the players were 5 pounds a point. but naturally the players and the spectators were free to offer side bets for or against the players making their nominated coup. With players of the calibre of Harry Mellow and Mungo St. John on the table, there was 1000 pounds or more riding on each stroke, and the voices that shouted the odds and those that accepted them were hoarse with tension.