The Luck of Gerard Ridgeley. Mitford Bertram

We are not Cetywayo’s dogs. Ha-ha!”

      “Dogs!” roared the tall man, his eyes flashing with the light of battle. “Dogs of Amakafúla! By the head-ring of the Great Great One, were I but armed as ye are, I would keep the whole of this kraal howling like dogs the long night through – I, Sobuza, of the Aba Qulúsi – I alone. Ha!”

      And with a ferocious downward sweep of his kerrie, he knocked the foremost of his assailants off his legs, receiving in return a numbing blow on the shoulder from the stick of another. All the warrior blood of the martial Zulu was roused, maddened, by the shock. He seemed to gain in stature, and his eyes blazed, as roaring out the war-shout of his race, the deep-throated “Usútu!” he abandoned the offensive and hurled himself like a thunderbolt upon his four remaining adversaries. These, not less agile than himself, scattered a moment previous to closing in upon him from all sides at once. At the same time he was seen to totter and pitch heavily forward. The man whom he had previously swept off his feet had, lying there, gripped him firmly by the legs.

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

      Down went the foremost like a felled ox, before the straight crushing blow of an English fist; while at the same time a deft left-hander met the next with such force as to send him staggering back a dozen paces. Wrenching the two sticks from the fallen man, Gerard pushed them into the hands of the great Zulu. The latter, finding himself thus evenly armed, raised the war-shout “Usútu!” and charged his two remaining assailants. These, seeing how the tables had been turned, did not wait. They ran away as fast as their legs could carry them.

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

      The last ejaculation was a staccato one of astonishment. For he recognised in Gerard his rescuer of the morning.

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

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

      “It was an A1 row,” continued the former. “We saw the whole of it. Allamaghtaag! but I envy the way in which you spun those two to the right and left.”

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

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

      “He’s a Zulu – a real Zulu – and his name’s Sobuza,” said Gerard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      “Ha, Umlúngu!” (white man) he exclaimed, as, having completed that operation, he replaced his horn snuff-tube in the hole cut out of the lobe of his ear for that purpose. “This has been a great day – a great day. Surely my inyoka has taken your shape. Twice have you helped me this day. Twice in the same day have you come to my aid. Wonderful – wonderful! The death of the water – to pass through the mighty fall to the Spiritland – that is nothing. It is a fitting end for a warrior. But that I, Sobuza, of the Aba Qulúsi, of the people of Zulu – that I, Sobuza, the second fighting captain of the Udhloko regiment – should be ‘eaten up’ by four or five miserable dogs of Amakafula2. Whau! that were indeed the end of the world. I will not forget this day, Umlúngu. Tell me again thy name.”

      Gerard, who although he understood by no means all of this speech, had picked up sufficient Zulu to grasp most of its burden, repeated his names, slowly and distinctly, again and again. But Sobuza shook his head. He could not pronounce them. The nearest he could come was a sort of Lewis Carrollian contraction of the two – “U’ Jeríji,” pronouncing the “r” as a guttural aspirate.

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

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

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

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

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

      “I don’t care if it does. And we never found out his name – who he is.”

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

      “But – he was such a nice-looking boy.”

      “Oho!” was the rejoinder, accompanied by a roar of laughter. “So that’s the way the cat jumps!”

      “Don’t be an idiot,” answered the girl, but in a tone which seemed to say the “chaff” was not altogether displeasing to her. “But you remember the report we heard coming through Howick, about two men being nearly carried over the Umgeni Fall to-day, while one was trying to save the other. That’s the hero of the story, depend upon it. I’d have got it all out of him if you hadn’t been in such a desperate hurry. And now we don’t even know who he is!”

      “No more we do. Let’s put an advertisement in the paper. That’ll draw him – eh? Such a nice-looking boy, too!” he added, mimicking her tone.

      “Tom, you’re a born idiot,” she rejoined, blushing scarlet.

      The “nice-looking boy” meanwhile was cantering homeward in the twilight, building castles in the air at a furious rate. Those blue eyes – that voice – hovered before his imagination even as a stray firefly or so hovered before his path. It was long since he had heard the voice or seen the face of any woman of birth and refinement. Anstey was not wont to mix with such, and the

2

A term of contempt employed by the warlike natives of Zululand to designate the natives dwelling in Natal. Probably a corruption of the popular term “Kafir,” ama being the plural sign.