Smiling Willie and the Tiger

by John Harris

  ‘I don’t suppose I would be if it weren’t for you,’ the Tiger complained. ‘I wouldn’t even be here even. I’d probably still be a shop assistant in Cape Town.’

  The four men in the cart brooded on their fate, considering it solemnly in their various ways. The Basuto driver brooded on the Black Man’s Burden and the fact that when they reached Corneliusdal, no one would ask him if he needed food or somewhere to sleep. He would have to scrounge, he knew, from the waste bins outside the kitchens, among the flies and the hovering kites, in the hope of getting the scrapings from some indifferent soldier’s plate – and probably have to scuffle for them, too, against some other Basuto.

  Major Southey brooded on the distance that lay between him and his lady friend in Bloemfontein. Miss Nellie Osterkamp had led him through many a gymnastic orgy and as his mind dwelt on them she seemed a long way away. It would be a damn good thing, he decided, when the bloody war was over and he could get down to earning a bit of real money again.

  In the rear of the cart Corporal Instant brooded on Major Southey. It was stuffy under the canvas cover and as Corporal Instant’s eyes began to droop he made himself more comfortable. The road was covered with small stones which jarred the wheels of the cart and jabbed the ammunition boxes containing Southey’s pay into his ribs and spine. He didn’t like Southey and couldn’t imagine any circumstances when he ever would. A soldier’s life was hard, he decided, and he began to wonder if he had the agate core that sergeant-majors seemed to need.

  Wooden just brooded. It wasn’t hard for Wooden to brood. He had become an expert at it over the years. He didn’t even have to think about it because it was as natural to him as breathing. Everyone superior in rank or fortune to him was an object to be brooded on, and since, despite his single stripe, he was really only a private soldier and a poor man to boot, this gave him a lot of elbow room.

  The mules, head down as they laboured up a slight rise, were brooding, too. Klipspringer Kopje, a towering mass of rock on their right as the road began to circle its base, was brooding. Even the rocks that came down to the road and half-way across the road seemed to be brooding.

  Southey sat up with a jerk as the cart stopped.

  ‘What the hell have you stopped for?’ he demanded of the driver.

  The Basuto pointed to the road and the rocks scattered across it in front of them.

  ‘Well, get down, you stupid bastard, and shift ’em!’

  The Basuto glanced at Wooden, who stared back at him defiantly. Wooden had no intention of getting down until he was ordered.

  Southey glared. ‘Get down, man,’ he snapped at him. ‘Shift ’em!’

  Wooden’s eyes were hidden by the brim of his sun helmet, but they were burning with hatred for Southey as he laid down his rifle and began to climb from the cart.

  Corporal Instant had finally fallen asleep out of sight among the boxes of pay, and the halting of the cart stirred him to consciousness. He was just coming to life when he heard the clatter of hooves, and the shot that rang out immediately afterwards brought him upright with a jerk.

  As the explosion echoed among the spurs and kranzes of Klipspringer Kopje, Southey grabbed instinctively for his revolver, but, as his hand pawed over the bare fabric of his tunic, he remembered he’d discarded it and tossed it into the rear of the cart. The Basuto, who had seen much more of the war than Southey or either of the other two, had dropped the reins at once and plunged over the side, and Southey could see him now bolting among the rocks. Wooden, taking no chances without his rifle, flung himself flat in the dust with his head between his hands. The restless mules, scared by the bang, were just on the point of taking off when Southey was startled to see a horseman appear from behind the cart to lean from the saddle and grab the bridles. At almost the same moment, two more horsemen emerged from the rocks in front. They both had weapons across their saddles and Southey noticed they were all three wearing bandannas over the lower part of their faces.

  Bandits, by God, he thought with a sinking heart. On the one day when he’d not got his revolver handy!

  The three men were muttering to each other now, as though uncertain what to do next, then one of them edged a moth-eaten grey forward and over the top of a red bandanna a pair of intimidated purple-blue eyes flickered nervously. ‘If you’ll please step down,’ a muffled voice said politely.

  Turning his head slightly, Southey found himself looking straight down the twin barrels of a shot-gun. ‘Better shove your hands up, old boy,’ the owner said.

  With everyone occupied at the front of the cart, Corporal Instant decided his moment had arrived. The three newcomers seemed to be busy and he started to ease himself out from among the boxes. He knew exactly where his duty lay. Like Southey, he had jumped immediately to the conclusion that the men were Boers – there were still plenty of them about who didn’t seem to be as well informed about the end of the war as Lord Roberts. Knowing they didn’t enjoy being shot at, he decided that one – perhaps two – knocked over before they were aware of what was happening might change the whole face of the situation.

  For a moment he wondered uncertainly if the British army would take a good view of him shooting an enemy in the back. It had strange ideas that wars should be fought standing up, man to man, presenting a good target so that it couldn’t be accused of using unfair tactics, but he’d heard a lot about Boer marksmanship and came to the conclusion it would be best to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. Seeing in his mind’s eye a medal on his tunic, he crept towards the rear of the cart.

  By the horses’ heads, a slight contretemps had arisen. The three riders were all getting in each other’s way, and if Southey had had the sense to carry his revolver in some more easily accessible place he could have shot the lot of them without trouble.

  ‘Get back where you belong, Dolly!’ Willie hissed. ‘And pull your bandanna up, Tiger! It’s slipped!’

  ‘Oh!’ The Tiger let go the reins to hoist up the slipping bandanna and the bad-tempered ex-police horse, like Wooden given to brooding a great deal on its lot, felt the reins go slack. It seemed to be the usual invitation to get going and it moved forward suddenly – so suddenly the Tiger very nearly disappeared backwards over its tail. His wildly flapping legs dug at the horse’s flanks, and taking this to be the normal encouragement to go fast, it bolted. The two mules, once more without Fish’s restraining hand on their bridles, decided to join in the game and set off after it, and Corporal Instant, just at that moment preparing to lower himself silently to the ground, was somersaulted out of the cart on to his head in a puff of dust. His weight almost drove the knob of his sun helmet through his skull and he gasped, rolled over and lay still.

  ‘Ye Gods!’ Willie said. ‘There was another one!’

  He had caught the two mules and brought them to a standstill and he and Fish gaped at each other, aware of their crashing amateurism. Instant had obviously harboured unpleasant intentions towards them.

  ‘Get those rifles, Poser,’ Willie said. ‘And throw ’em away.’

  By this time the Tiger was a hundred yards away, fighting to pull the grey to a halt. Jerking its head round at last, he cantered back to where the others were grouped round the cart. Southey was now standing with Wooden. The Basuto was very sensibly hidden somewhere on Klipspringer Kopje, his head down. Instant lay unconscious in the dust. Willie was still holding the mules and Fish was staring into the rear of the cart. ‘Jesus,’ he was saying in awed tones. ‘Jesus God Christ Almighty!’

  Startled by his reactions, Willie signed to the Tiger to dismount and take the mules’ heads, and moved to join Fish at the rear of the cart. Fish had climbed inside by this time and wrenched away the tarpaulin. Instead of the single box they were expecting he saw several.

  Willie’s jaw dropped and he gaped at Fish. ‘Too much to carry,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to take the cart, too.’

  While Fish hitched his horse to the tailgate, Willie jerked his shot-gun at Southey. ‘Trousers off,�
�� he said.

  ‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ Southey snapped.

  Willie swallowed uneasily. He couldn’t shoot the old fool, he knew. He’d never shot anyone in his life – and anyway the gun had no hammers. Fortunately, however, at that moment Wooden decided that it was better to be alive without trousers than dead with them. It wasn’t him they were making a fool of, he told himself. It was the army. When he had first stared at himself in the mirror and seen himself in an ill-fitting uniform looking like a cross between Abdul the Damned and Ethelrede the Unready he had been shocked and indignant. Then he had realised that if Jeremiah Wooden looked a shocking idiot it wasn’t Mrs Wooden’s boy who was suffering the humiliation, it was the army. It had often borne him up in his bitterest moments, and he unbuttoned his jacket now and began to unfasten the leather belt which held up his trousers. Since the brass fly buttons which the army seemed to consider an ideal form of fastening had all long since fallen off and Wooden had only preserved decency with a good wrapover, the operation left his trousers hanging inside out round his knees.

  Delighted to find there was going to be no need to shoot anyone, Willie stared at Wooden’s thick white legs.

  ‘Right off,’ he said.

  Without a word, Wooden sat down and began to unroll his puttees.

  His eyes glittering with hatred, Southey conceded defeat and slowly unfastened his tunic. Corporal Instant was just beginning to sit up and as he wrenched his helmet from his ears he looked up to find himself staring into the muzzle of Fish’s rusty Colt.

  ‘Trousers off,’ Fish said.

  At last all three of them were standing in a line, their trousers on the ground before them. Wooden and Instant wore grey army-issue underpants, but Southey’s thin legs were covered with a linen confection in pink and green.

  ‘You’ll pay for this,’ he said as Fish collected both trousers and boots and tossed them into the cart.

  Nobody paid the slightest attention to him, but as they swung the cart round Willie stopped his horse long enough to raise his hat. The Tiger almost muffed it again. The troublesome grey decided to set off without him and he had to hop frantically alongside with one foot in the stirrup until he could drag himself into an undignified position across the saddle.

  Southey stared after them, holding his jacket in his hand. Venter’s Road was ten miles away, the tents to the north probably more. But there would be women in Venter’s Road and he had always been a little sensitive about his thin legs, and he decided to settle for the camp.

  ‘Come on,’ he said harshly.

  Four

  The faint roll of the ground was deceptive. A whole column of men could hide themselves at a distance of a few hundred yards in a place that seemed as flat as a plate, yet it was also possible to see a dozen miles in every direction. The late afternoon light was extraordinarily clear, better even to see by than the full flare of the day which had set the plain dancing with heat shimmers and water patches of mirage.

  As the little cart drew to a halt, Willie indicated a low eruption of rocks ahead of them. ‘Over there,’ he said. ‘Won’t be seen so easily.’

  ‘Where are we?’ the Tiger asked.

  ‘South of Venter’s Road,’ Willie said. ‘A few miles off Makuasi.’ He stared about him anxiously. The little kopje ahead was golden suddenly in the rays of the lowering sun and the veldt was ripening to apricot now and would become a mass of purples and blood-reds as the light disappeared.

  Fish flapped the reins and the two mules set off once more and, as they finally halted by the kopje, Willie took a last glance about him before lowering himself stiffly from the saddle to slap at the fine powdering of grit that covered his clothes. The other two were already at the rear of the cart and Fish was dragging out the first of the ammunition boxes. The Tiger stood by the tailgate, blinking uncertainly, his mind on his days as an office boy in a bank. He counted the boxes, then he turned to Willie.

  ‘This isn’t just a regiment’s pay,’ he said unexpectedly.

  Willie and Fish stared at each other.

  ‘Two regiments?’ Willie asked.

  The Tiger’s voice was suddenly nervous. ‘I reckon this is the pay for the whole division.’

  They stared at him again. ‘How much will that be?’ Willie asked in a small voice.

  The Tiger’s mouth opened and shut nervously. ‘Ten thousand quid. Maybe more. I once did a headquarter guard. Shifting pay from base to divisional headquarters. With the requisitions there was twenty thousand quid.’

  He stared at the others for a moment, then he turned hurriedly and headed for his horse. Without thinking, he approached it on the wrong side and it almost emasculated him with its hind foot as he came within range of its solitary eye. He jumped back quickly and headed round the other side at full speed.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Fish said.

  The Tiger blinked at him. ‘The whole country’ll be after us for this,’ he pointed out.

  They stared at each other uneasily, but the thought of possessing a sum of money that might be anything between ten and twenty thousand pounds was too bright a prospect to ignore. Fish gave an uneasy smile.

  ‘We could all retire,’ he said. He had operated small swindles in the past, none of them very profitable, and the thought awed him a little. ‘Buy houses in Cape Town, marry a swell little Janey and settle down.’

  ‘Not me,’ the Tiger said. ‘I’m off. You see if I’m not.’

  Willie rubbed his nose thoughtfully. ‘One thing,’ he observed. ‘We can’t lug it all round with us.’

  ‘What do we do then? We can’t use this cart.’

  ‘So why not one of us ride into Makuasi?’ Willie suggested. ‘And buy a different one.’

  There was a moment’s silence, then Fish exploded. ‘I’m not going to be that stupid sonofabitch,’ he said. ‘What’d stop you two moseying off with the dough once I was out of sight?’

  Willie smiled. ‘If we bolted with the money, you could always pass our descriptions and names to the army.’

  What he said was right enough and Fish grinned. ‘Who goes then?’

  ‘Tiger,’ Willie said.

  Makuasi was a small town, not very different from Venter’s Road, its buildings mostly constructed of whitewashed bricks, dusty wood and corrugated iron. But because it was on the direct route north from Bloemfontein to Johannesburg there was a store, a branch of the Standard Bank of South Africa and a hotel, and the bar was the biggest single room in the town. The shelves of bottles were punctuated here and there with the heads of springbok, eland and the magnificent kudu; in the centre Edward VII, benign and pop-eyed, stared out of a dusty frame.

  The Tiger called for a beer and put down one of the sovereigns they had taken from the boxes in Southey’s cart.

  ‘Where’s the livery stable?’ he asked.

  The barman cocked a thumb. ‘Down the road.’

  The Tiger found the livery stable without difficulty. The owner was in a chair outside, dozing in the last of the sunshine, and, pulling his waistcoat straight, the Tiger coughed and asked for a rig.

  The owner eyed him warily from under his hat. ‘What did you have in mind?’ he asked.

  The Tiger settled for a small American buckboard that looked like a coffin on wheels, pulled by two dispirited-looking horses.

  ‘Ten pounds the cart,’ the proprietor said, assessing the Tiger’s shabby suit and quite prepared to lower his price if necessary. ‘Ten pounds each horse.’

  ‘Done.’ The Tiger was so anxious to be gone he’d have agreed to anything, and the proprietor debated whether to say he’d made a mistake and push up his price.

  ‘How’re you paying, kêrel?’ he asked.

  The Tiger fished in his waistcoat pocket and produced a handful of sovereigns. The proprietor noticed at once that they were new and wondered if the Tiger had just robbed the bank up the road. Since he’d heard no uproar, however, he decided he couldn’t have and decided instead he’d probably just come in from
Kimberley with a pocketful of diamonds which he’d changed into cash.

  ‘Got much to carry?’ he asked.

  ‘Just my luggage.’ The Tiger jerked a hand vaguely towards the outskirts of the town. ‘It’s out there. My cart broke an axle.’

  The proprietor eyed the coins in his hand wistfully. ‘It’ll be a good thing when the war’s over and we can all get back to earning money,’ he said.

  The Tiger indicated the one-eyed grey he’d ridden. ‘How much for the gee?’

  ‘Three pounds.’

  ‘I paid ten.’

  ‘You were robbed.’

  At the store, the Tiger bought biltong, coffee, tinned meat, biscuits, bacon, brandy and beer and, stuffing them into the cart, clattered out of the town. As he vanished the proprietor of the store stared after him. The owner of the livery stable, who had just locked up and who was heading for the bar, stopped and they studied the dwindling cloud of dust together.

  ‘You’d think he’d stay the night, wouldn’t you, man,’ the owner of the livery stable said. ‘The money he’d got.’

  The proprietor of the store gazed after him. ‘Had he got a lot?’

  ‘I saw a handful of sovereigns.’

  The proprietor of the store stared after the disappearing cart again. ‘Perhaps he pinched it,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps robbed a bank.’ The proprietor of the livery stable grinned.

  ‘Perhaps even robbed the British army of its pay!’ And they both roared with laughter at the joke.

  When the Tiger reached the kopje, Willie and Fish had lit a fire. They had found Southey’s whisky and finished it.

  The Tiger threw out the supplies and Fish began to drag a frying pan from where his saddle lay. Willie was staring critically at the buckboard, humming to himself. ‘Cheap?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten quid. And ten for each gee.’

  ‘You were done brown.’

  The Tiger was so pleased with the day he was indifferent. ‘We’ve still got the mules,’ he said. He’d been sampling the brandy and the beer on the way back and he was full of fire. ‘How much did we make?’ he asked.