Smiling Willie and the Tiger

by John Harris

  ‘Nothing would please me more, sir.’

  ‘You’ll have a squad of men permanently allotted to you. The general thought twenty-five, a sergeant, two corporals and a bugler, and twenty-five more to be called on if needed. I’ll give you Lieutenant Glover. He’s never been the same since he was wounded at Modder River. Prodded up the arse by mistake with a bayonet. Got the marks to this day.’ He consulted his notes. ‘We’ll mount you, of course,’ he went on. ‘To make you more mobile. And we’ll find you a farrier and a roughrider to help make your chaps horsemen. You’ll be based on Sinai.’

  Mace’s heart sank. Sinai wis a backveldt township just outside Chichester Junction. It was several degrees worse than Venter’s Road and would probably be hell.

  McGuinness was watching him. ‘You could hardly expect Johannesburg,’ he said. ‘However, you’ll have all the facilities of Chichester Junction at your disposal.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ Mace said coldly. He could just imagine how the colonel in command there would react if a mere lieutenant started throwing his weight about.

  McGuinness smiled. He knew how Mace had been thinking. ‘We’ve not forgotten the military idiots who’ll put on side and want to know where your authority comes from,’ he said. ‘The general said to make you up to captain.’

  Mace’s legs went weak but MacGuinness went on remorselessly.

  ‘Temporary, of course,’ he said. ‘So don’t let the baton burst out of your knapsack. You’ll be responsible for issuing the notices and the descriptions of these chaps.’

  ‘Any reward, sir?’

  McGuinness looked coldly at him. ‘The army can’t afford to throw money about like that,’ he snapped.

  Mace blinked indignantly. ‘It’s just thrown a great deal about, sir,’ he pointed out, ‘so that the general’s wife can feel safe.’

  McGuinness didn’t think it half as clever as Mace did but suddenly Mace didn’t care. He had an independent command and he had no thought of failure. He might even, he decided, get rid of Wooden if he were quick.

  ‘Instant’ll be with you,’ McGuinness continued. ‘He saw these chaps. He knows what they look like. So you’d better not come back here without the swine. The general said you could call on the whole damn division if you need it, so you’d better produce some results.’

  Mace was becoming aware by this time that his future as an officer was likely to depend on his skill as a detective. ‘I’ll lay my hands on that man who lifted the money from Southey’s cart if it’s the last thing I do. I’ll set something up at once,’ he ended. ‘Tonight.’

  He saluted and turned to the door of McGuinness’ tent. McGuinness looked up. There was a spark of malicious glee in his eyes. ‘Just one thing,’ he said. ‘We’re not having Wooden.’

  Mace waited until he was outside, then he looked up at the tall African stars. McGuinness’ last words had quite ruined his pleasure. He could just imagine Wooden on a horse.

  Seven

  It took Mace precisely three hours to get a small unit on the road and only another three to realise that he had made a great mistake in trying to move too fast.

  From Major Ffoulkes he prised a young native tracker called Andreus and a dozen Basuto guards – known to the disrespectful troops as the Black Watch – then, Napoleonic in his strapped and buckled authority, he snatched up Instant and Wooden and set off at once in pursuit.

  The day was scorching hot and Wooden’s muttered cursing came like the low roll of thunder across the veldt. He didn’t think much of the camp at Corneliusdal, but he saw no point in exchanging what few comforts it possessed for the unknown hazards of the veldt. For once Mace hardly heard him. The dusty plain north of the Karroo fascinated and repelled him at the same time. And today it brooded under heavy clouds banking up on the high ground to the north.

  ‘Looks like a storm coming up,’ Mace said.

  ‘No, Baas.’ The black tracker’s face split in a confident smile. ‘Everything all right.’

  Mace wasn’t so sure but he decided Andreus ought to know more about it than he did and he didn’t argue.

  As yet unmounted, he and his men plodded down the railway track, sweating in their khaki. Andreus had insisted that their quarry had driven a cart alongside the railway towards Brandewyn, and though it had been Mace’s impression that they had at no time been anywhere near the railway except perhaps to cross it, he didn’t argue, assuming that Andreus knew better than he did.

  He glanced at the sky. It looked more threatening than ever.

  ‘It will not rain, Baas.’ Andreus’ smile was cheerful and self-assured, and Mace, bowing to greater experience, had to accept that what he said must be right. Ten minutes later they were heading into the teeth of an increasing wind. The clouds had swept over them and a north-wester was blowing up a whirling storm of dust.

  ‘Thought it wouldn’t become a storm,’ Mace grated.

  ‘Soon it stop, Baas,’ Andreus said gaily.

  Almost immediately the lightning started, flashing in green, yellow and purple all round the horizon and among the livid clouds that seemed to be increasing with terrifying swiftness.

  ‘You sure it’s not going to rain?’ Mace asked.

  ‘Sure, Baas. It don’t rain.’

  It came as no surprise when the heavens opened and the downpour almost hammered them into the ground. By dark they were all wet through and exhausted and all they could see for their trouble were the steel rails running north and south with the sticky red soil in the shadows on either side interspersed here and there with black patches of sparse grass and clumps of taibosch, prickly pear or aloes.

  Mace was ready to murder Andreus and, reaching a set of points where the track, dividing into two lines, presented him with a dilemma he was too tired to face, he decided to leave it to the ever-eager Instant.

  ‘Take three men,’ he ordered, ‘and follow the line to the left and see where it goes. That black swine might be right for once and we might just bump into ’em.’

  As the sound of boots vanished, he sat down to await their return. When they didn’t reappear he decided bitterly that they’d lost their way and he’d better send out another patrol to find them. He stared gloomily at Wooden.

  ‘Off you go,’ he said, and Wooden went off with a troop of Basutos, swearing in words of such monstrosity Mace was fascinated despite his weariness.

  As they vanished, he pulled out his flask and took a sip of brandy. As he stuffed it back in his pocket, he heard a shot in the darkness, then another, then a whole fusillade and, flinging himself flat into the drying mud with what remained of his party as the bullets whined over his head, he waited with his revolver in his hand for the Boer commando he confidently expected to sweep over them. Nothing of the sort happened and the firing finally died away. Ten minutes later Instant arrived, furious and frightened, with a hole through his sun helmet. A quarter of an hour after that Wooden appeared with his men. The junction they’d struck was nothing more than a loop line for turning trains and, as Instant had wandered round it, he had run into Wooden who had promptly opened fire. The noise was such that the troops in Corneliusdal had stood to arms.

  Disillusioned, leg-weary and covered with mud, Mace headed back to Tobaccoberg to make his report. Thankfully he watched Andreus disappear – as it turned out later with Mace’s writing case, Instant’s cigarettes, two tins of raspberry-flavoured jam and a spare set of false teeth belong to Wooden – and the following day, 24 September 1900, assigned his rough-rider and his farrier, he headed back by train – posting up notices of the robbery at every station and halt he came to – through Roscoff, Makuasi and Fairplay and on to Chichester Junction

  By the worst of bad luck, his train had just left Fairplay as Dolly Fish, Smiling Willie and the Tiger entered it.

  Fairplay had never featured prominently in the history of the Orange Free State and looked it. It was a township of about thirty-odd houses, one hotel, a store and the wooden station building on the edge of what was
known in the Free State as the Little Reef. The Little Reef had never flourished, however, because although there were diamonds there weren’t many and they took a lot of finding and, though a few people still persisted in searching, most of the little towns now only had dilapidated diggings to show how they had come into existence. Because of the number of British and American immigrants the common language was not Afrikaans as it was to the north and south, but English. Since those who had arrived, seeking a fortune in the past thirty years, had sprung from such areas as Whitechapel, the Gorbals, Dublin, the Bull Ring in Birmingham, and even places like the Bronx, Belleville in Paris and the worst areas of Hamburg, on the whole it wasn’t very select English.

  Nevertheless, despite its failings Fairplay was big enough for a celebration and Willie, Fish and the Tiger rode in with confidence.

  They had left the kopje that morning with a few sovereigns apiece from one of Southey’s boxes and had headed for the town in the first of the daylight. The two sound, army-fed animals had been transferred to the buckboard and the two ill-fed nags the Tiger had bought in Makuasi had been turned loose with the two sorry-looking riding horses.

  They were feeling on top of the world and Willie headed straight for the piano in the corner of the only bar the town could boast, and began to brush the yellowing keys.

  ‘I’m shortly about to retire,’

  Then to Flo, of course, I’ll be wed.

  I shall do the thing fine, buy shares in a mine,

  Or else float a company instead.’

  ‘Wonderful to have money,’ he said.

  ‘I’m like a squirrel,’ the Tiger smiled. ‘I like to stuff it in my cheeks.’

  Fish grinned. ‘I’ll go swop the mules,’ he offered.

  As he vanished through the swing doors, Willie plunged with a light heart into another popular tune.

  ‘Off went Dolly

  With a step so jolly,

  And at lightning speed…’

  He had barely finished the first verse before Fish was back. The bar doors slammed open and without speaking Fish jerked his head in the direction of the billiard room. Inside, he turned.

  ‘Close the door, Tiger,’ he said. ‘And stand with your back to it.’

  As the door, with its loose panels of coloured glass squares crashed to and the Tiger nervously took up his stance, Fish pushed the balls away across the green baize and spread out a large sheet of paper. It had been written in blue pencil by the soldier manning the station telegraph office.

  Army Pay Robbery, it announced. Reward of 50 Pounds. Mace had finally persuaded the army to part with an honorarium but it was niggardly enough in all conscience. A reward of 50 pounds has been offered for information leading to the arrest of three criminals answering to the names of Dolly Poser, Willie and the Tiger. Descriptions to be issued later. Any person knowing these men or seeing anyone behaving suspiciously should contact the army authorities at once.

  ‘They move amazin’ quick,’ Willie said admiringly. ‘Where did you find this?’

  Fish’s face was angry. ‘Stuck up outside the station. I pinched it when they weren’t looking.’ His face was furious. ‘The bastards got my name,’ he pointed out.

  ‘They got ours, too,’ Willie said.

  ‘“Willie.” “Tiger.” That don’t amount to a good goddam. Look at me. Two names. “Dolly Poser.” They even got ’em wrong.’ Fish seemed irritated by the bad press he was getting. ‘And where did the bastards get ’em. If anybody’s been opening his trap…’

  His hand went to the six-gun. It clattered to the floor.

  ‘Goddam,’ he said.

  ‘Try it slower,’ Willie suggested.

  Fish picked the gun up. ‘Holster’s too big,’ he said. ‘Comes out too quick.’

  Willie blinked at the gun. ‘Isn’t cocked either,’ he pointed out and Fish peered downwards, narrow-eyed.

  ‘Goddam,’ he said again.

  ‘No time for that sort of stuff just now, anyway,’ Willie observed. ‘Ought to be off.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘Chichester Junction. Next stop up the line.’

  Chichester Junction, like Fairplay, had once hoped to be the centre of a diamond industry, but as at Fairplay there had been no diamonds and its prosperity had come from another source entirely – the railway.

  Previously left untouched by the indifference of the Free State Boers, it had been growing ever since the arrival of the British army. Now that the soldiers had passed on north and the war seemed to be over, cleverer men than those who had first come seeking a fortune from the ground had taken over, and money was being poured in by financiers who realised there were careers to be made out of other things beside minerals. With the war almost over, plans had been made to link up the various loose ends of line to east and west. Already Zulu labourers were putting up sheds near the station where white men could draw their charts and annotate their surveys; and crates of machinery, planks, bricks, bags of cement, ropes, girders and stacks of corrugated-iron sheeting were being dumped in Nicholson Street and Wonderkop Street ready for the next stage.

  Hitherto, the place’s only claim to fame had been that it was the site of a battle earlier in the year when Brigadier-General Birdham, trying to probe too hastily north from Bloemfontein, had been caught just outside the town. The Boers had made mincemeat of him and only his boneheadedness had prevented him from throwing down his arms and surrendering at once. He had formed the survivors of the first blast of fire into a square round a group of jacaranda trees on the crossroads, but they had only made a better target and by the time they had thankfully seen him go down with a bullet between the eyes there hadn’t been many left of them, and his second-in-command, a much more realistic type, had hoisted the white flag at once.

  The fight had gone down in British history as the Battle of Chichester Junction. The more realistic Boers in their ugly language had called it something else entirely, but in their kindliness of heart had succoured the wounded, buried the dead, and erected an ill-spelt wooden sign on a stone cairn under the jacaranda trees where Birdham had been carried to die. Since then Chichester Junction had never again been in the news. There were other things to catch the eye besides memorials by the time Fish, Willie and the Tiger arrived, however, because Mace had been there before them. He had had his reward notices printed, with full descriptions – Instant’s – and the first thing they saw as they halted in the dusk near the station was the sheet stuck on the wall beneath the oil lamp that lit the entrance.

  Army Pay Robbery, it announced. It was brand new, smudged and printed in large red letters and though the descriptions weren’t very accurate, they were near enough, despite Instant’s embroideries, to alarm them.

  ‘“Willie. Six feet four. Blond hair. Steel-blue eyes. Educated accent. Brown jacket. Grey trousers. Wide-brimmed hat. Mounted on black gelding with white stockings.”’

  Their anxious eyes followed the lines of smudged print as the Tiger read aloud. ‘“Dolly Poser. Name suggests German origin. Six feet three. Dark hair and yes. American accent. Wears two guns on hips American style. Brown trousers. Check shirt. Grey jacket. Wide-brimmed hat. Mounted on chestnut.”’

  ‘“Tiger. Slight…”’ The Tiger paused. ‘–I’m not slight,’ he said indignantly. ‘“Sandy-haired. Blue eyes. Habit of blinking rapidly. Full mouth. Freckles. Mole on cheek.”’ He had gone pale. ‘They’ve got me exactly,’ he said.

  ‘Well, if you will let the goddam bandanna slip!’

  ‘“Watch-chain. Stiff collar. Clerk-type suit. Bowler hat.”’ The Tiger snatched the hat from his head at once and, skimming it away into the scrub at the far side of the railway track, began to stuff his watch-chain out of sight. ‘“Believed to be inexperienced horseman. Mounted on one-eyed grey ex-police pony.”’

  As he turned away in alarm, Willie was already climbing back on to the cart. ‘Occurs to me,’ he said, ‘that we’d be wise not to hang around.’

  They turned the cart quick
ly and clattered off along the dusty street. The night grey sky had changed from green and orange to the last violent red in the west where the sun had set. Over by the railway, where the line ran east to Brandewyn, Winifred and Mimosa Grove, the lowing of oxen came on the soft breeze whispering from the Kalahari as a waggon train waited for the morning start, the sound rising over the gentle hiss of steam from a locomotive waiting to push a string of clanking waggons off the points.

  They stared longingly at the hotel as they passed. The sound of a concertina and a voice, rich with drink, came to them:

  ‘There was Brown, upside down,

  Mopping up the whisky off the floor…’

  At the crossroads outside the town they drew the cart to a halt near a clump of jacarandas. The plain around seemed bare except for a few eucalyptus trees to the east and the few square boxes of wood and tin behind them whose roofs picked up the starlight.

  ‘Which way?’ the Tiger asked.

  ‘There’s a sign there,’ Willie said. ‘Under the trees. On that stone thing. Nip down and have a look, Tiger.’

  The Tiger climbed down and hurried towards the jacarandas. As he entered the shadows the trees cast he disappeared abruptly and they heard his bleat of protest.

  ‘Somebody’s dug a ditch,’ he said indignantly.

  ‘What’s the sign say?’

  A match flared in the darkness. ‘“Battle of Chichester Junction”,’ the Tiger read. ‘“27 March, 1900. On this spot died Brigadier-General H A C Birdham and 193 of his officers and men. They fought well.”’

  While they spoke, Fish had been sitting silently, his head cocked, and now he made a quick gesture to indicate silence. ‘Listen!’

  As they froze, over the noise of the crickets and frogs they heard voices and the jingle of equipment.

  ‘Troops!’ Fish said.

  Without asking questions, Willie jerked the reins and the buckboard clattered off. In a blind terror as he saw himself abandoned, the Tiger leapt away from the sign to set off after it – only to disappear once more into the newly dug ditch.