Men of Men by Wilbur Smith Page B

against the earth and brandishing the open clasp knife, he told his twin, ‘Hold him still.’ The fine golden hair
was stretched like the strings of a violin and Douglas hacked at it.
    It came away in tufts in Henry’s fists, some of it cut through, some of it torn out at the roots, like feathers from the carcass of a slaughtered chicken, and he threw it high in the air,
shouting with laughter as it sparkled in the sunlight.
    ‘Now you will be a boy!’
    All the resistance went out of Jordan. He lay crushed against the earth, shaken only by his own sobs, and Henry grabbed another handful of his curls.
    ‘Cut closer,’ he ordered his twin, and then shrieked with shock and pain.
    The thin tapered end of a rhinoceros-hide riding whip curled with a snap around the seat of Henry’s breeches, over the fresh bruises raised by the Reverend Gander’s Malacca cane, and
Henry shot erect clutching at his own buttocks with both hands and hopping up and down on the same spot.
    A hand closed on the collar of his shirt and he was yanked into the air and held suspended, kicking, a foot above the ground, still clutching the seat of his breeches that felt as though they
were filled with live coals.
    His brother looked up from his seat on Jordan’s back. In the excitement of tormenting the smaller boy, neither of the twins had heard or seen the horseman. He had walked his horse around
the bend in the footpath between the gravel heaps and come across the squirming yelling knot of small bodies in the middle of the path. He recognized the twins immediately; they had earned quick
notoriety on the diggings, and it had taken only another second to guess the cause of the commotion, to understand who were the attackers and who the victim.
    Douglas was quick to realize the changed circumstances as he looked up at his twin, dangling like a man on the gallows from the horseman’s fist. He scrambled to his feet and darted away,
but the horseman turned his mount with his heels and, like a polo player, cut backhanded with the long rhino-hide sjambok, and the agony of it paralysed Douglas. But for the thick canvas breeches
it would have opened his skin.
    Before he could begin to run again the horseman stooped in the saddle, seized his upper arm and lifted him easily. On each side of the horse, the twins wriggled and whimpered with the sting of
the lash and the rider looked down at them thoughtfully.
    ‘I know you two,’ he told them quietly. ‘You are the Stewart brats, the ones who drove old Jacob’s mule into the barbed wire.’
    ‘Please, sir, please,’ blubbered Douglas.
    ‘Keep quiet, boy,’ said the rider evenly. ‘You are the ones that cut the reins on De Kock’s wagon. That cost your daddy a penny, and the Diggers’ Committee would
like to know who set fire to Carlo’s tent then—’
    ‘It weren’t us, Mister,’ Henry pleaded. It was clear they both knew who their captor was, and that they were truly afraid of him.
    Jordan crawled to his knees and peered up at his rescuer. He must be somebody very important – perhaps even a member of the committee he had mentioned. Even in his distress Jordan was awed
by that possibility. Ralph had explained to him that a committee member was something between a policeman, a prince and the ogre of the fairy tales which their mother used to read to them.
    Now this fabulous being looked down at Jordan as he knelt in the pathway, with his cheek smeared with dust and tears, his shirt torn and the buttons dangling on their threads, while the backs of
his knees were criss-crossed with bloody welts.
    ‘This little one is half your size,’ the horseman said. His eyes were blue, a strange electric blue – the eyes of a poet – or of a fanatic.
    ‘It was just a game, sir,’ mumbled Henry; the collar of his shirt was twisted up under his ear.
    ‘We didn’t mean nothing, Mister.’
    The horseman transferred that glowing blue gaze from Jordan to the two wriggling bodies in his