Everybody's Magazine/Medina Reef

Ups and downs! South Africa's a rum country for that. You never know two minutes together where you are. Look at this paper now. Here you've got it: Death of Sir Robert Savage, the Mining Magnate. Now I know Bob Savage as well as I know my own boots; and here he goes dying a millionaire, while I'm loafing about Joh'burg without a ticket in my pocket and glad to cadge a drink off you or any one else. Still, Bob Savage is dead: and I'm alive to talk about him. That's where you get your compensations. This time I'm up, all right, and Bob's down.

Bob and I struck each other first time in the early days at Moodie's. Down Swaziland way. That was the biggest gold-rush before the Rand was discovered. I met him there in Yankee Grant's store. Store, we called it: actually it was a buck-sail tent with a red lion painted on it and “Liquor up here!” written underneath. The counter was empty gin cases; but the gin they sold you was muck from Lorenzo Marques put up in Rynbende flasks. No chairs, mind you. We used to sit on sacks of mealie-meal and Kaffir corn, and a damn sight more comfortable it was than this here wooden bench. Take my word for it. At night there'd be close on a hundred men in that buck-sail tent; Britishers, Dutchmen, Dagoes, all paying for their drinks with gold-dust screwed up in paper. Scales on the counter. Three and sixpence a penny- weight: seven grains to the shilling. Old Grant weighed them himself. Nellie served the dope.

Nellie was pretty near the only white woman at Moodie's; a piece that Grant had brought over by wagon from Kimberley where he'd started. She was a big girl with a fine mouthful of teeth and not much else to her. Not even vices; but that's where the question of supply and demand comes in. And yet she had her fancies, our little Nellie!

I wasn't a bad-looking young chap in those days, though you wouldn't guess it now. When I rolled up at Moodie's Nellie was being run by a greasy I-taliano called Gennaro; but after I'd been there a week or two she took a fancy to me. Like the young fool I was I used to hang around that store all day, when the other chaps were fossicking over the hillside with their picks and pans. I guess she was lonely, like; but that's a fine climate to do nothing in with a peg to keep you going now and then. We used to sit and look at each other like two blue monkeys courting up a tree, listening to the thud-thud-thud of the dolly-hammers down in the valley that French Joe had put up. Five ounces a day that Frenchman was getting; nigh on twenty pounds.

Then Bob Savage came along. Poor old Bob: let's drink his health! Bob was an Irishman: a big, skinny chap with eyes like a bird's and a brogue that'd turn your head. He was a solitary beggar; always played a lone hand. But generous, too. Irish. He'd throw his money about like a gentleman in those days, and, by Gad, he was full of it. It seems he'd known our Nellie on the diamond diggings at Kimberley, where he'd picked it up; and when he came to Moodie's he reckoned he'd be able to begin again just where he'd left off.

But not a bit of it! That girl was too spry by half to be come over with Bob's soft brogue. What's more, she was a bit gone on me. The first thing Bob did was to make her a present of a diamond that'd make your mouth water. Our Nellie just smiled and said thank you and put it in her purse; and that was the end of it. Nothing doing! I had the bulge on Bob Savage.

But Bob wasn't finished. He went off for a month prospecting to think it over, and the first night he came back he walked straight up to me and put his hand on my sleeve.

“Now, young fellow,” he said, “I want a word with you.”

“Go ahead then,” I said, with a bit of a wink to Nellie.

“I'll trouble you to step outside for a minute,” he said. He was smiling all the time and looking properly wicked out of his little eyes.

Well, I wasn't going to show that I was afraid of him. Out we went on to the hillside. Lord, I can see it now: the tents all clean white in the moonlight and the silver trees on the hills. They've cut 'em all down in these days.”

“Now, Mr. Hicks,” says Bob, “Nellie's an old friend of mine and I'm going to have her.”

“That's Nellie's lookout,” says I.

“Don't you be making any mistake, Mr. Hicks,” he says. “It's yours.”

He began to roll up his sleeves. “I'll trouble you to take your coat he says. Always the gentleman, Bob!

Well, in those days, as I'm telling you, that sort of thing was all in the day's work. No fellow could keep his end up if he wasn't ready to use his fists; and though I was a youngster I'd had a bit of practice at that game in my time. The trouble was that I'd had more than a glass or two of Yankee Grant's dope. The cold air made my ears sting, like it does, and the cicadas in the trees were kicking up a din to drive you mad. I ran my eye over him. The chap was like an eel; a slippery, bendy devil, all joints.

“Ready, Mr. Hicks?” says he.

Then we fell to. I shall never forget that scrap. You can see now that I'm a stocky, tough sort of chap. There was nothing in the weights; but Bob had a longer reach, and knew how to use it. We went at it hot and strong for half an hour, just stopping for a moment when both of us had enough to go on with. I bunged up Bob's left eye; he bashed my nose, which was no odds, for it'd been broken two or three times and wasn't anything to speak of. It was Nellie's liquor that did for me. As soon as I begin to tire he'd got me beat, and I knew it; only a matter of time before he knocked me out. Well, I'm not the first chap that's taken a licking from Bob Savage, nor yet the last. In the end I went over like a ninepin.

When I came round, I wasn't so bad as I'd fancied; but I'd had enough. Bob took that for granted. He helped me down the hillside to the stream in which we chaps used to wash our tailings. We stripped and took a swill together. Then we shook hands on it.

“So that little job's settled,” said he, “and I'll tell you something: you're a well-plucked kid, Jim Hicks, and I'll give you credit for it.”

After that night it was always Jim and Bob.

But it wasn't settled by a long way. For a month or two Bob had his run with our Nellie. He was a level-headed devil. Bob knew how to separate work and pleasure. All day long he'd work like a horse at a claim he'd bought; at night he'd sit in Grant's store, tight up against the counter next to Nellie. He was making money, too, though I think Nellie got the most of it. He'd an Irishman's luck, Bob Savage. You see where it took him later. Sir Robert Savage, Bart.

Then, suddenly, Nellie got tired of him, or changed her mind some way, I can't say exactly what it was. Anyway, she gave old Bob the kick, and took up with a youngster from the Eastern Province who'd just arrived. I guessed there'd be another fight. But there wasn't. I reckon that Bob and Nellie were just about fed up with each other by then.

One evening Bob Savage came up to me. “Jim,” he said—by that time we were pretty good pals—“I've had enough of this old hill. I know what is going to happen. We're going to do all the work until some poor damned fool strikes something good, and then Moodie will collar the lot. I'm going to sell my claim for what I can get for it to the next flat that comes along. Then I'm going to push off prospecting in the Zoutpansberg, and if you've any sense you'll come along. What do you say to it?”

Of course I said: Yes. I knew Bob was set on getting me, and if he wanted anything Bob Savage could take the cross of an ass's back. The joke was that as soon as she knew we were off, Nellie turned mad. Women were like that with Bob Savage; that's how he married the lord's daughter afterward. She dropped her new boy like a hot coal; she hung round Bob's neck and cried buckets over him; but Bob was a chap you couldn't turn when once he'd made up his mind. He didn't bear her any ill feeling. He'd just finished with her: and there it was. What's more, when he'd sold his claim, he handed all that he got for it to Nellie, over the counter. He was like that with money in those days. You see he believed in his luck.

He used to talk so much about it that I began to believe in it, too. I never felt more confident in my life than the day when we set off north. We went down into the Crocodile River valley, where the railway runs now, and up into the mountains on the other side. We passed Spitzkop, and spent a few weeks fossicking down in the Blyde valley. Up and down! Everything in Africa's up and down.

It was the best sort of life that I'd ever known up till then. Before that I'd always lived in mining-camps or little dorps; and this was the real South Africa, of which there's not much left in these days. The low-country was thick with game, and black with niggers. The natives in those days weren't like the wasters you get in the mines now. Bob had a good bit of the language to carry him through. We used to get all the food we wanted at their kraals, mealie-meal, Kaffir corn, and the drink they make from it; sour stuff to taste, but it warms you up the same as anything can. Nowadays you often see people turn up their noses at chaps that have gone native. I say they don't know Africa. You get used to them, you know; and when once your mind's changed, a white woman looks like a blooming flour-sack.

I must have been down in the low-country, round about Leydsdorp, that we picked up the fever. Even in winter you get it down there. But it didn't come out strong till we'd got up higher on to the Berg, the part where Bob always used to say his luck was waiting for him. Well, that was our first bit of luck, and I can tell you we got it to some purpose. In those days nobody ever thought to carry quinine; you know what mining-chaps are. We got knocked over one after the other, Bob and me. Somehow or other we managed to stumble into a native kraal of sorts. He was in one hut and me in another. A damned old hag like a black cockroach drenched me with all sorts of Kaffir herbs to sweat it out of me. We got held up there for the best part of a fortnight. At night it froze your bones. Burning and shivering. Up and down! It's a queer thing, that low-country fever.

It doesn't only knock you out and take the strength out of your arms and legs. It goes to your head, like bad dope, and makes you kind of drunk. Not fighting-drunk: you're too weak for that. Irritable, you know. Like you could bite a chap's head off if he speaks to you. And you can't get over it. It goes on nagging at you like a woman till you feel like murder.

Bob Savage was tougher than me. Those skinny, dark chaps take fever better than us fair ones. My hair's white, now, what's left of it; but in those days it was proper carrots. We were both of us fairly done; but the more done we got, the keener Bob was to push north, to his luck, his Bonanza as he called it. I can tell you it was no joke. Between us we averaged three goes of fever a week; and the devil of it was that when Bob fell sick I was fit, and when I was down and out Bob wanted to be pushing on. He'd stand over me where I lay and curse me like a Dutchman curses a trek-ox. And generally he had his way. You couldn't cross Bob Savage.

So we kept on going north. That was another sort of Africa; you'd think you were in a different world from the low-country. You could trek for twenty miles without sighting a kraal. Sour veld. Food was scarce up then, and the niggers were frightened at us. Paul Krüger had been giving hem hell about then.

But that didn't matter to Bob. Food or no food, water or no water, fever or no fever, he'd got it fixed in his head that he was going to find his gold. It didn't trouble him that you couldn't even be sure of water; winter getting on, and all the streams drying up. It was all right for him. He'd got the strength of his will behind him; but I'd come out on a prospecting trip, not a wild-goose chase. I told him so.

By this time we were both of us getting a bit short tempered. He went as savage as his name.

“Hicks,” he said, “I asked you to come with me because I took you for a man. If you want to rat, you can rat, and be damned to you!”

That was a fine thing to say to a young chap a hundred miles from anywhere, with fever in his body and not a dozen words of Kaffir to help him along!

“If you're funking,” said he, “all you've got to do is to clear off and leave me alone.”

He knew as well as me that I couldn't do it. I wasn't an old hand like him. In a few days the Aas-vogels would have been picking my bones. I said I'd go on with him.

“I'm telling you,” he said, “that I'm going to find gold. I feel it coming nearer every day. Get up out of this and trek!”

So we went on. On and on. Like a couple of skeletons. I couldn't leave him. He had the laugh on me. Bob Savage's laugh was like a devil's. He was a brainy fellow, Bob. I guess he'd been a gentleman and well brought up. When he turned nasty that was the line he took with me, coming it over me with a lot of damned long words, and so polite I could have knocked him down if I'd had the strength in me. But I hadn't. I was rotten with fever, and that scrap at Moodie's had shown me that I must give him my best.

He got so rough-tempered, what with the fever and the rest, that by the time we turned back—he had to give it up in the end—I'd grown to hate the sight of him. I guess that was partly my fever, too. But it's the truth. What with his tongue, that cut like a sjambok, and his long words, and his sneering politeness, and this bee he'd got in his bonnet about the gold that we never found—I tell you, I couldn't look at him.

Nor speak. We went on trekking for days—his idea was to work back south to Pretoria without speaking a word. I hadn't the heart for it. I was pretty nearly dead, and I reckoned this fellow had played me the worst trick of my life. He used to go looping on in front of me, with his white-metal prospecting pan clinking behind him fit to drive you mad. All I could do was to lift one leg after another. Sometimes he'd turn back and grin at me and call me Mr. Hicks. That put the lid on it!

Hate . . . Damn me if that's the word for it. It kept on bubbling up in my bead like boiling water. If I'd had the strength . . . But I've told you that before. Honest, though, there were times when that devil in me, fever or whatever it was, made me want to run up to him from behind and brain him with my pick.

One evening we dropped down into the flat country under the Woodbush. The veld was all dried up to tinder; not a spot of water in it for more than twenty miles. Well, right in front of us—you can't guess distance in that clear air—was a kopje, and underneath it what looked like a farmhouse. Some tak-haar Boer, I supposed. At that time all this country was in the back-veld. Mile after mile I kept on looking at it, hoping to God I'd get a drink at that old fellow's dam. I'd not tasted water for thirty hours. My mouth was all cracked and black with dust; my throat was like a sand-pit. Bob could do better without water than me. There wasn't a drop of moisture in his skinny body.

When we came up to that farm I went down like a log. Bob went up to the stoep and asked for drink in his best Dutch. The Boer came out: a youngish fellow with a face like a horse.

“Water?” he said. “We're all dried up here. My dam's nearly empty, and my cattle must have it before you rooineks." It was just after the first Boer War, and they were properly vicious. “Besides,” he said, “there's a spruit with water in it two hours to eastward. Go and drink there!”

TWO hours meant two hours on horseback, and we poor devils were on foot. He was the first and last man we saw that day. I don't forget him. Somehow or other I managed to limp on after Bob in the direction he pointed. By this time, I was mad with thirst. How it sounded, how it tasted. There wasn't a spot of green; only the dry grass and miles of black ashes where that swine had fired his veld. You've heard talk about a cat on hot bricks? Well, that was what I was like. It burned your feet. But I couldn't skip . . . not I!

Bob Savage had never spoken a word to me. I reckon he hated me more than I hated him by now. He kept on in front, with his damned pan clinking. I began to shiver. I knew the fever was getting hold of me.

Then I saw his feet disappear. He was going down-hill. The veld fell away like. I guessed he must have reached the edge of the kloof where the water was. I got a kind of new strength. When he went down over the top, I started running to catch him up. I went on, God knows how, and he was taking his time, picking his way among the rocks.

It was the kloof, all right. I hit the bed of the stream twenty yards above him. Pool after pool that should have held water was dry . . . Bone dry! And then I saw Bob Savage, with his blasted luck, had struck a wet one. He was drinking out of his hands.

I came up to him like a dog to another dog with a bone. I could see there was only a spot of the stuff left, and that like coffee-grounds. I threw myself down to it.

“Now, Mr. Hicks,” he says. “Take your turn.”

And then . . . then God knows what happened. The anger rushed up into my head fit to take the top off. It didn't strike me that there might be more water lower down. I only knew that water was life and death to me, and that Bob Savage was drinking it. I went for him like a bull. No fists, this time. Iron picks. I was fitting to kill, fighting like a madman. Alone, in the middle of Africa.

Heaven knows where the strength came from. Once I thought I had him, but he swerved. Bob Savage was like an eel, I've told you. I kept on shouting: “I'll kill you, you swine; I'll kill you, you blasted Irishman!” All the stuff I'd been bottling up for months! He didn't answer a word. He kept his head, like he always did. He fenced me off just as if he'd been used to that sort of fighting from a child.

Then I got my chance. He slipped and fell. Murder this time! I was out to kill him. Not so much for himself, you know. Just water. Up went my pick: down it came! He gave a wriggle at the last moment, and I missed him.

That was the end of my strength. I followed the swing of the pick like a sack of flour.

When I came round, after a minute or two, there was Bob Savage sitting up with his shirt off beside me.

“Well, Jim,” he says, “how goes it?”

I was too weak to answer. Somehow the rage had gone out of me. He gave me a pannikin of water. I felt damned ashamed of myself. I could have cried.

“That was a lucky stroke of yours, Jim”.

“Lucky for you, Bob,” I told him.

“Lucky for the two of us, my son. First of all you missed being a murderer. Secondly you did the trick.”

“What trick?” I says. I couldn't think what he was driving at. I thought it was some new game of his.

“Look at this,” he said. “That's what you did with that last shot of yours.”

He tossed me a splinter of white quartzite.

“Gold,” he says, “wire gold. See it for yourself. Talk about the values at Moodie's! This is something like, Jim.”

That was how we discovered the Medina Reef. I don't suppose you've ever heard of it. To tell the truth, it wasn't a reef at all; it was what they call a “blow”! Fourteen ounces to the ton while it lasted, and then not a pennyweight more. When we got back south, Bob floated a company. That was where his brains came in. We sold our holdings for twenty thousand pounds apiece. I gave most of mine to a barmaid round the corner in Commissioner Street. The rest I lost in the Joh'burg boom in 'ninety. Bob . . . Well, you know what Bob did with his. He kept his head, like he always did. Bob went up and I went down. Ups and downs. That's Africa.