The clerk gulped. "This messenger seems to have been the only survivor." "Survivor!" Ralph stared at him. "What does that mean?

What on earth are you talking about?" "The Matabele have risen. They are murdering all the whites in Rhodesia man, woman and child, they are being slaughtered!" "Mummy, Douglas and Suss aren't here. There is nobody to get me breakfast." Jon-Jon came into the tent while Cathy was still brushing out her hair, and twisting it up into thick braids.

"Did you call for them?" "I called and called." "Tell one of the grooms to go down and fetch them, darling." "The grooms aren't here also." "The grooms aren't here either," Cathy corrected him and stood up. "All right, then, let's go and see about your breakfast." Cathy stepped out into the dawn. Overhead the sky was a lovely dark rose colour shaded to ripe orange in the east, and the bird chorus in the trees above the camp was like the tinkle of silver bells. The camp-fire had died to a puddle of grey powdery ash and had not been replenished.

"Put some wood on, jonjon,"Cathy told him and crossed to the kitchen hut. She frowned with annoyance. It was deserted. She took down a tin from the gauzed meat-safe and then looked up as the doorway darkened.

"Oh Isazi, she greeted the little Zulu. "Where are the other servants?" "Who knows where a Matabele dog will hide himself when he is needed?" Isazi asked contemptuously. "They have most likely spent the night dancing and drinking beer and now their heads are too heavy to carry.". "You'll have to help me," said Cathy. "Until the cook gets here." After breakfast in the dining-tent, Cathy called Isazi from the fire again.

"Have any of them come back yet?" "Not yet, Nkosikazi." "I want to go down to the railhead. I hope there is a telegraph from Henshaw.

Will you put the ponies into the trap, Isazi." Then for the first time she noticed the little frown of concern on the old Zulu's wrinkled features.

"What is it?" "The horses they are not in the kraal." "Where are they then?" "Perhaps one of the mujiba took them out early, I will go to find them." oh, it doesn't matter." Cathy shook her head. "It's only a short walk to the telegraph office. The exercise will be good for me." And she called to Jonathan, "Fetch my bonnet for me, Jon-Jon."

"Nkosikazi, it is perhaps not wise, the little one-" "Oh don't fuss," Cathy told him fondly, and took Jonathan's hand. "If you find the ponies in time you can come and fetch us." Then swinging her bonnet by its ribbon and with Jonathan skipping beside her, she started along the track that led around the side of the wooded hill towards the railhead.

There was no clamour of hammers on steel. Jonathan noticed it first.

"It's so quiet, Mama. "And they stopped to listen.

"It's not Friday," Cathy murmured. "Mr. Mac can't be paying the gangs." She shook her head, still not alarmed. "That's strange. "And they went on.

At the corner of the hill they stopped again, and Cathy held her bonnet up to shade her eyes from the low sun. The railway lines ran away southward, glistening like the silken threads of a spider's web, but below them they ended abruptly at the raw gash of the cut line through the bush. There was a pile of teak sleepers at the railhead and a smaller bundle of steel rails, the service locomotive was due up from Kimberley this afternoon to replenish those materials. The sledgehammers and shovels were in neat stacks where the shift had left them at dusk the night before. There was no human movement around the railhead.

"That's even stranger, "said Cathy.

"Where is Mr. Henderson, Mama?" Jonathan asked. His voice was unusually subdued. "Where are Mr. Mac and Mr. Braithwaite?" "I don't know. They must still be in their tents." The tents of the white surveyor and the engineer and his supervisors were grouped just beyond the square galvanized iron shack of the telegraph. There was no sign of life around the hut nor between the neat pyramids of canvas, except for a single black crow which sat on the peak of one of them.

Its hoarse cawing reached them faintly, and as Cathy watched, it spread its black wings and flapped heavily to earth at the entrance of the tent.

"Where are all the hammer-boys?" Jonathan piped, and suddenly Cathy shivered.

"I don't know, darling." Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. "We will go and find out." She realized she had spoken too loudly, and Jonathan shrank against her legs. "Mummy, I'm frightened."

"Don't be a silly boy," Cathy told him firmly, and dragging him by the hand, she started down the hill.

By the time she reached the telegraph hut, she was moving as fast as her big round belly would allow, and her breathing in her own ears was deafening.

"Stay here." She did not know what prompted her to leave Jonathan at the steps of the veranda, but she went up alone to the door of the telegraph hut. , The door was ajar. She pushed it fully open.

Mr. Braithwaite sat beside his table facing the doorway. He was staring at her with those pale popping eyes, and his mouth hung open. "Mr. Braithwaite," Cathy said, and at the sound of her voice there was a hum like a swarm of bees taking flight, and the big cobalt blue flies that had covered his shirt-front rose in a cloud into the air, and Cathy saw that his belly was a gaping mushy red pit, and that his entrails hung in ropes down between his knees into a tangle on the floor under the desk. Cathy shrank back against the door. She felt her legs turn rubbery under her and black shadows wheeled through her vision like the wings of bats at sundown. One of the metallic blue flies settled on her cheek and crawled sluggishly down towards the corner of her mouth.

Cathy leaned forward slowly and retched explosively, and her breakfast spattered on the wooden door between her feet. She backed away slowly out of the door, shaking her head and trying to wipe the sickly sweet taste of vomit from her lips. She almost tripped on the steps, and sat down heavily. Jonathan ran to her, and clung to her arm.

"What happened, Mummy?" "I want you to be a brave little man," she whispered.

"Are you sick, Mummy?" The child shook her arm with agitation, and Cathy found it difficult to think.

She realized what had caused the hideous mutilation of the corpse in the hut. The Matabele always disembowelled their victims. It was a ritual that released the spirit of the dead man, and allowed it to go on to its Valhalla. To leave the belly pouch was to trap the victim's shade upon the earth and have it return to haunt the slayer.

Mr. Braithwaite had been split by the razor-sharp edge of a Matabele assegai and his hot entrails had been plucked from him like those of a chicken. It was the work of a Matabele war party.

"Where is Mr. Henderson, Mummy?" Jon-Jon demanded shrilly. "I am going to his tent." The big burly engineer was one of Jonathan's favourite friends, and Cathy caught his arm.

"No, Jon-Jon don't go!" "Why not?" The crow had screwed up its courage at last and now it hopped into the opening of the engineer's tent and disappeared. Cathy knew what had attracted it.

"Please be quiet, Jon-Jon," Cathy pleaded. "Let Mummy think." The missing servants. They had been warned, of course, as had the Matabele construction gangs. They knew that a war party was out, and they had faded away, and a horrifying thought struck Cathy. Perhaps the servants, her own people, were part of the war party. She shook her head violently. No, not them. These must be some small band of renegades, not her own people.

They would have struck at dawn, of course, for it was the favourite hour. They had caught Henderson and his foreman asleep in the tents. Only the faithful little Braithwaite had been at his machine. The telegraph machine Cathy started up the telegraph was her one link with the outside world.

"Jon-Jon, stay here," she ordered, and crept back towards the door of the hut.

She steeled herself, and then glanced into the interior, trying not to look at the little man in the chair. One quick glance was enough. The telegraph machine had been ripped from the wall and smashed into pieces on the floor of the hut. She reeled back and leaned against the iron wall beside the door, clutching her swollen stomach with both hands, forcing herself to think again.

The war party had struck the railhead and then disappeared back into the forest and then she remembered the missing servants. The camp, they had not disappeared, they would be circling up through the trees towards the camp. She looked around her desperately, expecting at any moment to see the silent black files of plumed warriors come padding out of the thick bush.

The Service train from Kimberley was due late that afternoon, ten hours from now, and she was alone, except for Jonathan. Cathy sank down on her knees, reached for him and clung to him with the strength of despair, and only then realized that the boy was staring through the open doorway.

"Mr. Braithwaite is dead!" Jonathan said matter-of-factly.

Forcibly, she turned his head away. "They are going to kill us too, aren't they, Mummy?" "Oh Jon-Jon!" "We need a gun. I can shoot.

Papa taught me." A gun Cathy looked towards the silent tents. She did not think she had the courage to go into one of them, not even to find a weapon. She knew what carnage to expect there.

A shadow fell over her and she screamed. "Nkosikazi. It is me."

Isazi had come down the hill as silently as a panther.

"The horses are gone," he said, and she motioned him to look into the telegraph hut.

Isazi's expression did not change.

"So,"he said quietly, "the Matabele jackals can still bite." "The tents," Cathy whispered. "See if you can find a weapon." Isazi went with the lithe swinging run of a man half his age, ducking from one tent-opening to another, and when he came back to her, he carried an assegai with a broken shaft.

"The big one fought well. He was still alive, with his guts torn out of him and the crows were eating them. He could no longer speak, but he looked at me. I have given him peace. But there are no guns the Matabele have taken them." "There are guns at the camp," Cathy whispered.

"Come, Nkosikazi," he lifted her tenderly to her feet and Jonathan manfully took her other arm, though he did not reach to her armpit.

The first pain hit Cathy before they reached the thick bush at the edge of the cut line, and it doubled her over. They held her while the paroxysm lasted, Jonathan not understanding what was happening, but the little Zulu was grave and silent.

"All right." Cathy straightened up at last, and tried to wipe the long tendrils of her hair off her face, but they were plastered there by her own sweat.

They went up on the track at Cathy's pace. Isazi was watching the forest on both sides for the dark movement of warriors, and he carried the broken assegai in his free hand with an underhand stabbing grip.

Cathy gasped and staggered as the next pain caught her.

This time they could not hold her and she went down on her knees in the dust. When it passed, she looked up at Isazi.