Flashman And The Tiger

I don’t want to live through another five minutes like those last agonising moments while we sped across the plain, slower and slower with every yard, straining our eyes back at those distant black figures behind. Even when we reached the gully, a great rocky cleft that stretched as far as one could see on either side, like a volcanic crack, with a rickety plank bridge spanning its thirty feet, there was the time-consuming labour of getting the wounded out and across. The nigger driver and I managed it between us, and sinful hard it was, for two of ’em had to be carried the whole way; Moran, meanwhile, coaxed the team on to the swaying bridge, until the wagon was fairly in the middle of it; then we outspanned the horses and led them across, glancing back fearfully. There they came, those black fiends of the pit, a bare hundred yards away, sprinting full lick now that they saw we were halted and apparently stuck. They set up a great yell of "Suthu!" as they tore in towards the bridge, and Moran, who had been working in the wagon, jumped down and ran across to the little cluster of boulders where we had laid the wounded.

He dropped down beside me, looking back at the wagon; it was perhaps thirty yards off, with the waxed brown packet of gun-powder sitting on top of the ammunition boxes, and the tiny white primer fixed to the side of the packet. With a rifle, I might have hit it myself; all he had was a hand-gun.

"Well, here’s luck," says he. "One shot’ll have to do it."

He was right, I realised, and my mouth was parched with fear. If he missed the primer, his shot would hit the powder packet, but that wouldn’t explode it. It would just knock it over, and the primer would go God knew where. And the first Zulu was racing on to the bridge, shield aloft in triumph, with his hideous legion shrieking at his heels.

"Gather round, dear boys," murmurs Moran, cocking his pistol. "Get yourselves nice and comfy round the bonfire … Christ!"

His head jerked up, the colour draining from his face. It may have been a puff of wind, or perhaps the Zulus swarming past the wagon on that shaky bridge had disturbed it—but the front flap of the canvas cover suddenly swung across, momentarily hiding the tiny white target. It rapped again—for a split second the primer was visible—the first half-dozen Zulus were past the wagon and within three strides of the solid ground, assegais gleaming and knobkerries brandished—howling black faces—another flap of the canvas—the crash of Moran’s revolver—and with a roar of thunder the wagon, the bridge, and everything on it dissolved in a great blast of orange flame. I was hurled flat, my ears deafened and singing; a piece of timber clattered against the rock beside me. I came dizzily to my feet, to stare at the empty ravine, with a great black cloud billowing in the air above it, a few shreds of rope and timber dangling from the far lip, and on this side, lying in the dust, a single assegai.

Moran reversed his revolver in his hand and pushed it into the back of his sash. Then he tilted his hat back and flicked his fore-finger at its brim.

"Bayete, Udloko," says he softly. "I do like a snap shot, though. Give the gentleman a coconut."

•   •   •

That was in ’79, my first acquaintance with Tiger Jack, and it was to last only a few more feverish hours which I’ll describe at length some other day, for they don’t matter to the Tiger’s tale, which is strange enough without Rorke’s Drift to interrupt it. That was a nightmare in its own right, if you like—worse than Little Hand or Greasy Grass, for at least at those I’d been able to run. Why, at the Drift there wasn’t even room to hide, and it’ll make a ghastly chapter of its own in my African odyssey, if I can set it down before drink and senility carry me off.