Sunset at Sheba by John Harris Page A

Sidings was silent and still and dead but for the few yellow lights in the windows of the shabby houses. Over by the railway sidings on the soft breeze whispering from the Kalahari came the lowing of oxen from where the wagoners waited for the morning, rising over the gentle hiss of steam from a locomotive, and the clank of wagons being shifted from the points.
    From the direction of the soldiers’ billets the sound of crunching boots was followed by the roar of a motorcar engine being revved, harsh like the tearing of calico, drowning the witless chatter of the frogs and crickets, then falling rapidly to a sewing-machine murmur behind all the other sounds of the town.
    Winter shifted uneasily in the chair he had placed on the stoep of the hotel and reached for his glass. At the other side of the square there was a low store with the single yellow glare of a gas jet beyond its glass door. For a while, a few Kaffirs had sat on the stoep in the lowering sunshine, chattering noisily in the still warm air, then even they had vanished and the place lay in silence.
    In front of him the veld stretched out in a great sweep of earth, impressive in the prodigality of its space, while overhead the tall African stars, steady and unwinking, picked out the scattered gum trees beyond the town, and the few sparse peppers along the square. The fan of a dwarf palm nearby rusted into thin whiskers, its spikes reflected in the glassy water of a horse trough where grass grew round a dripping tap.
    Winter sipped slowly at the brandy in his hand and stretched his legs. Behind him in the hotel he could hear an argument going on, over the soft batting of moths against the lighted screen door.
    ‘The bloody Boers ought to be all shot,’ someone was saying loudly. ‘Starting a civil war. Setting about us when they’ve been beat once.’
    The argument was drowned abruptly as someone started playing a concertina, and a husky male voice, rich with drink, began to sing -
    ‘There was Brown upside down,
Mopping up the whisky off the floor -
Booze, booze, the firemen cried
As they came knocking at the door - ‘
    Winter put down his glass and lit a cigarette. In front of him the horse tethered to the hitching post out in the dusty road shook its head suddenly with a jingle of its bit, then dropped back into a silent somnolence. Suddenly the night seemed stiflingly hot and airless.
    There was still no sign of Sammy Schuter’s dusty cart and Winter began to wonder if the boy had been lying when he had promised to head to Upington and the west. He had seemed willing enough to go but there had been the same sort of contempt for politicians in his face that Kitto always showed, a derisive condescension that was probably powerful enough to make him susceptible to any offer Fabricius might conceivably have made to him.
    He could still remember the shrewd, youthful face, watching him with strange steely eyes as he had made his own offer, and he remembered that the sly humour behind it had brought into his mind all the doubtful things he had ever done for Offy in the name of business, all the crafty deals he had worked out in that shabby office over the newspaper, all the bribings with shares of intractable opponents, the small positions of trust that had been discreetly put forward, the pensions, the directorships, even the blackmail when nothing else had worked - the dead dogs he’d dug up, trying to ignore the fact that it wasn’t entirely honest by persuading himself that it was necessary, and that circumstances demanded a loosening of the bounds of moral obligation.
    He shrugged, smiling at his own unexpected flash of conscience, and it was while he was still stretching and yawning, stiff with sitting and bored with waiting, that he heard the throb of an engine and saw the yellow glow of a motorcar’s lamps as it swung into the square. It moved slowly down the eastern side of the dusty patch of ground, away from the faint light of the stars, then it