The covenant - James A. Michener [200]
Curiously, Adriaan did not support his wife in this argument, for he was coming to believe that Rebecca spoke for the future; it was time that order be brought to the frontier, although he himself wanted none of it. The truth was, he rather liked his daughter-in-law, for she was capable, intelligent and forthright, and he suspected that Lodevicus had been lucky to catch her. Seena, however, saw her as a moralizing menace to be consistently opposed: 'You think your Bible has an answer for everything?'
'It has.'
'Well, when you and Vicus make the Xhosa mad, and they come clicking over that hill armed with assegais, what does your Bible say about that?'
With absolute assurance Rebecca said, 'Vicus, fetch me the Bible, please,' and in later years he would often remember this moment, when his wife and his mother argued over what might happen if the Xhosa struck.
Turning the pages expertly, Rebecca came to that passage in Leviticus which formed a keystone of her father's belief, and read triumphantly: ' "And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword. And five of you shall chase an hundred . . ."
' And then, as if this solved all problems of the frontier, she glared at her mother-in-law and said, 'We will have five to defend this farm.'
Of course, the little brown men knew nothing of this prophecy and had no difficulty whatever in breaking through. One night a clan of Bushmen living beyond the mountains crept down, found large numbers of cattle roaming freely, and made off with some sixty fine beasts.
'That's enough,' Lodevicus said, his voice betraying iron but no fire. 'That's just enough. And now we settle the problem of the Bushmen.'
He organized a commando, all the men from thirty miles around, and he set forth, inviting Adriaan to come along but ignoring him when decisions were required. They went north about seventy miles, so far that Adriaan was certain they had left the Bushmen far behind, but when he started to alert his son to this fact, Vicus, grim-lipped, sat astride his horse, saying nothing.
The old man was right. The commando had far outrun the little brown raiders, but Vicus had devised a super strategy, and when the riders reached a spot where whole families of Bushmen might be expected to congregate, he ordered his men to dismount and hide themselves near a spring that broke out from between the rocks. Adriaan, unable to discern his son's plan, expected the hunting party to arrive with the stolen cattle and walk into an ambush, but instead, just at sunset, a huge rhinoceros lumbered in to catch his evening swill of water, and as he drank noisily, switching his wiry tail, Lodevicus dropped him with one powerful shot behind the ear.
There the great beast lay, beside the spring, and before nightfall vultures gathered, perching in trees and waiting for the dawn. They were seen, of course, both by the Bushmen families awaiting the return of their men and by the cattle stealers coming north, so that by midafternoon some sixty Bushmen, counting the women and children, had gathered at the spring to gorge upon the unexpected feast of the dead rhino.
During the first excitement as the little people butchered the huge beast, Lodevicus kept his men silent, and this was prudent, for the wait allowed another thirty brown people to assemble, and when they were all there, about ninety of them, cutting the rhino steaks and laughing as the blood ran down their wizened faces, Vicus leaped up and cried, 'Fire!'
Caught in the crossfire of a score of guns, the banqueters fell one by one. Cattle stealers, grandmothers, the makers of arrows, the young women who collected the beetles from which the poisons were made, and the little children, even the babiesall were exterminated.
Lodevicus the Hammer he was called after that exhibition, God's strong right arm, and whenever trouble threatened he was summoned. He organized the first church in this remote region and served as its sick-comforter during the years when it had no predikant. He read sermons from a book printed