The covenant - James A. Michener [597]
'Not likely.'
'We can't afford to go looking for scandal, you know.'
'This Saltwood's an American.'
He was summoned from Zambia, to which he had fled after his expulsion from Vwarda, and he arrived one morning at the Swartstroom driving a white Toyota with the gold monogram AMAL. He was followed by two other white cars bearing the famous letters, and then by two white trucks carrying five workmen each. A team of eighteen would now work every bend of this little stream, for it was imperative that the industry know whether a new source of alluvial diamonds had been found, and if so, where the master pipe might be hiding that produced them. It would be Philip Saltwood's responsibility to answer these questions, and he had seventeen assistants and twelve months in which to do it.
When he first arrived at the Swartstroom that sunny November morning in 1978 he seemed ideally suited for the task. A theoretical geologist well trained in America and Australia, he had acquired broad experience in the oil fields of the former country and the gold mines of the latter. In recent years his specialty had become diamonds, as a result of his intensive work in places like Sierra Leone, Botswana and Vwarda, and he brought to his present task a considerable knowledge.
He was thirty years old, bright, hard-working, and because of his American-Australian diet, much more solid than the average South African Saltwood. He had always known vaguely that his family stemmed from Salisbury in England, with a major branch in South Africa, but none of his relatives had ever made contact with either branch.
He was divorced from an Australian girl, and since they had had no children, there were no lingering emotional ties. They had met while he was working at Broken Hill and had courted while chasing brumbies across the
Outback. They had spent their honeymoon on the ski slopes in New Zealand, and as long as Philip worked Down Under they were a happy pair.
But when he was sent back to America, she could not adjust. The oil fields of Oklahoma had broken her spirit, and prospecting in central Wyoming had proved intolerable, so one afternoon she fled those barren regions in a Quantas plane to Australia, informing Philip of her departure only when she reached the safety of civilized Sydney. There she obtained a divorce on the grounds that he had deserted her, and sometimes he could scarcely remember her name.
He established his camp quickly and with stern authority: 'At the beginning we work three weeks unbroken, then a week off. Spend that week as you will, but come back sober. Workday starts forty minutes after sunrise, so get up early and hit the chow line. Good on you.' His speech was an amalgam of Texan, Australian and African diamond field; his manner, international-mine-field. He was a bold man determined to whip this crew and this rivulet into shape, and when he surveyed the six white tents in which he and his men would live for the following months, he took satisfaction in the secure way they had been pegged to the ground and the orderly manner in which they lined up. He knew of no other way to work.
There was great excitement in surrounding towns like Venloo when it was learned that Amalgamated Mines was making a serious probe of the Swartstroom, and curious businessmen kept trying to discover whether any further diamonds had been uncovered: 'They work from sunrise to sundown, and they got all kinds of machinery. They've an American in charge, and he drives them.'
'But did they find any diamonds?'
'Not from what I hear. That stream's been worked before, you know. Back in the thirties, I been told. They found nothing then, either.'
But old Pik Prinsloo had found his diamond, now reported to have been eleven carats in size. 'Yes, but sometimes I wonder. He's a canny old coot. You suppose he salted it?'
Why and from where would a seventy-one-year-old man salt a trivial little Transvaal stream? From time to time Saltwood would hear rumors that he was hauling his house-wagon to some new site, but none of the workmen had ever actually seen