9

March 1892

The driver of the new and expensive trap that Barney had acquired was at the stable harnessing the four horses that would draw the trap on the first stage of the long and tiresome five-day trip to Johannesburg; the outriders who had been selected to accompany the trip were in the corral behind the stable selecting the horses that would be taken along as replacements. The railway from Cape Town to Kimberley had been finished and in operation for over seven years, but the stubborn Paul Kruger refused permission for the line to be extended into Transvaal territory. It would, he said, bring in more Uitlanders and further despoil what had been a moral and religious land before the hated foreigners had brought in their brothels and their whores and their gaming and their greed and all the rest of their verdoem vices. It was bad enough that some Uitlanders were already there, but he had no intention of encouraging their sins by allowing a railway to be built that would bring in thousands more. Let them travel by carriage or oxcart over the rough roads and trails; it might even make them think twice before coming to Johannesburg in the first place.

Barney stopped by the Paris Hotel to see that the trap was supplied with a wicker basket well filled with whiskey and sandwiches for at least the first part of the journey. He and Fay no longer lived at the hotel; during their absence in Europe a large home had been built to Barney’s specifications as a surprise gift to Fay upon their return, but the Paris Hotel still drew him to it for entertainment, nor had he ever been tempted to sell it. It was a visible sign to him of where he had come from, of the poverty with which he had arrived in Kimberley, and he never wished to forget either those conditions or those days. Besides, it was here he had bedded his beloved Fay for the first time, and he knew he would never forget the early days of their marriage, enjoyed in this very building.

He gave the proper instructions to the barman as to his wants for the wicker basket, and while waiting turned to see who might be around. And then Barney was grinning his broadest grin at sight of a large hulking figure in the dining room having breakfast. Barney walked over.

“Andries!”

The large man looked up, his bronzed, deeply lined face wrinkling in a broad smile of pleasure. “Barney!” The smile faded. “I mean, Mr. Barnato. You remember me?”

Barney drew up a chair and motioned to the waitress. When she came over he ordered a bottle of the house’s best brandy, always the favorite drink of the Boer, even for those who, like Andries, drank sparingly. He sat down and moved the chair to face the other. “I’ll never forget you,” he said simply. “And what’s this Mr. Barnato nonsense?”

Andries looked embarrassed. “You’re known all over the country, Mr.—I mean—”

“Barney!” Barney said firmly.

“Barney, then. They say you’re a friend of the new Premier, Mr. Rhodes. And they say you’re the richest man in the country.”

“I suppose I am,” Barney said with no attempt at false modesty. “I’ve been lucky. Luckier than you know. D’you remember that girl—” He paused as the waitress brought a bottle and two glasses to the table. He poured two large drinks and pushed one across to Andries. “To your health.” They drank and then Barney went on. “D’you remember that girl we met on the trail? Fay Bees? Her mother died and we buried her up on the Orange?”

“I remember. A very pretty girl.”

“A beautiful girl!” Barney said fervently. “We’re married.” He could not keep the pride of possession from his voice. “We’re going to have a baby very soon.” He considered Andries gravely. “D’you know, when I think of Fay and how I met her, I owe you a great deal. More than you can imagine.”

Andries shook his head. “You owe me nothing.” He looked around, purposely changing the subject. “This is the first time I’ve been to Kimberley in many years. It’s certainly improved since I first dropped you off—in front of this very hotel, I believe.”

“That’s right. And the town has improved, thanks to a lot of work by a lot of people. We think it’s a fine town now. But what brings you to Kimberley now?”

“A load for Johannesburg. No railway, you see. I loaded up at the goods shed; the load came up from Cape Town by train.” Andries smiled a bit ruefully. “When they have railways all over the country, it will be a different world…”

Barney made up his mind on the spot, as he usually did. “Andries, can you get another driver, someone down at Market Square, to take the load? In your wagon—or in theirs, if they prefer?”

“Why should I do that?” Andries said, puzzled by the request.

“Because I want you to come with me. I’m going to Johannesburg, leaving today, going by trap. You could take the place of my driver. As a matter of fact,” he added, struck by the neatness of the solution, “my driver could take your wagon up there. He’s completely reliable. And it would give us a chance to talk.”

Andries studied the still-young face looking at him so earnestly.

“And what would we talk about?” he asked gently. “Let us be honest with each other, Mr.—I mean, Barney. We’re miles apart; we have nothing in common. I’m an old drover; you’re a rich man. What would we talk about?”

“We have two of the most important months of my life in common,” Barney said with conviction. “We can talk of many things. You said yourself that eventually the railway will cover this country. What will you do then, when ox wagons are just a curiosity in some museum?”

Andries finished his drink and put his glass down. Barney reached for the bottle, but Andries laid one of his huge hands over the glass.

“No, that is enough. What will I do when ox wagons are just a memory?” He shrugged lightly. “Then I’ll find a small piece of land and grow my own vegetables, raise a few cattle, watch my oxen graze. Watch them grow old. And, in time, watch them die. Or they’ll watch me die, one or the other.”

“How old are you, Andries?”

“Sixty-two, or maybe sixty-three. Old enough.”

“If you want to sit around on a piece of ground,” Barney said, trying to get the other to see reason—as usual, once his own mind was made up he had difficulty understanding why everyone didn’t see things his way—“they say the land around Johannesburg is good for cattle. I’m going up there to see what else the town is good for; I’ve waited too long as it is. Come with me. We’ll find something we can do together.”

Andries raised his bushy eyebrows. “Why together?”

Barney leaned a bit closer. “Andries, I was a stupid boy twenty years ago; I was an innocent. I thought the five quid for the trip-five quid you never even collected—included keep, as well. Grub. I know better today; I know what you did for me. In a way I owe you more than I can ever repay you.”

“You owe me nothing,” Andries said evenly. “You earned your keep on the trek. I was a fool to take on a load that heavy and try to take it over the mountains by myself. Without you I could never have made it. And the time you stopped those men from robbing the wagon. No, you owe me nothing. Actually,” he added dryly, “you owe me less than nothing. If I had had my way, I would have talked you out of staying in Kimberley. I would have talked you into coming back to Cape Town to work with me; I tried, if you remember. And today you’d be driving an ox wagon, like me.”

“And, except for Fay, probably as happy if not happier,” Barney said. “But I’m ready to work with you now,” he added with a grin, “but not as a driver. Maybe as a rancher. Come on! What d’you say?” He came to his feet as if the matter had already been decided. “Where’s your wagon?”

Andries hesitated; then he said, almost reluctantly, “At the goods shed next to the railway station.”

“And my driver is at the stable practically next to it,” Barney said, as if the proximity of the stables and the goods shed made his argument that much more sensible. The waitress brought over a wicker basket, placing it on the table. Barney thanked her and looked at Andries. The big man slowly came to his feet. “Fine!” Barney said. “Let’s go.”

“Wait. I haven’t paid—”

“I own this place,” Barney said firmly. “You don’t pay at my wagon any more than you let me pay at yours.”

And it had to be an omen, Barney thought as he led the way from the hotel, this running into Andries again after all the years, an omen that Johannesburg would prove as good to him as Kimberley had, especially when he rode into it with the big man at his side…

The crowd before the crude Stock Exchange in Simmonds Street in Johannesburg was quiet and glum; the prices constantly being changed on the board outside of the Exchange—a service for those who could not crowd into the small room inside—were being changed in a downward direction, as they had been for many months, and there was every indication this downward trend would not only continue but accelerate. For many of those watching, the changing figures meant little: what shares they had once owned had been lost long since, sold at any price for food. For these, as well as for many others watching, the entire exercise was simply one of entertainment; they were there to be in a crowd, to be with people, which had to be better than bring alone in a tent, or in a small room someplace with four bare walls and nothing to do but sit and stare, wondering how to meet the rent.

Barney and Andries, weary from the long and tiresome trip—far more tiresome, oddly enough, than walking beside a slow-moving ox wagon—at the moment wanted nothing more than to find a decent hotel and rest. But first, Barney said, they should find the office Solly Loeb had rented in Fox Street, wherever that was, and advise him of their arrival. They had stopped in the Market Square to ask directions, leaving the outriders there, and now they turned from Market Street into Simmonds, crossing Commissioner, and then pulled up, frowning at the sight of chains that blocked the road, and the crowd that was gathered behind the chains, wondering what had caused the congregation. But the board outside the building and the prices being chalked on it explained everything, at least to Barney. He was about to indicate to Andries to turn and take another street when somebody in the crowd recognized him.

“Hey! It’s Barney! Barney Barnato!”

The crowd turned their attention to him; he was, after all, the richest man in Africa while at the moment there were, among them, undoubtedly some of the poorest. They moved from the relatively unexciting listing of prices to crowd against the chains behind which, in a very ornate trap albeit covered with the dust of the trip, was the far more glamorous and enviable Barney Barnato. Many had never seen him, but everyone there had certainly heard of him. Barney, never too tired to take a bow before an audience, smiled and stood up, resting one hand on Andries’ shoulder for support. He looked down at the faces surrounding the trap, searching for a familiar face but unable to find one.

“Hey, Barney, when did y’get back from Merry Ol’ England?”

“Just a few weeks ago,” Barney said, and then added, from lack of anything else to say, “How’s the market?”

This was greeted by a bitter laugh from the crowd. “Don’t ask!” someone shouted.

Then someone else called out. “Hey, Barney, want to buy a gold mine?”

This brought an even louder laugh from the crowd.

“Hey, Barney, how about a choice piece of ground? Make a fine site for a block of office buildings. You can have it cheap. It’s right in the heart of Jo’burg. I’m serious.”

“That’s if you can find anyone to rent them afterwards!” someone else shouted.

“Hey, Barney, you used to pick and shovel, didn’t you? Well, I got me a fine pick and shovel, both. Hardly used. Lately, that is—” That brought another laugh.

Barney held up a hand for quiet.

“You want to know what I want to buy?” he called out when relative silence had fallen. “Well, I’ll tell you—everything!” He held up his hand again to settle the buzz that had broken out from the crowd. “Hold it, boys! I’m serious. Anyone who has anything to sell, come and see me tomorrow. Our offices are at Forty-five Fox Street, if anyone can tell us where that is—”

“Just around the corner,” someone said, and pointed.

“Thanks,” Barney said, and sat down. Andries started to turn the team from the chains, but with a shout the men in the crowd loosened the chains and dropped them at both ends of the block that had been set aside before the Exchange, and then shoved back to give Andries room to pass. The trap moved around the corner, leaving a stunned crowd.

“You think he’s serious?”

“Maybe he thinks he is, but he don’t know Jo’burg,” someone else said.

“He may know diamonds, but he don’t know shit from shaving soap about gold.”

“He may be the richest man in Africa right this minute, but if he buys everything in this town somebody’s got for sale, like he says, then he’s going to be the poorest man in Africa before you can say Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger—”

“That’s his worry, the way I see it. It don’t take no skin off’n a man’s behind just to drop in that office of his tomorrow and see if he really meant what he said.”

“Why, you got something to sell, Joe?”

“I’m down to me virtue, is all—”

The crowd slowly drifted back to the chalkboard and the man still scribbling on it.

Solly Loeb looked at the crowd that filled the outer office of their new rooms and wound itself down the stairs to the street below with what he considered justified resentment. If he was supposed to be in charge of the Johannesburg office, if he was supposed to make the decisions, if he was supposed to make the recommendations as to what to buy—which at this moment in time positively should be nothing at all in this depressed town—then what was Barney doing coming up here and, for all intents and purposes, taking over? And in so doing making a fool of himself, and by association, a fool of Solly Loeb as well? Already, in one short month, Solly was almost ashamed to show himself at the Rand Club, sure the other members were laughing at him behind those suave and supposedly sincere smiles. As he saw one more indigent petitioner—for that was how Solly saw them—leave Barney’s inner office and as he resignedly waved another one to enter, Solly tried to calculate how much money Barney Barnato had already thrown down the drain, but the figure he came up with was too staggering even to be contemplated without making him sick. If it kept up like this, the Barnato Investment Company would go stony, and with it the value of the shares Solly held in it.

What had his maniac uncle bought in the short matter of four weeks? Well, he had bought about any land offered in downtown Johannesburg that had clear title, land which had to be worth less than a tenth of what he had paid for it, if Solly was any judge. And who should be a better judge? He, Solly, had been here several months before Barney showed up, and he hadn’t wasted his time, either, in learning the facts of the place, facts that Barney seemed to prefer to disregard. And not satisfied with buying half of the town itself, he had gone ahead and bought land outside of the city, a huge tract, more land than Solly could imagine, an area the idiot intended to stock with cattle—to feed the coming city of Johannesburg, he had said. What coming city of Johannesburg? The way things were going, there wouldn’t be a Johannesburg in five years! And what he had paid for that—that—that pasture could have been purchased for pennies a few years back! Oh, they had seen him coming, all right! His smart uncle, Barney Barnato!

What else? Oh, yes, the waterworks! Water was essential for the mines as well as for the people, Barney had said. What mines? What people? This town would be another Barberton in a year! Oh, yes, and speaking of mines and gold stocks, Barney had, of course, bought gold mines and gold stocks—mines that had gold in them, nobody denied that, but gold that could be taken from those mines at a break-even cost only, and you had to be pretty smart to even do that. The fact was it cost as much to get an ounce of gold from that retentive rock as the cost of just about bringing it to the surface, let alone the cost of crushing the rock in those expensive batteries, and the cost of labor and supervising the damned Kaffirs and the cost of the tools and the machinery and the freight, since because of the damned Kruger there were no railways to the damned place, and God alone knew what else!

Solly had said as much to the reticent Andries the day the large Boer had driven him out in the trap to inspect the land Barney had bought for the ranch, a ranch Andries was to run on a fifty-fifty partnership basis.

“He’s lost his mind!” Solly had said hopelessly. “I don’t believe he has the slightest idea of what he’s doing. Or how much he’s spending.” It wasn’t because Solly particularly wished to confide his thoughts to Andries; to begin with he was a stranger, and a Boer, and besides he was obviously an uneducated peasant, a nobody. But there wasn’t anyone else around; it was almost like talking to oneself. “Over two million pounds. Two million pounds! In less than a month! Can you imagine? Do you have any idea how much money that is, two million pounds?”

Andries properly considered that the question needed no answer from him, and held his silence.

“And if it was only all his own money!” Solly had gone on bitterly. “He seems to forget, or maybe he prefers to forget, that there are other shareholders in the company! He doesn’t even ask their opinion; he just plows on!” He seemed to suddenly realize he was expressing his personal views before a man Barney had just recently introduced into the picture, a new factor in the equation. The people Barney managed to pick up! Like stray dogs! A driver of an ox wagon, for God’s sake, just because they’d once made a trek together! “Of course, that’s just my opinion …” He looked up, the look itself on that haughty patrician face demanding an answer, a commitment.

“Ummm … ,” Andries had said diplomatically.

“Yes,” Solly had said shortly with a shake of his head and a sidelong glance at the other man, as if to warn him he had been eavesdropping, for all practical purposes, and not to forget it; and fell silent.

He came back to the present as a man came from Barney’s office and approached his desk, holding out a chit upon which Barney’s scrawled signature was clearly evident. Solly studied it balefully for several moments and then looked up.

“What’s this for?”

“Sold ’im a share o’ a claim.” The man sounded as if the money represented by the chit had been found in the street.

“And where’s this claim?” Solly asked sardonically. “Market Square?”

The man bridled. “Hit’s a good claim, an’ ’e bought hit square! An’ you pay me me money raht now, you ’ear?”

“Don’t take that tone with me! You watch your tongue!”

“Watch me tongue, eh? You watch yer throat, lad! I signed the papers all proper, an’ ’e signed the chit! Now I wants me money!”

Solly gritted his teeth. He wrote the check, signed it, and handed it over, coming to his feet immediately afterward, fuming. This was too much! He marched into Barney’s office, forestalling a rather well dressed elderly man who had moved to the door and had merely been waiting for Solly’s permission to enter. He did not look like the usual run of petitioner waiting to cash in on a worthless claim, or a claim that was, at the very least, profitless; on the contrary he looked rather distinguished, but Solly was well aware that merely looking distinguished did not prevent a man from taking as much advantage of Barney as one who looked disreputable. In any event, Solly pushed past the man brusquely, entering the office and closing the door firmly behind him. Barney looked up curiously.

“Yes, Solly?”

Solly drew up a chair and sat down opposite his uncle. He took a deep breath and began. “Barney,” he said, trying to sound as calm as his uncle looked, “do you know what you are doing?”

“I think so,” Barney said mildly.

“D’you know how much money you’ve put out? In a month?”

“About two million pounds, I believe. Why?”

Solly was speechless, but only for a moment.

“Why? Why? Because most of it if not all of it is money down the drain, that’s why! Sure, there’s gold in the Reef; there’s gold in people’s teeth, too! But what good is the gold in the Reef if nobody can get it out at a profit, eh? The mines that are still working are barely breaking even. Look at the Simmer & Jack mine! They know as much about getting gold out of the rock with mercury amalgam as anyone in the world, and they’re barely making expenses! Look at Robinson! He’s added the new chlorination process to try and squeeze an extra tenth of an ounce per ton of rock, and I doubt if he’s even paid for the new equipment he added! My God, Barney, there’s probably more gold in the slag heaps than there is being extracted and poured, practically. What kind of a business is that to be pouring money in, endlessly? And the mining stocks you insist upon buying, stocks even in mines that have been shut down and will probably never reopen—”

“Solly,” Barney said quietly, interrupting. “There were diamonds in the blue ground, as you may remember, and we had to figure out how to get them out. The answer was in power equipment, steam-driven equipment, and we had to even bring the coal by ox wagon over half of South Africa to fire the boilers. I don’t know what the answer is going to be to get the gold from the rock, but there’s going to be an answer and somebody’s going to find it. And if power is needed and steam to produce that power, at least the coal is within a few miles of here. I know this: there’s gold in the Reef! They calculate there’s more gold here than in any other place in the world. Where there’s that much gold, somebody is going to figure out how to recover it. And at a profit, too. And when they do, I expect to be ready.”

“And if they don’t figure out how to recover it—at that profit you’re talking about—for the next hundred years?” Solly asked sardonically. “What then?”

“Then I guess we wait a hundred years,” Barney said philosophically. He looked at his nephew steadily. “But we wait.”

Solly shook his head in frustrated desperation. “But, damn it, Barney! Even so! The prices you’re paying for everything! The market keeps going down and you keep buying!”

“Solly,” Barney said quietly, “if the basic proposition is good, the time to buy is on a falling market. Let a rising market take care of itself. In the long run you’ll come out far ahead. People lose opportunities waiting for a market to bottom; they lose money because they’re afraid to lose it. I’ve never been afraid to lose money and that’s why I’ve got what I’m spending today.” Solly stared at him hopelessly. “Now,” Barney said briskly, getting back to business, and avoiding Solly’s baleful glance, “who’s next out there?”

“A chap dressed to the nines,” Solly said a bit vengefully. “And I only hope you don’t buy the Cape Town breakwater from him, or either Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace!”

“I didn’t know they were for sale,” Barney said with a smile, “but if they are I promise to bid low.” He watched Solly stamp from the room to be replaced by a gray-haired gentleman dressed in the latest fashion. The door closed behind him. Barney motioned the man to a seat and waited until he had been made comfortable. Barney leaned back in his chair, relaxing. “And exactly what do you have to sell?” he asked politely.

The man smiled broadly. “Position,” he said evenly. “Possibly even fame, although I can’t guarantee it. Possibly notoriety, although I can’t guarantee that, either. Recognition, certainly, although you do not require that, being who you are. And all at a reasonable price. My rates are usually sixpence a line, but as an old friend—and one who should be hurt by your failure to remember me, although I am forced to recognize that time works its havoc whether we wish it or not—I have come to offer my services for what they might be worth. Possibly nothing. Possibly a bit more.”

Barney frowned across the desk. This was far different from the normal approach he had become used to in the past month, although he had to admit he had faced more than one ingenious ploy. “I beg your pardon?”

“For not recognizing me?” The man carefully rucked one trouser leg several inches upward before crossing his legs; he glanced down to satisfy himself there were no creases that might provide future and unsightly wrinkles, and then looked up with a slightly accusatory frown, although his eyes were twinkling. “I suppose you should be forgiven, considering the lapse of time. I can only gather that you are not in the habit of saving calling cards, my young Mr. Isaacs. Actually, I don’t myself. They take up so much room in filing cabinets, and when you run across them years later you say to yourself—with much the frown you have on your face at present—who the devil was that? Why did the dreadful bore give me his card in the first place? And then, quite properly, you tear it in shreds and throw it away.”

Barney stared. “I’m afraid—”

“Cape Town,” the man said, smiling. “A large area next to the Castle. People milling about like mad, and a young boy trying to figure out how to get to Kimberley on a rather restricted budget, I imagine—”

Barney came to his feet, beaming. “Mr. Breedon!”

“Well, at least the name made an impression,” Breedon said, and smiled across the desk. “In all honesty, my young friend, I’m more than gratified that you remember me at all. After all, our conversation lasted only a few moments. And it’s been—what?—twenty years?”

“Mr. Breedon!” Barney hurried around the desk, his hand out to greet the elderly man. “It’s truly good to see you! My first good word in this country came from you. And I’ve never forgotten!”

“Nor have I. Nor your Shakespearean recitations.” His eyebrows rose humorously. “Your accent has improved. Or at least changed.”

Barney grinned broadly and went into his old Cockney. “Eee, I married a ’ard woman, y’can take me word fer it!” He put away the Cockney. “The Bard said, in Hamlet, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman!’ Well, he didn’t know my Fay, and that’s the truth.” He dropped his light tone. “I’m glad you’re here, Mr. Breedon. You offered money to an absolute stranger, a young boy you knew you might never see again.”

“A loan the boy refused.”

Barney shook his head. “That makes no difference.” He returned to his chair and leaned back in it, considering Breedon across the wide desk. “I’ve never forgotten that. And whatever I can do for you, in Johannesburg or Kimberley, will be done. Just say the word.”

Breedon looked a bit embarrassed. “Well, to tell the truth, I do need a favor of sorts to ask—”

“Just name it! Do you need money?”

Breedon laughed. It was a laugh of such enjoyment, such pleasure, that Barney stared at him. Breedon shook his head.

“I suppose I should be more flattered than anything else at your offer, since I try very hard to maintain my privacy. While it is undoubtedly true I am not as rich as Barney Barnato, I’m afraid the wolf comes to my door, sniffs a bit, and then wanders off a trifle discouraged. No, Barney, I came to ask you for something more precious, possibly, than your money. I came to ask you for your time.”

Barney frowned, now thoroughly confused. “My time?”

“Yes. I came to ask you to run for the Cape Assembly.”

Barney’s frown turned to puzzlement.

“There are no Assembly representatives from Johannesburg, I’m sure you know that. We’re part of the Transvaal, not the Cape Colony.” He smiled faintly, but there was little humor in his smile. “I doubt that Oom Paul Kruger would be pleased to have us think otherwise; his Boer commandos would be at the voting booths and they wouldn’t be there to vote, at least not with ballots. Bullets, maybe.”

“I’m quite aware of that, of course,” Breedon said, his eyes sharp on Barney’s face. “But Kimberley is still a part of the Cape Colony, and I understand you still have a home there, as well as many friends, and a great many interests.”

Barney looked at the man thoughtfully. “Mr. Breedon,” he said at last, “your name is not as unknown to me as you may think. I do know something about you. When I offered you money a few moments ago, I thought possibly you might have fallen upon temporary hard times; it happens to the best. They tell me publishing is a risky business at best; it’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed out of it. But still, as I understand it, your principal interests are in Cape Town—”

“And in Bloemfontein and in Pretoria, and although it is not generally known—nor need it be—I also own a good share of the local newspaper here in Johannesburg. No, Mr. Barnato—Barney—I am a newspaper publisher and I have interests in all parts of South Africa, and major ones in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. I am also of Dutch parentage. And I feel that a strong voice in the Cape Assembly will be needed very shortly, a voice with reputation and influence, to counteract, if you will, the influence of certain parties who seem intent upon fostering trouble between the Boers and the English.”

Barney stared at the man, his face expressionless. “And what makes you think I disagree with—these certain parties?”

Breedon smiled gently. “You insult me, Barney. I am a newspaper publisher and it’s true I spend most of my time behind a desk, but I am also a newspaper reporter, and if I say so myself a rather good one. I did not come to see you without having done a decent amount of investigating. I am as sure you agree with my point of view as I am that I am sitting here. Otherwise, I assure you I would not be sitting here.”

Barney swung his chair to stare from the window. In the distance he could see the long low but rising yellow slag heaps that dotted the landscape of the Reef, and the peaceful rolling hills beyond, touched with light fleecy clouds. It was an idyllic scene and one he knew could change radically in a very short time. He knew exactly what Breedon was talking about; he heard the hotheads of the so-called Reform Committee spouting their talk of possible revolution or even outright war every day in the Rand Club, and had argued often enough with them. But politics was not his game, mining and finance were. And what could or would one voice matter in the Cape Assembly if these rash fools were to insist upon trouble?

On the other hand it undoubtedly would be an honor to run for the Assembly and to be elected; he was sure Fay would enjoy the time spent in a civilized town like Cape Town during the Assembly sessions as a welcome respite from the dirt and filth of the growing Johannesburg; besides, it would be near her hometown of Simonstown and would give her a chance to see old friends. And it would be good to have an excuse to get back to Kimberley again for the campaigning, and to meet old friends and see the old familiar sights. Oh, there would be advantages, there was no doubt of that, not the least being that he would be able to tell these hot-tempered idiots just how foolish they were.

But on the other hand, Fay was close to her time, and was in no condition to be traveling anywhere, not even to Kimberley and not even in the most comfortable means of travel; the roads and carriages of the day were not for women in labor. And it would be unfair for him to be away when the baby was born. Unfair? It would be unthinkable, especially after they had waited so many years for this baby. And, without being crass, he had just spent over two million pounds of his Barnato Investment Company’s money, and while a good part of it was his own money, at the same time the stockholders were entitled to his close attention to sums that great. And he also had a responsibility to his family and the unborn baby to see that the Barnato fortune was not treated cavalierly through what would, at the moment, merely represent a form of vanity on his part. Solly was a capable assistant, Barney knew that, but he strongly suspected that it was precisely people like Solly and Cecil Rhodes that Breedon had been referring to as wishing to foster trouble between the Boers and the English. And, to be truthful, the best place to be to keep an eye on Solly and the other members of the so-called Reform Committee was in Johannesburg and the Rand Club, not in Cape Town.

In some ways it was a hard decision, but basically it was an easy one. Barney swung back to his guest.

“Mr. Breedon,” he said earnestly, “I appreciate your coming to see me, and I’m flattered you wish me to run for a seat in the Assembly. But this isn’t the time, at least not for me. In two or three years, when the next election takes place, possibly. But not now.”

Breedon sighed and came to his feet. He was a pragmatist, a man who recognized the futility of an argument with a man of Barnato’s caliber once his mind had been made up.

“Then it is possible that I shall be back in two or three years, if it is not too late by then,” he said, and smiled. “Newspapermen are notoriously patient; after all, we have no choice. We must wait each day for something to happen to give us our headlines and our columns. Impatience doesn’t help.” He held out his hand; Barney came to his feet and gripped it strongly. “Newspapermen can also be helpful at times,” Breedon added quietly. “If there is ever anything I can do …”

Barney grinned, his old gamin grin. “As a matter of fact, there is,” he said. “That young chap who was in here before you is my nephew. I’d appreciate it if you could tell him, on your way out, to send in the next one…”

In a suburb of Glasgow, in a small laboratory behind the surgery of two brothers who were doctors, three men labored, the third being a self-taught chemist. The three had been intrigued for a long time with the problem of extracting the last grain of gold from the ore-bearing rock. Not only would the solution to the age-old problem make them rich and famous—and permit them, possibly, to mount a decent laboratory instead of the poor one in which they worked—but it would have a profound effect on the economy of many countries, and principally South Africa and the gold Reef of the Rand.

Up until that time the major method of extracting nonalluvial gold—gold that was not found in a free state, washed down some river from a mother lode above—was through the mercury process. Here mercury was used to form an amalgam with the precious metal once the rock containing it had been crushed; the mercury was then boiled off and condensed for reuse. But the amalgam process recovered at most 50 per cent of the precious gold, and since the Johannesburg Reef contained on an average approximately between one half and one ounce of gold per ton of rock, even a 50 per cent recovery rate—as Solly Loeb had pointed out—was barely profitable considering the huge expenses involved in equipment and labor. The addition of the chlorination process, as installed at the Robinson mine, had raised the recovery rate from 50 per cent to between 65 and 70 per cent, but the additional cost involved made the increased recovery little more profitable than the original amalgam process. The challenge of knowing that the largest deposit of gold-bearing rock in the world, practically an underground mountain of gold, would soon be merely an oddity, a curiosity, its riches forever locked away from mankind merely because of the economics of recovery, drove the three men to work hard to find a proper solution to the problem.

“If the rock could be crushed fine enough,” said one of the doctor brothers one day—his name was William Forrest—“then it seems logical that the gold could be combined with another element, a cheap-enough and recoverable-enough element to make the process worthwhile. In that combination we might be able to precipitate the gold in some fashion.”

“The fineness of the crushing should be no great problem,” said his brother, Robert Forrest. Robert, while weaker in chemistry than the others, was by far the most mechanically minded. “Some of the big presses down at the John Brown Shipyards along the Clyde can bend and form a four-inch-thick steel plate; they certainly ought to be able to crush rock. And if we want it any finer, we can use the type of ball mills they use for pigments, and some of them, like the phthalocyanine greens and blues, are pretty hard,” he added with conviction. “We can get the rock to as fine a powder as we wish. The only thing is, combining crushed rock with another element is basically what the mercury amalgam process does. And the recovery is barely half.”

“I don’t mean mercury,” William said, irritated at his brother’s intransigence. “I mean something more effective!”

“Like what?” Robert asked innocently.

The three of them laughed. They were having lunch at a small pub not far from their laboratory in the industrial section of Rutherglen. John Stewart MacArthur, the third of the group and the self-taught chemist, had learned his profession at a company that specialized in the treatment of refractory minerals from all over the world. With a sudden faraway look in his eyes, he bit into his meat pie, chewed, swallowed, and washed the entire bit down with a draft of his beer.

“Speaking of the phthalocyanine blues and greens,” he said, setting down his stein, “Farraday experimented with sodium cyanide in an exhibition at the Albert Hall almost twenty-five years ago, showing it had an extraordinary affinity for gold.”

“But it was never proven as being practical on an industrial scale,” Will said. “I know what you mean. There was a Julio Rae who even got a patent in America on treating either gold or silver ores with potassium or sodium cyanide, but nothing ever came of that, either.”

“Maybe they didn’t go far enough,” MacArthur said. He pushed aside his meat-pie dish and was wiping the table dry before applying his pencil to it. A horrified serving maid hurried up, sliding a piece of paper under his pencil before he could mar the polished surface of the wood; apparently the staff of the pub were accustomed to Mr. MacArthur and his habits, and were prepared for them.

“Really, Mr. MacArthur!”

MacArthur grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Kitty.” He bent over the paper, putting down symbols. “Au + NaCN—” He looked up. “Farraday used water, too, as I recall, to obtain sodium hydroxide as a by-product. To reduce the sodium.” Both Will and Bob Forrest were watching him carefully.

“You’d get a faster reaction if you were to bubble pure oxygen through the solution,” Will Forrest pointed out, wishing to contribute.

“Pure oxygen is expensive,” his brother pointed out, his Scottish heart automatically rejecting the suggestion. “We’re trying to save money, not spend it.”

“Use air then,” Will said. “That isn’t expensive. The oxygen in the air will do the trick, and the nitrogen, I’m sure, won’t do any harm.”

“We hope,” MacArthur said, and crossed out his first attempt, starting a second formula. “Au + NaCN + H₂O + O₂—”

Will Forrest reached over, putting his hand over the paper.

“We’re going about this the wrong way,” he said quietly. “Let’s consider what we want to end up with, and then backtrack to see how to get there. What we want is sodium hydroxide and the gold-cyanide solution—”

MacArthur shook his head stubbornly.

“It isn’t that simple or someone would have done it years ago.” He went back to his scribbling, crossing out, adding, a frown on his face. At last he looked up. “We’re going to have to have enough sodium not only for the sodium hydroxide but for a combination of gold and sodium cyanide. Then we can work on the gold-sodium cyanide and separate out the gold. A number of metals might do the trick, leaving the sodium cyanide.” He pushed over the paper. “I think this is probably where we should start.”

The formula read: “4Au + 8NaCN + O₂ + 2H2O.”

Will frowned. “You mean we start with sodium cyanide and we end with sodium cyanide?”

“That’s how these things sometimes work,” MacArthur said cheerfully.

Bob Forrest was interested in another problem. “Why four gold and eight sodium cyanide?”

“Because I’m the chemist and you’re only doctors,” MacArthur said with a grin, “and because chemistry is a funny thing, as you should know by now. You only get out what you put in, only in a different form.” He bent back to his paper, muttering to himself as he did computations in his head, and then completed his formula. “—= 4NaAu(CN)₂+ 4NaOH.”

Will Forrest studied the paper, frowning, and then looked up. “It looks simple enough, but will it work?”

MacArthur shrugged. “It’s easy enough to find out. All we have to do is try it.”

“Cyanides are dangerous to work with,” Bob Forrest objected, always the pessimist.

“The concentration doesn’t need to be very high,” MacArthur said, not at all bothered by the statement. “Farraday worked with a one per cent solution, I believe. We can start even weaker than that. Start with a tenth of one per cent and work our way up, if need be.”

“But would a solution that weak work?”

“We’ll only find out trying. Besides,” MacArthur said with a broad smile, “it seems to work in this pub for the beer. That certainly can’t be any stronger than one tenth of one per cent alcohol, and they don’t seem to have any trouble getting rid of it.” He watched his companions finish their meat pies and empty their steins. “Well, shall we go back to work and see if the great Michael Farraday knew what he was talking about twenty-five years ago? Not to mention the ubiquitous but less famous Julio Rae, whoever he was?”

Bob Forrest frowned as he came to his feet, looking down at MacArthur. “And if the formula works, what then?”

“Then we take our little gold-sodium cyanide and start combining it with every known metal—except gold, of course—working alphabetically, which is the scientific method, until something happens. With our luck,” he added with pretended mournfulness, “the one that finally works will probably turn out to be zinc!”

He stood up and started to lead the way from the pub, anxious to get to his test tubes and his formula.

“Mr. MacArthur! Gentlemen! Your bill!”

MacArthur turned back, smiling, reaching for his wallet.

“Kitty, Kitty, Kitty!” he said reproachfully, handing her a note. “Don’t you know that the first sign of pure genius in a scientist is his forgetfulness?”

Leah Primrose Barnato was born on March 16, 1892, and a prouder father than Barney Barnato would have been hard to find. Leah Primrose was a beautiful, healthy child who Barney was pleased to see was going to resemble his wife’s side of the family, rather than his own, and Barney could hardly wait to take his daughter around Johannesburg and show her off. It took all of Fay’s strong will and persuasion to hold him back for at least the first few months of the child’s life, but after that it was impossible. It was quite commonplace to see Barney Barnato come wheeling Leah’s pram to the Sunday races and point out to the punters, often interrupting their betting, just how lovely his daughter was; or find him pushing the pram into the Stock Exchange and—waving away any who dared bend over the child with a cigar in his mouth—hold up the chalking of prices while he expounded on her virtues. Or see him march proudly into the Rand Club, lift Leah from her pram and set her on the bar, and beam at the other patrons as he bought a round of drinks, heisting his glass in a toast to “the prettiest, cleverest, strongest, most intelligent baby in the world” and practically daring anyone in the place to disagree.

And it was on a day when he was doing exactly that in the Rand Club—Leah had begun to show signs of teething, which Barney seemed to think was something no other child on earth had ever done before, certainly not at her age—when Solly Loeb burst into the club and raced down the bar to Barney’s side. Barney frowned. In the first place, overt exercise on the part of his nephew Solly was quite unusual; in the second place, any sudden motions seemed to upset little Leah, especially at the moment. Solly’s face was red; he was gasping.

“Barney! Barney!” Solly suddenly seemed to realize he was causing a bit of a scene, that his obvious agitation was drawing attention that was precisely the last thing he wished. But his news was so momentous it was difficult to appear calm. Still, he forced himself into an approximation of composure, and dropped his voice. “Barney, let’s get out of here. I’ve got to talk to you. It’s important.”

Barney merely nodded. He finished his drink, carefully placed Leah Primrose in her pram, waved to the others along the bar, and walked out, pushing the pram before him. Solly sidled alongside him, bursting with his news. Once they were in the street and Barney had covered the open portion of the pram with a netting against the dust of Commissioner Street, Solly could hold out no longer.

“Barney, d’you remember those two fellows from Scotland? Forrest and MacArthur? Who said they had a process for the extraction of a hundred per cent of the gold from the rock?”

“I remember. They claimed they had proven their process in Australia and America. We gave them the use of our laboratories for them to prove it here.”

“Well, by God, they proved it! They actually proved it! You know, when they first came down here—”

“—you wanted to throw them out of the office.”

Solly waved this away as being unimportant. “I admit I didn’t believe them. Why would they have come to South Africa last? Well, I was wrong, I admit it.” Barney looked at him; for Solly to admit he was wrong was a major event. “I just came from the laboratory, Barney! It works! The process really works!”

“I was sure it would.”

Solly stopped short, eyeing his uncle disbelievingly. “Oh, come on! How could you be sure it would work?”

“I wasn’t sure their particular process would work,” Barney said calmly, “but I was sure that one or another, theirs or someone else’s, would work. It had to.” He looked out toward the low hills that surrounded the city, and the growing mountains of yellowish slag that covered a good part of the landscape. “There’s just too much gold out there in the Reef for one process or another not to work.”

Solly said, still almost in a state of shock at the unexpected fortune that had befallen them, “They won’t give us an exclusive on the process, but they’ll set up our plant first and won’t begin any other negotiations until we’re in full production. It’ll be on a royalty basis, but it’s dirt-cheap at the price. We’ll have the edge on every other mining company in the Rand! Our stocks will go right through the roof!”

“I was talking to them when they first came,” Barney said, recalling the incident, “and more out of curiosity than anything else. They said they spent most of their time playing with different metals until they found the best one to bring out the gold from their chemical solution. Which one was it that did the trick?”

“Zinc,” Solly said, and chortled to think of their good luck. Solly Loeb had no idea of what zinc was, other than being a metal that people sometimes used in sheet form for rooftops, but if it wasn’t gold at least it made gold possible, and to Solly Loeb, that was all that mattered.

But Solly’s tone was different when he spoke to Andries Pirow over a drink at the Rand Club. Speaking with Andries was perfectly proper now; Andries was a respected and established rancher, as well as being a member of the Rand Club—one of its very few Boer members, and one whose membership had been demanded and won by Barney Barnato. Andries Pirow was also a member of the Volksraad, the Transvaal Parliament, easily elected from the Johannesburg District by his many friends he had made in his years of hauling into the area. It seemed hard, at times, for Andries to realize the profound change in his life that had come about because of his chance meeting with Barney that day in the Paris Hotel in Kimberley; it was something he often thought about and it was what he was thinking about as Solly went on with his speech. Andries was well aware that to Solly it was still the same as if he were speaking to himself to address Andries.

“Luckiest man in the world, Barney Barnato!” Solly said bitterly, almost as if a good portion of his own fortunes were not intimately bound up with Barney’s. He lifted his drink and sipped gloomily before putting his glass down. “Buys when nobody else is buying, pays prices nobody else would dream of paying, buys things nobody in his right mind would touch with a barge pole, does things that would put any other man in the world in the poorhouse; and then has the incredible, unbelievable, inconceivable fortune to get the first go at the cyanide process for the Rand! If he fell into a cesspool, he’d come out dripping with diamonds!”

“Ummm,” said Andries.

“When they first came into the office, Barney was about to throw them out, but luckily—another example of his incredible luck—I talked him out of it. ‘Give them a chance,’ I told him. ‘After all, they say they’ve installed the process in Australia and America and that it works there. Why shouldn’t it work here? And what’s the point of our having laboratories if we don’t use them?’”

“Ummm.”

“But it’s not as if I envy Barney, or that I’m jealous of him, or anything like that, I want you to understand,” Solly said loftily. “Don’t think that for a moment. After all, we’re relations, and I owe everything I’ve got to Barney. Just as he owes a lot of what he’s got to me. And besides, I own a fair bit of Barnato Investment Company stock myself.”

“Ummm.”

“But still, you can’t deny that he’s luckier than a man with the only beer license for the entire Karroo. Lucky, that’s the only word for Barney Barnato,” Solly said glumly, repeating himself.

“Ummm,” said Andries.