2. THE ALLEY OF TEARS
CHAPTER 1
“And are you planning to marry her if you get her in your hands?” The older man with the lean, tanned face looks at his younger companion with a sparkle in his sharp, black eyes as he asks him the question. They are riding side by side on horseback down a slope, between bushveld trees.
The younger man, with an unkempt, bushy, black beard on his face, grins.
“Don’t know,” he says with a shrug. “If she’s as beautiful as the old fellow says, you might think about it, and if she’s going to inherit so much money. But what I think it’s all just crazy stories that the old geezer is proclaiming. If I have to say, I would say he’s getting childish!”
“How can you say that? He himself showed you the map and the piece of gold ore too. And you say the map is very detailed... Look here, Swarts...”
The older man suddenly pulls his horse in, and his small, black eyes remain maliciously on the face of the bearded, younger fellow for a moment. “You mustn’t start proclaiming other stories now. You didn’t say before that you think he’s getting childish...”
“Yes, well, but I’m just joking now,” Swarts explains hastily. “I do believe that it’s a real map that one, that the old man showed me. He must have quite a bit of knowledge of things because he’s been involved in gold seeking for more than fifteen years, since before 1870, in a loose and fast manner. But as for his wonderful granddaughter who supposedly disappeared so completely... I don’t know...” He shrugs his shoulders and grins again.
They ride on, neither of them speaks for a while. They keep to the thickets along the way, not in the open part higher up against the mountainside. In places, the horses struggle to make their way through the thick bushes, and then the two riders are forced to ride one behind the other. When they ride next to each other again a while later, the older man, a lean, bony fellow who sits strong and upright on his horse, with his heavy revolvers on a bandolier around his hips, says:
“And how does the old man say his granddaughter looks now, finally? He’s supposedly never even seen her?”
“Well, he showed me a picture of her mother, and he says she should look like that. He says she will be light-skinned and have blue eyes. He says his daughter that is the girl’s mother was supposedly the most beautiful maiden in the Eastern Transvaal. But he’s heard that she’s already dead. Now the old man is desperately searching for his granddaughter, because he supposedly has bitter remorse because he chased his own daughter away from home back then.”
The older man does not respond to this. His thoughts, grim and sardonic, wander far away.
He wonders if the old man they are talking about and to whom they are on their way, knows that he actually has two granddaughters. Would he ever know that his wonderful daughter she was definitely the “most beautiful maiden in the Eastern Transvaal” ran away from her first husband and married another fellow? Would he ever know that she’s already dead?
Would he ever dream what has become of the two children, the one with the first husband and the other with the second husband? Would he ever dream that his daughter’s first husband is currently riding here on horseback, on his way to him, with the aim of getting that mysterious map in his hands?
The old man has offered great riches to anyone who can trace his missing granddaughter. Sometimes he has added that he will give the riches and his granddaughter to such a man...
There is an almost sardonic chuckle on the tanned face of the rider when he thinks about this. The old man has said to people more than once that if he should ever run i
