In the city he found work on the mines and a room in one of the townships, and for a year he had been travelling from the one to the other in the early morning, with a multitude of others on the crowded trains, to work, and back in the evening, with the same multitude on the same trains, to sleep. He travelled safe for a year because he heeded the advice of others, and in that same year he worked hard and earned well and wore through the new shoes he had bought on the road, and had them mended, then wore through them again and then through them again and bought a new pair.

In some ways the year was a short one, and in others it was long, especially when he remembered Maxulu sitting on the side of the road and he got him a man who could make words to do him a letter back home. And now at last the year was almost over. In a week, only one more week of early steaming mornings and work under the ground, he would be going back with the money he had saved. Maxulu would be getting back her man very much the same as he had left, with his laugh still big, and his hands that were generous in the gestures of love and even in shoes, still as high as hope.

But Gumboot was a man and that has a second meaning. It has to do with death and the frailty of even those earthen cups that hold passionate draughts of laughter, that can be broken and all the life of a man spilt in the dust. Gumboot was this man also, in this meaning, because on that Friday night train going back to the township, a week before going home, Butcher was behind him and Butcher knew with unfailing accuracy the position of the heart.

Gumboot had made three mistakes. Firstly, he smiled. It was because of the long queue at the station entrance, you see, because it was only a week to going home and ahead of him was a weekend of no work and a man coming round to his room to write Maxulu the letter that he was coming back—it was because of the people, his people (there were so many of his people!): the smell of these other men, their impatience to be home, some sad, most happy; it was because of all this that he smiled and Tsotsi noticed him because that smile was as white as light.

His second mistake was the tie. Flaming red it was, with bolts of silver lightning playing on his chest, like those sunset storms he had seen as a boy when he had stopped on the long trek home with the cattle after a day in the mountain pastures, stopping under the torn and brooding sky to shout his exultation to the world and hear it echoing down the long valleys and then to run with fear when the sky answered and lightning struck deep in the mountains. He had bought the tie at lunchtime from the Indian hawker who trundled his cart of scarves and beads and bangles and bright things to the mine gate every Friday, bought simply because he had never had one and it would surely impress Maxulu. But it was a bright tie and made it easy for Tsotsi to follow him at a distance as the queue shuffled on its thousand legs, like a millipede, to the ticket office.