Campbell's Kingdom (16 page)

‘Trevedian wasn't there,' he said and called to the Chinaman to bring more beer. ‘I went along and saw Jean instead.' His eyes crinkled as he looked across at me. ‘Leastaways you got yourself one friend in Come Lucky. She's a real dandy, that girl. If I were a few years younger . . .' He smiled gently to himself and drank his beer.

‘If you were a few years younger, you'd still be a bachelor,' Jeff said.

‘Sure, I know.' He nodded slowly. ‘A girl's all very well, but when it comes to living with her . . .' He stopped suddenly, his gaze fixed over my shoulder.

I turned in my chair. Peter Trevedian was standing in the doorway, looking round the bar. He went over to Creasy and asked him a question. Creasy shook his head. ‘No. Ain't seen him.' Trevedian straightened up, facing the room. ‘Just a minute, boys.' His solid, throaty voice silenced the murmur of conversation. ‘Anybody here seen my brother today?'

‘Wasn't he loading a truck outside the bunkhouse when we left this morning?' a voice asked.

‘Sure he was . . . I seen him myself.' There was a chorus of assent all round the room.

‘I know that,' Trevedian answered. ‘We left him at the bunkhouse when we went up to the hoist. I want to know what's happened to him since then.'

‘Maybe he went out for a walk and lost hisself.' It was the driver of one of the bulldozers.

‘Max doesn't lose himself,' Trevedian said harshly.

‘Maybe he lose his memory, eh?'

There was a laugh and somebody added, ‘Per'aps he forgot where he is going.'

Trevedian's eyes narrowed. ‘Another crack like that and I'll send the man who makes it back where he came from. Just confine yourselves to statements of fact. Has anybody seen Max since this morning?'

‘Yeah. I seen him.' It was one of the old men, the one they called Ed Schieffer. ‘I seen him right after you left. Saddled his horse an' rode off. I seen him from the window of me shack.'

‘Where was he headed for?'

‘He followed you. Up Thunder Creek.'

Trevedian growled a curse and turned towards the door. It was then that Johnnie slid to his feet. I grabbed hold of him by the arm. But he threw me off. ‘Just a minute, Trevedian.'

Something in the quietness of his voice silenced the murmur of talk that had started in the bar. Trevedian turned, his hand on the door. ‘Why, if it isn't Johnnie Carstairs.' He crossed the room, his hand outstretched. ‘What brings you up here this early in the year?' His tone was affable, but his head was sunk into his shoulders and his eyes were watchful under the shaggy brows.

Johnnie was in the middle of the room now. He ignored the other's hand. He was rocking gently on his high-heeled boots, anger building up inside him like steam in a boiler. ‘I came on account of what I heard from Bladen.'

‘Well?' Trevedian had stopped. His hand had fallen to his side. ‘What did you hear from Bladen?'

‘Did you have to play a dirty trick like that on an old man who never did you—'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You know damn well what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Stuart Campbell. You killed him.' Johnnie's voice vibrated through the silence of the room. ‘Why the hell did you have to do it like that, striking at him through his—'

‘Oh, stop talking nonsense. I didn't touch the old man and you know it.' Trevedian's eyes glanced round the room, seeing it silent and listening. ‘We'd better go down to my office. We can talk there.' He turned towards the door.

‘There's nothing private in what I got to say.' Johnnie had not moved, but his hands had shifted to the leather belt round his waist. ‘What were you afraid of—that he'd talk to some newspaper feller, that he'd tell them what he knew about the dam?'

‘What do you mean?' The other had swung round.

‘Campbell wasn't a fool. Why do you think he let them go on with the construction of the dam at the start of the war without making any demand for compensation?'

‘He'd have put in a claim only Pearl Harbor brought the Yanks into the—'

‘It wasn't Pearl Harbor. It was because he knew the dam wouldn't stand the weight of the water.'

‘I don't know what the hell you're talking—'

‘Sure you do. I'm talking about the
Marie Bell
and her cargo of cement. I took a Vancouver shipowner up to the Kingdom in 1940 and he told us the whole thing.'

‘The construction of the dam is nothing to do with me—never has been. I just pack the materials in.' Trevedian's voice had risen slightly. He moved a step nearer. It was like seeing a bull about to charge a matador.

Johnnie laughed softly. It reacted on Trevedian like a slap in the face. His head came down and his fists clenched. A tingle of expectation ran through the room. ‘Think I don't know what packing rates are?' Johnnie said. ‘You didn't make enough out of transporting the stuff to start a transport and construction company in Alaska.'

‘The Government was responsible for building the dam,' Trevedian snapped. ‘They had inspectors.'

‘Sure they had inspectors. But how were they to know you were packing in cement that had lain for a year on the rocks of the Queen Charlotte Islands.'

‘That's a lie.' Trevedian's face was livid. ‘All the cement I delivered was from an American company down in Seattle.'

‘Sure. They were shipping cement up to Alaska for military installations. One of their ships—'

Trevedian suddenly straightened up. He had got control of himself and his big laugh boomed through the room. ‘So I'm supposed to have killed Campbell because he knew I'd supplied dud cement for the dam.' He slapped his thigh with amusement. ‘That's damn funny. In the first place I didn't kill Campbell, and every God-damned person in this room knows it. In the second place, that dud cement you talk about seems to be standing up to it pretty well since the dam's still there and there isn't a crack in the whole structure. You want to get your facts right before you come storming up here making a lot of wild accusations.' And still laughing he turned on his heel and went out into the night, leaving Johnnie standing there in the middle of the floor.

Johnnie didn't move. He stood there, staring at the closed door and for a moment I thought he was going to follow Trevedian. But instead he came back to our table and knocked back the rest of his beer. ‘What's all this about the dam?' Jeff asked.

‘To hell with the dam.' Johnnie's eyes were angry. ‘But if that bastard—' He suddenly laughed. ‘Well, maybe Stuart was right. If he was willing to let things take their course, I guess I should be, too.' He put down his glass. ‘I'm going down to have a talk with Jean.' He turned then and went out of the room. And as the door closed behind him a buzz of conversation filled the smoke-laden atmosphere.

‘What did he mean—about the dam?' I asked Jeff.

‘I don't know. Never heard him mention it before.'

We discussed it for a while and then Jeff said, ‘You know, I'd like to see this dam there's all the fuss about. Have you seen it?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘I saw it the other day from Thunder Creek. What I want to do is get up there. I want to see the Kingdom.'

‘Thunder Creek's where they're building the road, isn't it?'

‘That's right.'

He suddenly laughed. ‘Well, what are we waiting for? It's a fine night and there's a moon. Let's go right on up there.'

I stared at him. ‘Now?'

‘Sure. Why not?'

But some instinct of caution made me hesitate. ‘It would be better to go up by daylight,' I said. ‘Could we go up tomorrow? Then you'd get a good view of the dam and I might be able to persuade—'

‘Tomorrow's no good,' he said. ‘We're leaving tomorrow.' He got to his feet. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘We'll go up there now.'

‘What about Johnnie?'

‘Johnnie?' He laughed. ‘Johnnie wouldn't come anyway. He just hates automobiles. We'll leave a message for him. How far do we have to go up Thunder Creek?'

‘I think it's about ten or eleven miles,' I said.

‘And the road has only just been made. Hell! We can be there and back in an hour and a half. Come on. You don't need a coat. We got some in the station wagon and it's got a heater, too.'

THE ROAD UP
Thunder Creek was like the bed of a stream. Water poured across it. The groundgrips of the big car were either slithering and spinning in a morass of yellowish mud or bumping over stones and small boulders washed down from above. Some of the log bridges were unable to dispose of the volume of water coming down the gullies they spanned. It banked up above them and poured across, a foot deep in places, so that they looked like small weirs. But Jeff never once suggested turning back. A car to him was an expendible item, a thing to fight nature with and he sang softly to himself as he wrestled with the wheel.

Above us, through the trees, the moon sailed fast among ragged wisps of cloud, a full circle of luminous yellow that lit the winding trail in a macabre light, half drowning the brilliance of the headlights. Thunder Creek, below us to the left, was a dark canyon of shadow out of which came the steady, relentless roar of water. And as we climbed, the black shadow of the fault capped by the snow-white peaks shouldered its way up the sky till it blotted out the moon and seemed to tower right over us.

It was here, in the dark shadows, that we suddenly emerged from the timber into a clearing where roofless log huts sprawled amongst the sapling growth. We had reached the camp built in 1939 when work on the dam had begun. The trail, blazed by the piles of slash on either side, ran straight across it and into the timber again. Gradually the trees thinned out. The surface of the road under its frozen powdering of snow became hard and bumpy. Then the timber finally fell back behind us and the headlights blazed on the most colossal rock fall I have ever seen. Great blocks of stone the size of houses were piled one on top of the other, balanced precariously and hung like the playthings of the Cornish giants against the moon-tipped edges of the racing cloud wisps. And above the slide—high, high above it—towered the black shadow of the cliff face, a gleam of white at the top where the moon caught the snowcaps, a gleam of white that wavered and moved as mare's tails of wind-driven snow streamed from the crests.

The headlights swung across the fantastic, gargantuan jumble of the slide as the track turned away into the wind that funnelled up the dark cleft of the valley. The track here had been hammered out of the edge of the slide itself and the wheels bounced and jolted over the uneven surface of stones. We dropped steeply several hundred feet and fetched up at a square, concrete building that looked like an enormous pill-box. On the side facing us was a timbered staging on which rested a heavy wooden cage suspended by wires to a great cable the thickness of a man's arm. Jeff stopped the car and switched his spotlight on to the cable, following it up the slope of the slide. It gleamed dully in the light like the thick thread of a spider, running in a long loop away up the slide until it faded into nothing, reaching beyond the range of the spotlight. Below it two subsidiary cables followed the pattern of the loop.

‘Well, that's it, I guess,' Jeff said. ‘Quite a place, isn't it?'

I didn't say anything. I was staring along the threadlike line of the cable, following it in my imagination up the dark face of the cliff, up to the narrow V between the peaks of Solomon's Judgment. That slender thread was the link bridging the dark gap that separated me from the Kingdom. If I could travel that cable . . . A queer mood of excitement was taking hold of me. I pushed open the door. ‘Let's have a look in the engine house,' I said.

‘Sure.'

The door flung to behind me, slammed by the wind. Inside the car we had had the heater going full blast and had been protected from the wind. Outside I found I could hardly stand. The wind tore up the valley. It was not a cold wind, but it had no power to dispel the frozen bite of the air trapped in the circle of the valley head. It was a griping cold that thrust through one's clothing and ate into one's guts.

Jeff flung me a duffel coat from the back of the car and then we pushed down through the wind to the engine housing. Though McClellan had only left the place a few hours ago snow was piled up against the pinewood door and we had to scoop it away before we could open it. Inside we were out of the wind, but the cold was bitter. A powdery drift of snow carpeted the floor and the draught of air that whistled in through the horizontal slit window that faced the slide could not dispel the dank smell of the concrete and the less unpleasant smell of oil and combustion fumes.

The interior of the engine housing was about the size of a large room. One wall was taken up entirely by a huge iron wheel round which the driving cable of the hoist ran. This was connected by a shaft to a big diesel engine that stood against the other wall, covered by a tarpaulin lashed down with rope through the eyeholes. Shovel marks showed on the floor where the party which had come up that morning had cleared out the winter's accumulation of snow. A control panel was fixed to the concrete below the slit and there was an ex-service field telephone on a wooden bracket. Back of the main engine house was a store room and in it I saw the drums of fuel oil that had been brought up from Come Lucky.

I stood there for a moment, absorbing it all, while Jeff peered under the tarpaulin at the engine. I turned slowly, drawn by an irresistible impulse. I went over to the slit and, leaning my arms on the sill, peered up to the snow-lipped top of the cliff face. The moon was just lifting above the left-hand peak of the mountain. I watched the shreds of cloud tearing across the face of it, saw the shadows of the mountain receding, watched till all the whole slide was bathed in the white light of it. The thick thread of the cable was plainly visible now, a shallow loop running from the engine housing in which I stood up to a great concrete pillar that stood on a huge slab of rock that marked the highest point of the slide. From there the cable rose steeply, climbing the black face of the cliff and disappearing into the shadows. My eyes followed the invisible line of it, lifting to the top of the cliff and there, etched against the bright luminosity of the sky, was another pillar, no bigger than a needle, standing like an ancient cromlech on the lip of the cliff.