Campbell's Kingdom (37 page)

‘It seems I was right in insisting on police protection up here.' Trevedian smiled and glanced at his watch again. ‘Better get your things clear of the ranch buildings now, Wetheral,' he said. ‘I'm going to finish flooding.' He turned away, the policeman following him.

‘Just a minute,' I called. ‘What time did you come up here?' They had paused and I was addressing the policeman.

‘At eight o'clock this morning,' he answered.

‘And you weren't up here when the order to flood was given?'

‘No.'

‘Why not?'

‘Mr Trevedian didn't expect any trouble until this morning.'

‘You mean he was prepared to deal with it himself during the hours of darkness.'

The other shrugged his shoulders. ‘My orders were to be up here at eight this morning.'

‘Are you here as an official of the Provincial Police or have the company hired you as a watch-dog?'

‘Both,' he said rather tersely.

‘I see,' I said. ‘In other words you're employed by the company and take your orders from Trevedian. That's all I wanted to know.' I turned my horse. ‘We're wasting our time here,' I said to Garry. ‘This will have to be fought out in the courts.'

He nodded slowly and we rode back to the ranch-house in silence. His face looked drawn and haggard. The fire of anger had gone out of him and he slumped in his saddle like a bag of bones and flesh. He didn't say anything all the way back, but I was very conscious of the fact that he'd lost his rig, everything he had made in over fifteen years. It deepened the mood of black despair that had gripped me since I woke up and found the Kingdom had become a lake over-night. It was difficult to remember the elation that had filled us in the early hours when the drenching rain had obliterated the broken rig from our sight.

When we reached the ranch-house we were greeted with the news that the water was rising again. They had thrust a stake in at the edge of the lake and even as we watched the water ran past it and in a moment it was several feet out from the lake's edge. All our energies were concentrated then on salvaging what we could. We loaded Boy's vehicles with all our kit and movable equipment and drove them up to the edge of the timber. Jean and I harnessed the horses to an old wagon we found and in this way I managed to get some of my grandfather's belongings out. And then as the rain slackened and a misty sun shone through we made camp in the shelter of the trees and drank hot tea and watched the water creep slowly up to the ends of the barns and then trickle in clutching fingers round the back of the ranch-house. By midday the place my grandfather had built with his own hands was a quarter of a mile out in the lake and the water was up to the windows. For five miles there was nothing but water flecked with white as the wind whipped across it.

It was the end of the Kingdom.

I DON'T KNOW
whether it was the reaction after the strain of the last two months or the physical effect of suddenly having nothing to work for any more, but that night my feet and hands were swollen and painful and my heart was thudding against my ribs. I felt exhausted and drained of all energy. They made me a bed in the back of Boy's instrument truck and though I was reasonably comfortable I lay awake half the night, feeling certain that now my time was up and the end had at last come. I slipped off into a sort of coma and when I woke sometimes Jean was there, holding my hand, sometimes I was alone. The moon was bright and by craning my head I could just see out of the back of the truck and get a glimpse of the lake that now filled the Kingdom. The ranch-house had disappeared completely, swallowed by the waters. There was no sign left that my grandfather had ever been in the country.

I felt better in the morning, but very tired. I slept intermittently and once Boy came and sat beside me and told me he had been over to the dam and had phoned Trevedian from the control room. We were to have the trucks at the hoist by midday tomorrow. I lay back realising that this was our final exodus, that we should not be coming back. The rest of the business would be conducted in the stuffy, soul-destroying atmosphere of a court room. I didn't feel that I wanted to live. There would be weeks, maybe months of litigation. I couldn't face that. Jean seemed to understand my mood for she kept assuring me that it would be all right, that the lawyers would look after it all and that we'd get the compensation required to repay everyone. But I didn't really believe her. And then, late in the evening, Johnnie rode in with a couple of American newspaper boys, the same who had been up with him the previous fall when they had found the body of my grandfather.

I remember they came to see me that night. They were a surprisingly quiet, slow-spoken pair and somehow their interest in the whole business as a story put new heart into me. They had listened to Garry's story of the night we'd struck the anticline. They'd got the pictures so vividly in their minds that I could see it all again as they talked. ‘But who'll believe us?' I said. ‘Even Steve Strachan, who was up here with us, isn't entirely convinced.'

The taller of them laughed. ‘He's not used to this sort of thing,' he said. ‘We are. We've put the four of you through a detailed cross-examination. And it's okay. The detail is too good to have been fabricated. Soon as we get down I'll send off my story and I'm going to ask my paper to put up the dough for us to get divers down before the weather breaks. If we can drag that pipe up, that'll prove it. In the meantime, I take it you've no objection to Ed taking a few pictures of you.' His big, warm-hearted laugh boomed out. ‘Boy, you certainly provide the final touch to make this one of the most human dramas I've ever been handed. Now if you'd been running around full of health and vigour . . .' He shook his head and grinned. ‘But here you are, King Campbell's grandson, lying sick with no roof over your head because these bastards . . .' There was a flash as Ed took the first picture. ‘Well, don't worry. Fergus will have half the North American continent gunning for him by the time I've finished writing this up. And by a stroke of luck we've got pictures of the Campbell homestead and the whole Kingdom before they flooded it.'

Next morning we started out towards the dam. The going was very rough for the water forced us up into the rock-strewn country at the foot of the mountains. In places boulders had to be hefted aside and at one point the timber came right down to the water's edge and it took us an hour to cut a way through for the trucks. I started off in the instrument truck, but pretty soon I got out and walked. It was less tiring than being jolted and flung from side to side.

It was well after midday by the time we turned the base of the buttress and ground to a halt at the barbed wire. There was nobody on the dam or up at the concrete housing of the hoist. The whole place seemed strangely deserted. We hung about for a time, blowing on the horns and shouting to attract attention. But nobody came and in the end we found a join in the wire, rolled it back and drove the vehicles through. I had taken the precaution of hiding all the rifles under a pile of bedding. The Luger I had slipped into my pocket. The drillers, exhausted and despondent, were in an ugly mood. It only wanted a crack or two from some of the men working on the power house at the bottom of the hoist and there would be trouble. I was taking no chances of it coming to shooting.

We took the vehicles and the cart straight up to the cable terminal. There wasn't a soul there. Boy went down to the dam and disappeared down concrete steps into the bowels of it. We stood and stared down at the dam, a little bewildered and I think even then with an odd sense of waiting for something. The silence was uncanny. The dam was a flat-topped battlement of concrete flung across the cleft that divided the peaks of Solomon's Judgment. It was smooth and curved with clean, fresh lines as yet unmarked by weather. On the Thunder Valley side it sloped down like a great wall into the gloom of the cleft. From where we stood we couldn't see the bottom. It gave me the feeling that it went on dropping down indefinitely till it reached the slide two thousand feet below. On the other side the lake of the Kingdom swept to within a yard or so of the top. The wall of concrete seemed to be leaning into the lake as though straining to hold the weight of the water in check. It was hot in the sunshine as we waited and the air was still, the water lying flat and sultry like a sheet of metal. The noise of water running was the only sound that broke the utter stillness.

Boy came up out of the smooth top of the dam and climbed towards us, a puzzled frown on his sun-tanned face. ‘Not a soul there,' he said. ‘And all the sluices are fully open.'

‘Isn't there a phone down in the control room?' Jean asked.

Boy nodded. ‘I tried it, but I couldn't get any answer. It seemed dead.'

We stood there for a moment, talking softly, wondering what to do. At length Garry said, ‘Well anyway, the cage is here. We'd better start loading the first truck.'

As Don moved towards the instrument truck there was a sudden splintering sound and then the noise of falling stone. It was followed by a faint shout half-drowned in a roar of water. Then a man came clambering up the sides of the cleft. He was one of the engineers and he was followed by the guards and another engineer. They saw us and came running towards us. Their faces looked white and scared.

‘What's happened?' Garry called out.

‘The dam,' shouted one of the engineers. ‘There's a crack . . . It's leaking . . . The whole thing will go any minute.' He was out of breath and his voice was pitched high with fright.

We stared at him, hardly able to comprehend what he was saying—convinced only by the fear on his face.

‘Can't you relieve the pressure?' Boy asked.

‘The sluice gates are wide open already.'

‘Have you told them down below?' Steve Strachan asked him.

‘No. The phone was cut in that storm the night before last. It's terrible. I don't know what to do. There are nearly a hundred men working down on the slide where they're going to build the power house. What can I do?' He stood there, wringing his hands hopelessly.

‘What about the phone in the cable house?' I asked.

‘Yes, yes, of course. But I don't think there'll be anyone in the lower housing, not until six this evening.'

Everybody was talking at once now and I watched the engineer as he ran stumbling to the cable terminal. If there was nobody at the bottom to get his warning . . . I looked at the lake. It was six miles or more across and in the centre it would be as deep as the dam was high—over two hundred feet. I thought of the men working down there on the slide, directly in the path of that great sheet of water if the dam collapsed. It would come thundering through the cleft and then fall, millions of tons of it falling two thousand feet; all the water that had fallen on the mountains in twelve hours tumbling over in one great solid sheet. Jean's hand gripped my arm. ‘What can we do?' Her voice trembled and I saw by her face that she, too, was picturing that effect of a breach. But the dam looked solid enough. The great sweep of it swung smoothly and uninterruptedly across the cleft. It looked as though it could hold an ocean.

The others were already scrambling down to have a look at the damage. I followed. Johnnie came slithering down with me. And from the top of the dam itself we looked down the smooth face of it to a great jet of water fifty feet long and two or three feet across. It was coming from a jagged rent about halfway down the dam face and all around the hole were great splintering cracks through which the water seeped. Down below at the very foot of the dam the sluice gates added their rush of water.

‘It's that cement they used on the original dam.' Johnnie had to shout in my ear to make himself heard above the din of the water. ‘It was old stuff and it's cracking up. The goldarned fools!'

As we turned away from the appalling sight the engineer who had gone to the hoist to try and telephone came slithering down to us. ‘There's nobody there,' he shouted.

‘Can't you go down and warn them?' Johnnie asked.

‘There's nobody down there, I tell you,' he almost screamed. ‘Nobody hears the telephone. There's nobody to work the engine.'

I was looking up towards the hoist, remembering the night Jeff and I had examined the cradle together to see if there was a safety device to get the cage down if the engine packed up. ‘How long before this dam goes?' I asked the engineer.

‘I don't know. It may go any minute. It may last till we have drained the lake.'

‘It won't do that. Look.' Johnnie was peering over the edge, pointing to the great thundering jet of brownish water. It had increased in size appreciably in the last few minutes.

The American newspaper correspondent came along the top of the dam towards us. He had been out in the centre with his photographer who was taking pictures regardless of the danger. ‘Why don't these guys do something—about the boys down below I mean?'

‘What can we do?' the engineer demanded petulantly, ‘We've no phone, no means of communicating.'

I called to Boy and together we climbed the side of the cleft to the hoist. Jean caught up with us just as I was climbing into the cage. ‘What are you going to do?' I was already looking up at the cradle, seeing what I needed to knock the pins out that secured the driving cable to it. Her hand gripped my arm. ‘No. For God's sake, darling. You can't. They'll be all right. They'll have seen that flow of water coming down—'

‘If they have then I'll stop the cage on the lip of the fault.' I gently disengaged her fingers. ‘Don't worry,' I said. ‘I'll be all right.' She stared at me, her face suddenly white. I think she knew as well as I did that the chances of the men working down there having noticed an increase in the flow of water from the dam were remote. ‘Why you?' she whispered. ‘Why not one of the men who belong to the dam? It's their responsibility.'