Campbell's Kingdom (23 page)

I saw his mouth open, but I didn't give him the chance to speak. I turned to the door. ‘Meet us at the entrance to Thunder Valley in half an hour,' I said. ‘I'll need two saddle horses. I've an oil man with me. You needn't worry about your brother. He's gone up to the dam.' I paused, my hand on the door. ‘If you don't do this for me, Max, may the dead ghost of Stuart Campbell haunt you to your dying day.'

I left him then. Outside the sunlight seemed to breathe an air of spring. I paused when I reached the Golden Calf and looked back to the old house. Max was making his way slowly towards the stables. I knew then that we'd get up to the Kingdom. I turned and went into the hotel, feeling a sense of pity, almost of affection for that great, friendless hulk of a man.

Quarter of an hour later Winnick parked his car in a clearing at the entrance to the valley of Thunder Creek. It was screened from the road and we waited there for Max. Half an hour passed and I began to fear that I had failed. But then the clip-clop of hooves sounded on the packed, rutted surface of the road and a moment later he came into sight leading three horses, two saddle and one pack. He dismounted and helped us into the saddle, adjusting our stirrup leathers, tightening the cinches. ‘You ride good?' he asked Winnick.

‘I'll be okay.'

Max turned to me then, his eyes keen and intelligent. ‘But you do not ride, huh?'

‘Not for a long time,' I said. ‘And not on a Western saddle.' It was a big, curved saddle shaped like a bucket seat with a roping horn in front. It was elaborately decorated and there were thongs of leather to tie things on to it.

He stared at me critically. In all else he might be a child, but he was a man when it came to horses. He was in his own element now and his stature increased immeasurably. He was the leader and he behaved like a leader. ‘It is different from the English saddle, huh? Now you ride with long stirrups and a long rein. Relax yourself and get down in the saddle. We have some bad places to cross. Let the pony have her head.' He turned and swung himself on to his big black in a single, easy movement.

We moved off then, Max leading the pack-horse, myself following and Winnick bringing up the rear. We went down through thick brush and black pools dammed by beavers to the rushing noise of Thunder Creek. We crossed the swirling ice-cold waters, the horses swimming, their heads high, their feet stumbling on the bottom. Then we were in timber again and climbing steadily.

Now and then we paused to rest the horses. At the stops nobody talked, but I saw Winnick watching me, speculating whether I'd make it or not. When I had returned to the Golden Calf with the news that I'd got horses and a guide, he'd tried to dissuade me. I think his scientific mind was convinced that a man who only a few days ago had been ordered into hospital by a doctor could not possibly stand up to a gruelling trek in the mountains. I think it was this as much as anything else that made me determined to reach the Kingdom. It was as though I'd been given a challenge. My heart hammered as it pumped thin blood through my system to give me oxygen, my ankles were swollen and the tips of my fingers ached. But as my muscles became exhausted my body sank lower and more relaxed into the saddle until the movement of the horse became easy and natural, as though it were a part of me and I a part of it.

Shortly after noon we came out above the timber line. The black gash of Thunder Creek cleaved the mountains below us and all round white peaks glimmered in the azure sky. Little rock plants, saxifrages mostly, thrust up among the stones and there was a warm, invigorating smell about the mountainside. Ahead the peaks of Solomon's Judgment stood guard over the gateway to the Kingdom and gradually, as we moved along the mountainside, climbing steadily, the position of these peaks changed until one was almost screened by the other and ahead of us rose the rock-strewn slopes of the Saddle that swept up to the northern peak.

The sun was low in the sky as we crossed the Saddle and saw the bowl of the Kingdom at our feet. There was little snow now. It was green; a lovely, fresh emerald green, and through it water ran in silver threads. I could see Campbell's ranch-house away to the right, and towards the dam, two trucks stood motionless, connected to the ranch-house by the tracks their tyres had made through the new grasses. I was tired and exhausted, but a great peace seemed to have descended upon me. I was back in the Kingdom, clear of cities and the threat of a hospital. I was back in God's own air, in the cool beauty of the mountains. I turned to Max. ‘We can find our way down from here,' I said. I held out my hand to him. Thank you for bringing us.'

He didn't move. He sat motionless, staring down into the bowl of the Kingdom. ‘You rebuild the house,' he said.

I nodded.

He looked at the peak rising above us. ‘Perhaps they are together—my father and Campbell.' He turned to me. ‘You think there is some place we go when we die?'

‘Of course,' I said.

‘Heaven and hell, huh?' He gave a derisive laugh. ‘The world is full of devils, and so is the other place. How then can there be a God? There is only this.' He waved his hand towards the mountains and the sky.

‘Somebody made it, Max.'

‘
Ja
, somebody make it. He make animals, too. Then somebody else make men. Tell Campbell I have done what you ask.' He clapped his heels to his horse's flanks and turned back the way he had come.

‘What about the horses?' I called to him.

‘Keep them till you return to Come Lucky,' he shouted back. ‘The grass is good for them now.'

‘Queer fellow,' Winnick said. ‘What did he mean about
tell Campbell I have done what you ask
?'

I shrugged my shoulders and started my horse down the slope. I couldn't tell him Max was a soul in torment, that he was a mixture of Celt and Teuton and that circumstances and the mixture of his blood had torn him apart from the day he was born.

The mountain crests were flushed with the sunset as we rode into Campbell's Kingdom and from the end of the wheel tracks where the trucks were parked came the sharp crack of an explosion as Boy fired another shot and recorded the sound waves on his geophones. The echo of that shot ran like a salvo of welcome through the mountains as we slid from our saddles by the door of the partly-burned barn. I stood there, hanging on to the leather of my stirrup, staring out across the new grass of the Kingdom. Early crocuses were springing up in the carpet of green. The air was still and clear and cold, and the shadow of the mountains crept across us as the sun went down. I was too weak with exhaustion to stand on my own and yet I was strangely content. Winnick helped me into the house and I sank down on to the bed that my grandfather had used for so many years. Lying there, staring at the rafters that he had hewn from the timbered slopes above us, the world of men and cities seemed remote and rather unreal. And as I slid into a half-coma of sleep I knew that I wouldn't be going back, that this was my kingdom now.

I slept right through to the following morning and woke to sunshine and the clatter of tin plates. They were having breakfast as I went out into the living-room of the ranch-house. Sleeping bags lay in a half circle round the ember glow of the wood ash in the grate and the place was littered with kit and equipment. Boy jumped to his feet and gripped hold of my hand. He was seething with excitement like a volcano about to erupt. ‘Are you all right, Bruce? Did you have a good night?' He didn't wait for me to reply. ‘Louis has been up all night, computing the results. We've all been up most of the night. He wouldn't let us wake you. I knew it was an anticline. I did my own computing and allowing for weathering I was certain we were all right. And I'm right, Bruce. That shot we fired just as you got in was the last of five on the cross traverse. It's a perfect formation. Ask Louis. It's a honey. We're straddled right across the dome of it. Now all we've got to prove is that it extends across the Kingdom and beyond.'

I looked across at Winnick. ‘Is this definite?'

He nodded. ‘It's an anticline all right. But it doesn't prove there's oil up here. You realise that?' The precise, meticulous tone of his voice brought an air of reality to the thing.

‘Then how did Campbell see an oil seep at the foot of the slope if it isn't oil bearing?' Boy demanded.

Winnick shrugged his shoulders. ‘Campbell may have been mistaken. Anyway, I'll ride over the ground today and do a quick check on the rock strata. It may tell me something.'

But however matter-of-fact Winnick might be there was no damping the air of excitement that hung over the breakfast table. It wasn't only Boy. His two companions seemed just as thrilled. They were both of them youngsters. Bill Mannion was a university graduate from McGill who had recently abandoned Government survey work to become a geophysicist. He was the observer. Don Leggert, a younger man, was from Edmonton. He was the driller. These two men, with Boy, were mucking in and doing the work of a full seismographical team of ten or twelve men. I didn't need their chatter of technicalities to tell me they were keen.

I stood in the sunshine and watched them walk out to the instrument truck. They walked with purpose and the loose spring of men who were physically fit. I envied them that as I watched them go. Winnick came out and joined me. He had a rucksack on his back and a geologist's hammer tucked into his belt. ‘Well,' he said. ‘What are you going to do now you know you're on an anticline?'

‘Sit in the sun here and think,' I said.

He nodded, his eyes peering up at me from behind his thick-lensed glasses. ‘Why not let me try and interest one of the big companies in this property?'

‘You honestly think you could persuade them to risk a wildcat right up here in the Rockies?'

‘I could try,' he answered evasively.

I laughed. ‘There's oil in the Rocky Mountains?' His eyes avoided mine. ‘No,' I said, staring out towards the ring of the mountains. ‘There isn't a chance, and you know it. If it's to be done at all, I'll have to do it myself.'

‘Maybe you're right,' he said. ‘But think it over. Now Roger Fergus is dead, his son controls a lot of finance. You're a one-man show up against a big outfit. You'll be running neck and neck with the construction of the dam and every dollar that's sunk in that project will make it that much more vital to Fergus that you don't bring in a well up here.'

‘How far do you think he'll go to stop me?' I asked.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I wouldn't know. But that dam is going to cost money. Henry Fergus will go a long way to see that his money isn't thrown away.' His hand gripped my arm. ‘Don't rush into this. Think it over. At best your contractor may lose his rig. At worst somebody may get hurt.'

‘I see.'

There was nothing new in this. He was only saying what Jean had said, what I knew in my heart was inevitable. And yet hearing it from him, coldly and clearly stated, forced me to face up to the situation. I watched him ride out across the Kingdom and then I brought a chair out into the sunshine and most of the day I lay there, relaxed in the warmth, trying to work it out.

That night I wrote to Keogh telling him the result of the survey to date and instructing him to talk to no one and to come up on his own in three days' time.

Drive through from 150-Mile House without stopping, arriving at the entrance to Thunder Creek at 2 a.m. on the morning of Tuesday. We'll meet you there with horses.

I underlined this and gave Winnick the letter to take down with him.

Winnick left next day. I was feeling so much better that I rode with him up to the top of the Saddle. High up above the Kingdom I said good-bye to him and thanked him for all he'd done.

I sat there watching his small figure jogging slowly down the mountain slope till it was lost to view behind an outcrop. Then I turned my horse and slithered down through the snow back into the bowl of the Kingdom. As I came out below the timber I saw the drilling truck like a small rectangular box away to the right close beside the stream that was the source of Thunder Creek. They were drilling a new shot hole as I rode up, the three of them working on the drill which was turning with a steady rattle as it drove into the rock below. Boy pointed towards the dam. ‘They've started,' he shouted to me above the din.

I turned and looked back at the dam. Men were moving about the concrete housing of the hoist and there were more men at the base of the dam, stacking cement bags that were being lowered to them from the cable that stretched across the top of the structure. My eye was caught by a solitary figure standing on the buttress of rock above the cable terminal. There was a glint of glass in the sunlight, a flicker like two small heliographs. ‘Have you got a pair of binoculars?' I shouted to Boy.

He nodded and got them from the cab of the drilling truck. Through them every detail became clear. There was no doubt about the solitary figure on the buttress. It was Trevedian and he was watching us through glasses of his own. ‘Did you have to start at this end of the Kingdom?' I shouted to Boy.

He turned down the corners of his mouth. ‘Got to start somewhere,' he said. ‘They were bound to find out what we were up to.'

That was true enough. I swung the glasses towards the dam. The cage was just coming in with another load, two tip trucks this time and a pile of rails. More cement was being slung along the top of the dam. And then in the foreground, halfway between us and the dam I noticed a big rusty cog wheel and some rotten baulks of timber bolted together in an upright position. There was the remains of an old boiler and a shapeless mass of machinery. I called to Boy. ‘What's that pile of junk there?' I asked him.

‘Don't you know?' He seemed surprised. ‘That's Campbell Number One.'

‘How far did they get down?'

‘Don't know. Something over four thousand, I guess.'