Хэммонд Иннес - Nothing to Lose [= Campbell’s Kingdom]

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 homes. I’ve a big 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 aid house. Max was making his way slowly toward the stables. I knew then that we’d get up to the Kingdom. I didn’t like trading on the man’s simpleness. But it had been the only way. I turned and went into the hotel, feeling a sense of pity, almost of affection for that great, friendless hulk of a man.

A 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 hoofs 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. 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.

We moved off, Max leading the pack horse, I following and Winnick bringing up the rear. We went 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. 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.

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 toward the dam two trucks stood motionless, connected to the ranch house by the tracks their tires 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 looked at the peak rising above us. “Perhaps they are together — my father and Campbell.” He turned to me. “Tell Campbell I have done what you ask.” He clapped his heels to his horse’s Hanks and turned back the way he had come, trailing the pack horse behind him.

“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!”

The mountain create were Hushed 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 Bound wave 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 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 the bed that my grandfather had used for so many years. And as I slid into a half coma of sleep I know 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 barn 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. “Louie has been up all night, computing the results. We’ve all been up most of the night. I knew it was an anticline. 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 tint 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. 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 graduate of 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 seismographic 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. “Now you know you’re on an anticline, why not let me try and interest one of the big companies in this property?”

“No,” I said, staring out toward the ring of the mountains. “There isn’t a chance of that, 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 Bunk in that project will make it that much mare 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.”

When I made my decision to drill for oil in the Canadian Rockies, I realized that even if I did bring in a well, I might not live to see it.

My name is Bruce Campbell Wetheral. On the day my physician told me I had only a few months left to live, I also learned that I had inherited from my grandfather, Stuart Campbell, a tract of land in the Rockies called Campbell’s Kingdom. My grandfather had spent his life trying to prove there was oil in the Kingdom, and his last request to me was to prove him right.

Apart from my fatal illness, there were other obstacles I had to overcome. A man named Henry Fergus was financing the construction of a dam just below the Kingdom that would be completed in about five months — and flood the Kingdom. Also, the only way to get drilling equipment up to the Kingdom was on a hoist owned by Peter Trevedian, who worked for Fergus. I knew that Trevedian would never let me use the hoist.