Hammond Innes - High Stand

I had a night in Fecamp, with a lonely meal in a restaurant and then a round of portside bistros getting gradually a little tight on Armagnac, and early on the Sunday morning I sailed out with the wind south-west force 6 and a rising sea that was soon breaking quite viciously. I wasn’t thinking of Miriam then. It was raining and visibility poor, but at least I had a fast passage and the next morning I was in court arguing a paternity case.

My young partner was back and life was suddenly easier, my own holiday only two weeks away. The following morning I heard from Miriam again, just a postcard showing timbered cabins dark against a brilliant sunrise reflected in the pewter surface of a lake, and across the middle of it, in bold black type:

LAKESIDE LODGE

DEZADEASH

Mile 123 Haines Highway

On the back she had scribbled:

I’m in luck. An Italian from Medicine Hat — what a name for a birthplace! — a real nice guy with a 4 x 4 who spends the summer working a claim on the Squaw. Our creek runs into it, he knows the way and we leave in the morning. It really is very exciting, everybody so kind, but the word is that l.C. is cleaned out. Will write you again when I get back to Whitehorse. How’s the boat — happy sailing! M. That was the last I heard from her. She never wrote from Whitehorse, or from anywhere else. I couldn’t blame her. It was nice of her to think of me, but I was under no illusions. She had been alone in Whitehorse and I suppose I was uppermost in her mind at the time, so closely connected with what had happened, but once she had got used to the country and begun to make new friends her need of any contact at home would have receded. Indeed, England would probably seem as remote as the Yukon did to me and she had already indicated that the mine was finished. She probably felt there was nothing more to say, but it irked me all the same, and though I was very busy running in my new partner and getting to grips with the boat, I still found it difficult to get her out of my mind. Once I drove over to Bullswood House to see that everything was all right. The staff were provided for — I had checked that already. Miriam had sent them a quarter’s wages in advance before leaving for Canada. Mrs Steading, the housekeeper, opened the door to me. ‘Mr Brian still here?’ I asked her.

She shook her head.

‘Did he leave an address?’

Again the negative shake of the head. She was a small, very quiet woman, born locally and still living in the village. ‘Never said a word. One day he was here, the next he was gone.’ I already knew that she didn’t approve of him.

‘Anything missing?’ I asked. I had had to find out about the silver myself, but now she didn’t hesitate. ‘Two pictures,’ she said, and she took me into Tom Halliday’s study, pointing to where they had hung, one on either side of the sad-looking moose that dominated the fireplace. I remembered them vaguely, two small ship pictures, very Dutch. ‘Mr Halliday thought a lot of them.’ I wondered who they were by, how much his son had got for them, whether he had flogged them to a picture dealer in the Lanes in Brighton or taken them up to London, to the Portobello Road, something like that, where they’d never be traced. ‘Have you mentioned it to anybody else?’ I asked her.

She shook her head. ‘None of my business, but since you asked I’ve told you.’

‘Very proper of you, Mrs Steading,’ I said, wondering what the hell to do about it now she’d told me. I couldn’t really blame either of them, Miriam using the money to take a look at the mine, and Brian — where had he gone, back to India and his Himalayan guru? Or had he gone to stand guard over those Cascades trees? I sat down for a moment at Tom Halliday’s desk, my eyes going involuntarily to that extraordinary photograph of his father dancing and shouting for joy there by the wooden sluice box, his teeth gleaming and his hand with the pan in it held out, the snow on the mountain behind him yellowish-white and speckled with damp marks.

The housekeeper had left me. I could hear her moving about upstairs. I went through the drawers quickly, none of them locked and all of them full of the usual backlog of papers, bank statements, old cheque stubs, and in the top right-hand drawer the timber sale agreements. As his son had said, the sale agreements and related correspondence, including felling and towing contracts and forestry reports from a consultant in Campbell River, Vancouver Island, went back seven years with new agreements every six months and the payments steadily declining. All the agreements were with Canadian companies, except the last, which was with SVL Timber and Milling Coy. Inc. of Seattle, and with this contract there were no felling and towing contracts, only a letter from the forestry consultant advising that the American company was more cost-effective in its felling and towing arrangements and was therefore offering a better price, having also outlets in the mid-west of America, particularly Chicago.

I made a note of the dates of those agreements, also the address of the Vancouver solicitors who had drawn them up. Then I was sitting back, looking up again at the wall above the desk, thinking of Tom — and of Miriam, the life they had shared together in this house. By now she would have been where the sluice box in that photograph had stood, where young Josh Halliday with the ridiculous drooping moustache and the battered hat had proved a dud mine so full of gold that it had given him and his son a steady flow of wealth for the better part of a century. Was there anything here she would want to keep if he didn’t turn up, anything personal — of Tom or the mine? Idly I began opening the drawers of the desk, not looking for anything specific, just thinking how odd it was to be sitting there in Tom’s study, everything just as it was when I had last been to dinner, and soon perhaps it would belong to somebody else who would probably change it all round, throw out that photograph and the moose head and the bits and pieces of mine equipment that hung on the walls and lay scattered about the hearth. I was surprised Brian hadn’t taken the photograph, a reminder of the man who had planted High Stand all those years ago.

The desk was an old one, Queen Anne by the look of it, a lovely silky walnut, the top slightly stained with ink, a letdown flap and little drawers and pigeonholes full of note-paper, envelopes and postcards. I had seen one rather like it in the home of a retired oil man and I moved my hands gently across the flat wood below the pigeonholes, feeling for movement. That’s how I found it, a secret well with a sliding top, the space beneath broad and shallow, and in it a gold Hunter with a flip-up top and a tinkling chime, a gold chain with a nugget of rough gold about the size of a lump of sugar, and beside it a slim book, rather like a ledger, the ink faded to a dull brown.

It was Joshua Halliday’s diary. It began on 20 July 1898:

My birthday, and everything I own now aboard this ship. A great number of people too, many, like me, with stores, also horses, some bullocks, several big cast-iron stoves, and the SF waterfront crowded, the hubbub of excitement swelling all the time, thrilling me through and through. So much hope, every man I speak with sure he will strike gold and come back a millionaire. I turned the pages. Shipboard life. Seattle. Vancouver, 5 September: This day we reached Skagway. Great excitement, but also chaos. So many people ashore, tents and makeshift huts, the squalor and the stench — and rising above this wretched encampment the mountains we have to cross.

After that entry the writing became less copperplate, in places quite shaky, the ink often giving way to pencil scribblings that were so faint the words were difficult to decipher. But it was all there — how he’d cut across the frozen expanse of a lake called Bennett and made it to Dawson in the depth of winter and then to the Dalton Trail and the Squaw. / was about done when I started up the Ice Cold, my breath freezing on my beard, the range all white, and next day the wind came westerly, thick mist and the snow melting to slush on the surface, like ice underneath. That was the first day of April and next morning he had reached the claim.