Hammond Innes - Campbell's Kingdom

‘And her fiance?’

She gave a little shrug. ‘The man was no good either.’

‘Why have you told me this? Why have you shown me where you keep your money?’

She stared at me for a moment and then she gave me a beautiful little smile. ‘Because I like you,’ she said. ‘I had a — friend once. He was rather like you. A Scotsman. But he was already married.’ She got to her feet. ‘I must go now. I do not want my sister to know that I have done anything so naughty as visiting a man in his bedroom.’ Her eyes twinkled at me. And then she touched my arm. ‘I am an old lady now. There has been very little in my life. You remember the parable of the talents? Now that I am old I see that I have made too little use of the money my father gave me. Jean told us what had happened up in the Kingdom. I would like to you to know that you do not have to worry about money. You only have to ask-’

‘I couldn’t possibly-’ I began, but she silenced me.

‘Don’t be silly. It is no good to me and I would like to help.’ She hesitated and then smiled. ‘Stuart Campbell was the friend I spoke about. Now perhaps you understand. Goodnight.’

I watched her as she went out and then I sat down on the bed, staring at the old leather trunk with a strong desire to cry. I still remember every detail of that visit from Sarah Garret and I treasure it as one of the most beautiful memories I have.

A few hours later I left. The house was silent and as I walked down through the shacks of Come Lucky the sky was just beginning to pale over Solomon’s Judgment. I walked along the lake-shore and waited for a truck coming down from Slide Camp. It took me as far as Hydraulic and from there I got a timber wagon down to 150 Mile House. Jean was to take my horse back up to the Kingdom and now that I was on my own I found a mood of depression creeping over me.

But when Johnnie arrived everything was different. He came with a couple of Americans. They were on holiday and they regarded the whole thing as a game, part of the fun of being in the Rockies a long way from their offices in Chicago. As soon as they knew the situation they got on the phone to a whole list of farmers along the valley. But we soon discovered that though horses were easy to hire it was difficult to get them complete with packing gear. The farms were widely dispersed and the better part of a week had passed before we had a total of twenty-six animals with gear coralled at a homestead a few miles west of Beaver Dam Lake.

On the 15th July we moved them up to the entrance to Thunder Creek and the following morning, as arranged, we rendezvoused with the vehicle trucking in our containers. It took us over 24 hours to pack that first 500 gallons up to the Kingdom. Every four hours we off-loaded and let the animals rest. It was back-breaking work and the weather was bad with several thunderstorms and thick mist on the slopes of the Saddle. Without Johnnie I should have turned back, but he seemed to be able to smell the trail out through mist and blinding hail. And the men who were hiring him to show them the Rockies were in high spirits, always anticipating worse conditions that we actually experienced, apparently thoroughly happy to combine pleasure with some real outdoor work.

The atmosphere when we came down into the Kingdom was one of tense excitement. The whole bunch came out to meet us. The rig had stopped drilling three days back for lack of fuel and Jean told me afterwards that if I hadn’t turned up when I did Garry would have asked Trevedian to hoist the rig down. Time was running out for him. But just before we arrived an Imperial Oil scout had ridden in. This recognition from the outside world had lifted their spirits slightly and with the arrival of the fuel and the starting up of the rig again enthusiasm was suddenly unbounded.

Two days later the four of us brought a second 500 gallons up. We now had enough fuel to drill to nearly six thousand feet at the present rate. At the time they started the rig again they were at four thousand six hundred and making over twelve feet an hour through softish rock. By the time we packed in the second load of fuel they were past the five thousand mark and going strong.

I remember Johnnie standing in front of the rig the day he and his two Americans took the pack animals down. ‘I’d sure like to stay on up here, Bruce,’ he said. He, too, had been caught by the mood of excitement. Boy had arrived that morning and with him was a reporter from the Calgary Tribune. Five thousand five hundred feet was the level at which they expected to reach the anticline and hanging over me all the time was the knowledge that it wasn’t oil we were going to strike there, but the sill of igneous rock that had stopped Campbell Number One. I couldn’t tell anybody this. I just had to brace myself to combat the sense of defeat when it came.

‘Oil isn’t much in your line, is it, Johnnie?’ Jean said.

He grinned. ‘I guess not. But I’ll need to know what we’re to put on old Campbell’s tombstone.’

‘Just quote him as saying, “There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains,” Garry said. ‘That’ll be enough.’

Everybody laughed. It was a thin, feverish sound against the racket of the drill and I thought of the grave I had found behind the ranch-house and how they were all up here because of him. They were pretty keyed up now, and their optimism had a feverish undercurrent that wasn’t healthy.

As the days went by the suspense became almost unbearable. At first there were anxious inquiries as each shift came off duty, but as we approached the end of July the mood changed and we’d just glance at the shift coming off, unwilling to voice our interest, one look at their faces being sufficient to tell us that there were no new developments. The waiting was intolerable and a mood of depression gradually settled on the camp. We were drilling through quartzite and making slower progress than we had hoped. Time was against us. With each day’s drilling our fuel reserves were dwindling. And meanwhile the dam was moving steadily towards completion. Sometimes on an evening Jean and I would ride up to the rock buttress and look at the work. Already by the first week in August there was only a small section to be completed and engineers were working on the installation of the sluices and pens. From higher up the mountainside we could see that work on the power station beside the slide had also started. Some of the drilling crew were in touch with men working on the dam from whom they were able to purchase cigarettes at an inflated price, and from them they learned that the completion date was fixed for August 20th. Worse still, the Larsen Company planned to begin flooding immediately in order to build up a sufficient head of water to run a pilot plant during the winter.

At the beginning of August we were approaching five thousand five hundred and Garry was getting restive. So were his crew. They had been up in the Kingdom for almost two months. The cuttings, screened from the mud as it flowed back into the sump pit, showed us still in the metamorphic rock. No jokes were cracked on the site now. Nobody spoke much. Four of the boys had started a poker school. I tried to break it up, but there was nothing else for them to do. They’d no liquor and no women and they were fed up.

The inevitable happened. There was a fight and one of them, a fellow called Weary Dodds, got a finger smashed in the draw works. He was lucky not to have had his arm ripped off for he was flung right against the steel hawser that was lifting the travelling block. Jean patched it up as best she could, but she couldn’t patch up the atmosphere of the camp — it was very tense.

Just after nine on the morning of August 5th they pulled pipe for what they all hoped might be the last time. The depth was five thousand four hundred and ninety feet. They were all down on the rig, waiting. They waited there all morning, watching the grief stem inching down through the turntable and I stood there with them feeling sick with apprehension. They pulled pipe again at two-fifteen. Another sixty-foot length of pipe was run on and down went the drill again, section by section. The depth was now five thousand five hundred and fifty feet. Those not on shift drifted back to the ranch-house. We had some food and a tense silence brooded over the meal.