Hammond Innes - Campbell's Kingdom

He nodded. ‘It’ll be quite a race.’

‘Better get yourself settled in,’ I told him, and Jean and I set out for the rig, Moses limping along beside us. We didn’t talk. Somehow, now I was here it didn’t seem necessary. We just walked in silence and across the deep grass came the clatter of the rig like music on the still air. But something was missing and my eyes slid unconsciously to the cleft between the peaks of Solomon’s Judgment. ‘What’s happened to the cement mixers?’ I asked.

They stopped yesterday.’ Her hand came up and gripped my arm. ‘They’ve finished concreting.’

I began to tell her what had happened in Calgary, but somehow the publicity I had got seemed unimportant. Up here only one thing mattered — if there was oil, would we reach it in time?

The strain I had seen in Jean’s face was stamped on the faces of everyone on the rig. They were pulling pipe when we arrived. Garry working the draw works and Boy acting as derrick man. ‘Where are the others?’ I asked Jean.

‘Sleeping. I told you, they’re working round the clock now.’

As soon as they’d changed the bit and were drilling again, they all crowded round me, wanting to hear the news from Calgary, eagerly scanning the papers I had brought and searching the bundle of mail for their own letters. And I stood and watched them, noticing the dark shadows under their eyes, the quick, tense way they spoke. The atmosphere was electric with fatigue and the desperate hope that was driving them.

‘Did you see Winnick?’ Garry asked me. His voice was hard and tense.

I nodded.

‘What did he say?’

‘He’s been over the seismograms again. He thinks we’ll strike it around seven thousand or not at all.’

‘We’ll be at seven thousand the day after tomorrow.’

‘Have you taken a core sample since you got clear of the sill?’

‘Yeh. I don’t know much about geology, I guess, but it looked like Devonian all right to me.’

‘We’ll just have to make it,’ I said.

‘Oh, sure. We’ll make it.’ But his voice didn’t carry conviction. He looked dead beat.

‘Seen anything of Trevedian?’

‘No. But he’s got somebody posted on top of that buttress, keeping an eye on us through glasses. If that bastard shows his face down here-’ He turned and stared towards the dam. His battered face looked crumpled and old in the hard sunlight. ‘I wish to God we’d got a geologist up here. If we do strike it, as like as not it’ll be gas and we’ll blow the rig to hell.’

‘If you do strike it,’ I said, ‘you won’t need to worry about the rig.’

‘It’s not the rig I’m worrying about,’ he snapped. ‘It’s the drilling crew.’ He gave a quick nervous laugh. ‘I’ve never drilled a well without knowing what was going on under the surface.’

His manner as much as his appearance warned me that nerves were strung taut. It was not surprising for there were only nine of them to keep the rig going the twenty-four hours and it needed four men on each shift. Pretty soon both myself and Steve Strachan were doing our stint. Fortunately it was largely just a matter of standing by, so that our inexperience was not put to the test. Now that we were in softish country it was only necessary to pull pipe every other day and about all that was required of a roughneck on each shift was to add a length of pipe when the travelling block was down to the turntable. I did the shift from eight to twelve and by the time I had been called at four to go on duty again I began to understand the strain they had been working under. I came off duty at eight, had some breakfast and turned in.

I hadn’t been asleep more than an hour before I was woken with the news that Trevedian had arrived and wanted to see me. He was in the main room of the ranch-house and he had an officer of the Provincial Police with him. Garry was there, too, and he held a sheet of paper in his hand. ‘Trevedian’s just served us with notice to quit,’ he said, handing me the paper.

It was a warning that floodings of the Kingdom under the provisions of the Provincial Government Act of 1939 might be expected any time after 18th August. It was written on the Larsen Company’s note-paper and signed by Henry Fergus. I looked across at Trevedian. The dam’s complete, is it?’ I asked.

He nodded. ‘Just about.’

‘When are you closing the sluice gates?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. As soon as we’re ready.’ He turned to the policeman. ‘Well, Eddie, you’ve seen the note delivered. Anything you want to say?’

The officer shook his head. ‘You’ve read the notice, Mr Wetheral. I’d just remind you that as from 10.00 hours tomorrow morning the Larsen Company is entitled to flood this area and that from that time they cannot be held responsible for any loss of movable equipment.’

‘Meaning the rig?’

He nodded. ‘I’m sorry, fellows, but there it is.’

One or two of the drilling crew had drifted in. They stared in silence at Trevedian and the policeman. It wasn’t difficult to imagine what they were thinking. They’d been working up here now for two and a half months without pay. They’d gambled on the chance of bringing in a well and they’d lost. Trevedian shifted his feet nervously. He knew enough about men to know that it only needed a word to touch off the violence in the atmosphere. ‘Well, I guess we’d better get going,’ he said.

The policeman nodded. In silence they turned and went out through the door. Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. At length Garry said, ‘Better get some sleep, boys. We’re on again in an hour and a half.’

‘Any chance of bringing in a well between now and ten o’clock tomorrow?’ Steve Strachan asked.

Garry rounded on him with a snarl. ‘If I knew that do you think we’d be standing around looking like a bunch of steers waiting for the slaughter-house?’ And he flung out of the room, back to his bunk.

When I went on shift at midday the drill was down to six thousand six hundred and twenty-two feet. When we came off again at four we had added another forty-three feet. It was blazing hot and the sweat streamed off me, for we had just had the grief stem out and added another length of pipe. I stood for a while, staring across to the dam. The silence there was uncanny. Not a soul moved. I mopped my forehead with a sweat-damp handkerchief. There wasn’t a breath of air. The whole Kingdom seemed silent and watching, as though waiting for something. A glint of sun on glasses showed from the rock buttress. They were still keeping us under observation.

‘I don’t like it,’ a voice said at my elbow.

I turned to find Boy standing beside me. ‘What don’t you like?’ I asked and already I noticed my voice possessed that same sharpness of strain that the others had.

‘Just nerves, I guess,’ he said. ‘But it’s crook sort of weather this with no thunder heads and the mountains burning up under this sudden wave of heat. It’s as though-’ He paused there, and then turned away with a shrug of his shoulders.

I should have got some sleep, but somehow I couldn’t face lying on a sleeping bag in the suffocating heat of the barns. I was too tensed-up for sleep, and the day was too oppressive. I saddled one of the horses and rode out across the Kingdom, past Campbell Number One and along by the stream towards the dam. The water was running deep and fast, carrying off yesterday’s hail and the remnants of the winter’s snow melted by the gruelling heat. I reached the barbed wire and rode along it up towards the buttress. There didn’t seem to be more than a dozen men working on the damn and they weren’t labourers, they were engineers in grease-stained jeans. I sat and watched them for a while. They were working on the sluice gates. The cage of the hoist came up only once whilst I sat there. It brought machinery.