For a long time we ran through a world of virgin white, between heaped-up banks of snow where the road had been cleared of drifts, only the occasional black line of a stream to relieve the monotony. Then we were climbing and gradually the timber closed in around us. The snow no longer drove past the cab windows. The trees were still and black. I wondered vaguely why the trail to Come Lucky had been cleared of snow, but I was too drowsy to question the driver. It was open and that was all I cared about. I was on the last stage of my journey.
I tried to imagine what it had been like up here less than a hundred years ago when the Cariboo gold rush had been on and these creek beds had been crowded with men from all parts of the world. But it didn’t seem possible. It was just a wilderness of snow and mountain and timber.
After half an hour the snow eased off. We were climbing steadily beside the black waters of the Little River. Timbered mountain slopes rose steeply above me and I got a momentary glimpse of a shaggy head of rock high above us and half veiled in cloud. I glanced at my companion and suddenly it occurred to me that this might be the packer that Johnnie Carstairs had talked about. ‘Is your name Max Trevedian?’ I asked him.
He turned his head slowly and looked at me. ‘Ja, that is my name.’ He seemed to consider for a moment how I knew it and then he turned his attention back to the track.
So this was the man who could take me up to Campbell’s Kingdom before the snow melted. ‘Do you know Campbell’s Kingdom?’ I asked him.
‘Campbell’s Kingdom!’ His voice had a sudden violence of interest. ‘Why do you ask about Campbell’s Kingdom?’ ‘I want to go up there.’
‘Why?’
For some reason I didn’t wish to tell him why. I stared out of my side window. We were running along the shores of a small lake now. It was all frozen over and the flat surface of the ice was covered with a dusting of snow.
‘Why do you wish to go there?’ he asked again.
‘I’ve heard about it, that’s all,’ I replied vaguely, wondering why the mention of Campbell’s Kingdom should so suddenly rouse him from his tactiturn silence.
‘Why do you go to Come Lucky, huh? It is too soon for visitors. Are you an oil man?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Then why do you come?’
‘That’s my business,’ I answered, annoyed by his child-like persistence.
He grunted.
‘What made you ask if I was an oil man?’
‘Oil men come here last year. There is an old devil lived up in the mountains who thought there was oil there.’ He suddenly began to laugh, a great, deep-throated sound. ‘Damned old fool! All they found were rocks. I could have told them there was no oil.’
‘How do you know?’
‘How did I know?’ He stared at me angrily.
‘What made you so certain?’
‘Because he is a swindler,’ he growled. ‘A dirty, lying, bastard old man who swindle everyone.’ His voice had risen suddenly to a high pitch and his little eyes glared at me hotly. ‘You ask my brother.’
His words swept me back to my childhood, to the taunts and jeers I had suffered. ‘You’re referring to Campbell, are you?’
‘Ar. Campbell.’ There was an incredible vibrance of hatred in the way he spoke the name. ‘King Campbell! Is that why you come here — to see Campbell?’ He laughed. ‘Because if you have, you will waste your time. He is dead.’
‘I know that.’
‘Then why do you come, huh?’
I was beginning to understand what Johnnie Car-stairs had meant when he had said the man was an ornery crittur. I didn’t answer him and I didn’t ask any more questions. It was like travelling with an animal you’re not quite sure of and we drove on in silence.
As dusk began to fall we came out on the shores of a narrow lake. Come Lucky was at the head of it. My first sight of the place was as we slid out of the timber on to the lake shore. The town was half-buried in snow, a dark huddle of shacks clinging to the bare, snow-covered slopes of a mountain and leaning out towards the lake as though in the act of being swept into it by an avalanche. Beyond it a narrow gulch cut back into the mountains and lost itself in a grey veil of cloud. The road appeared to continue along the shore of the lake and into the gulch. We turned right, however, up to Come Lucky and stopped at a long, low shack, the log timbers of which had been patched with yellow boards of untreated pine. There was a notice on one of the doors — Trevedian Transport Company: Office. This was as far as the track into Come Lucky had been cleared. A drift of smoke streamed out from an iron chimney. A door slammed and a fat Chinaman waddled out to meet us. He and Max Trevedian disappeared into the back of the truck and began off-loading the stores. I stood around waiting and presently my two grips were dropped into the snow at my feet. The Chinaman poked his head out of the back of the truck. ‘You stay here?’ he asked.
‘Is this the hotel?’
‘No. This is bunkhouse for men working on road up Thunder Creek.’
‘Where’s the hotel?’ I asked.
‘You mean Mr Mac’s place — The Golden Calf?’ He pointed up the snow-blocked street. ‘You find up there on the right side.’
I thanked him and trudged through the snow into the town of Come Lucky. It was a single street bounded on either side by weather-boarded shacks. Dotted amongst them were log cabins of stripped jack pine. The place seemed deserted. There wasn’t a soul about and only in two instances did I see smoke coming from the ugly clatter of tin chimneys. The roofs of many of the shacks had fallen in. Some had their windows ripped out, frames and all. Doors stood rotting on their hinges. The untreated boards were grey with age and soggy with moisture. Scraps of paper hung forlornly to hoardings and the faint lettering above the empty shops and saloons proclaimed the purpose for which the crumbling bundle of wood had originally been assembled. The King Harry Bar still carried the weathered portrait of an English King and next door there was a doctor’s brass plate, now a green rectangle of decomposing metal. The wooden sidewalks stood up above the level of the snow, a crazy switch-back affair of haphazard design and doubtful safety. It seemed to be constructed on stilts. In fact the whole place was built on stilts and it leaned down the slope to the lake as though the thrust of the coast wind had pushed it outwards like a flimsy erection of cards. Here and there a shack was held together by pieces of packing cases and rough-cut planks; evidence of human existence. But in the main Come Lucky was a rotten clutter of empty shacks.
It was my first sight of a ghost town.
The Golden Calf was about the biggest building in the place. Faded gilt lettering proclaimed its name and underneath I could just make out the words: If it’s the Gaiety of the City for You, This is the Best Spot in the whole of Cariboo. And there was the picture of a calf, now grey with age. The sidewalk was solid here and roofed over to form a sort of street-side verandah.
The door of the hotel opened straight into an enormous bar room. The bar itself ran all along one side and behind it were empty shelves backed by blotchy mirrors. There were faded pictures of nude and near-nude women and yellowing bills advertising local events of years gone by. The few marble-topped tables and rickety chairs, the iron-framed piano and the drum stove which roared against the opposite wall took up little of the dirt-ingrained floor area. The room was warm, but it had a barrack-room emptiness about it that was only heightened by the marks of its one-time Edwardian elegance.
Two old men playing cards at a table near the stove turned to stare at me. Above them was the picture of a voluptuous young beauty of the can-can period. Pencil shading had been added in appropriate places and she had been given a moustache. The crudity of it, however, produced only speculation as to the circumstances in which the trimmings had been added. I put my bags down and drew up a chair to the stove. The warmth of the room was already melting the snow on my windbreaker. My trousers steamed. I took off my outer clothes and sat back, letting the warmth seep into my body. I felt deathly tired.