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.
The watcher from the buttress came scrambling down towards me. ‘Better get moving, Wetheral.’ It was the man I had tangled with outside the Golden Calf, the guard who had been on the hoist when we’d brought the rig up. He wore a dirty cotton vest and he’d a gun in a leather holster on his hip.
‘I’m on my own property,’ I said. ‘It’s you who are trespassing.’
He started bawling me out then, using a lot of filthy names. I felt the blood beating at my temples. I wanted to fling myself at him, to give vent to the violence that was pent up inside me. But instead I turned my horse and rode slowly back to the ranch-house.
That night at dinner a brooding silence reigned over the table. It had the stillness of weather before a storm. It was in tune with the sultry heat of the night. The faces of the men gathered round the table were thin and tired and shiny with sweat. They sat around till eight waiting for the change of shift. Every now and then one of them would go to the door and listen, his head cocked on one side, listening for some change in the rhythm of the rig, waiting for the news, that they’d brought in a well.
But the shift changed and the drilling went steadily on, the bit grinding into the rock, six thousand seven hundred and thirteen feet below the surface at the rate of ten and a half feet per hour. I got some sleep and went on shift again at midnight. Jean was still up, standing by the stable, looking at the moon. She didn’t say anything, but her hand found mine and gripped it. Boy passed us, going to the rig. ‘There’s a storm brewing,’ he said.
There was a ring round the moon and though it was still as sultry as an oven, there was a dampness in the air. ‘Something must break soon,’ Jean whispered. ‘I can’t stand this suspense any longer.’
‘It’ll all be over tomorrow when they flood the place,’ I said.
She sighed and pressed my arm and turned away. I watched her go back into the ranch-house. Then slowly I walked down to the rig. Garry was driller on this shift and Don was acting as derrick man. We sat on the bench beside the draw works, smoking and feeling the drill vibrating along our spines. ‘Queer how the moon reflects on the ground below the dam,’ Garry said.
‘It’s the mist rising,’ Boy murmured.
‘I guess so. Queer. It looks as though it were shining on water.’ A breath of wind touched our faces. ‘What’s that over there — beyond Solomon’s Judgment? Looks like a cloud.’
We peered beyond the white outline of the peak. The sky there no longer had the luminosity of moonlight. There were no stars. It looked pitch black and strangely solid. The wind was suddenly chill. ‘It’s the storm that’s been brewing,’ Boy said.
I don’t know who noticed it first — the change in the note of the draw works’ diesel. It penetrated to my mind as something different, a slowing up, a stickiness that deepened the note of the engine. Boy shouted something and then Garry’s voice thundered out: The mud pump — quick!’ His big body was across the platform in a flash. Don and I had jumped to our feet, but we stood there, dazed, not knowing what was happening or what had to be done. ‘Get the hell off that platform,’ Garry shouted up to us. ‘Run, you fools! Run for your lives!’
I heard Boy say, ‘God! We’ve struck it!’ And then we collided in a mad scramble for the ladder. As I reached it I caught a glimpse of the travelling block out of the tail of my eye. The wire hawsers that held it suspended from the crown block were slack and the grief stem was slowly rising, pushing it upwards. Then I was down the ladder and jumping for the ground, running blindly, not knowing what to expect, following the flying figures of my companions. The ground became boggy. It squelched under my feet. Then water splashed in my face and I stopped, thinking we’d reached the stream. The others had stopped, too. They were standing, staring back at the rig-