The grief stem was lifted right up to the crown block now. It was held there for a moment and then, with a rending and tearing of steel, it thrust the rig up clear of the ground. Then the stem bent over. The rig toppled and came crashing to the ground. The draw works, suddenly freed of their load, raced madly with a clattering cacophony of sound. And then, in brilliant moonlight that gave the whole thing an air of unreality, we watched the pipe seemingly squeezed out of the ground like toothpaste out of a tube.
It was like that for a moment, a great snake of piping, turning and twisting upward, and then, with a roar like a hundred express trains, it was blown clear.
“Garry! Garry! Garry!” Boy’s voice sounded thin against the roar.
We splashed back toward the rig, searching for him. We stumbled against pieces of machinery, scraps of trucks that had been flung wide by the force of gas.
“Garry!”
A shape loomed up in the gloom. A hand gripped mine. “Well, we struck it!” It was Garry and his voice trembled slightly.
I’d been too dazed to consider the cause of the disaster, I still couldn’t believe it. “You mean we’ve struck oil?”
“Well, we’ve struck gas. There’ll be oil down there, too, I guess.”
“It hasn’t done your rig much good,” I said. I don’t know why, but I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Oh, to hell with the rig!” He laughed. It was a queer sound, violent and trembling and rather high-pitched.
“We’ve done what we came up here to do. We’ve proved there’s oil down there. And we’ve done it in time. Come on. Let’s rout the boys out. Steve must see this. He’s our independent observer. This is going to shake the Larsen outfit.” And that high-pitched laugh sent out its trembling challenge again to the din of the gas jet.
It wasn’t until we were headed for the ranch house that I realized that the moon had vanished, swallowed by the inky blackness that was rolling across the night sky. Halfway to the house a gust of wind struck us. From the slopes of Solomon’s Judgment came a hissing sound that enveloped and obliterated the sound of the gas. And then, suddenly, a wall of water fell on us. It was a rainstorm, but as solid as if a cloud had condensed and dropped. Lightning ripped across our heads, momentarily revealing my companions as three half-drowned wraiths. And then the thunder was incessant.
Somehow we reached the ranch house. Nobody was up. The place was as silent as if it had been deserted. We stripped to the huff and built up the fire, huddling our bodies close to it and drinking some rye that Boy had found. There seemed no point in waking the others.
There was nothing to see and the storm was so violent that it was quite out of the question to take them down to have a look at the well. We drifted off to our bunks, and as my head touched the pillow I remember thinking that everything was going to be all right now. We had proved there was oil in the Kingdom. My grandfather’s beliefs were confirmed, my own life justified. And then I was asleep.
It was Jean who woke me. She seemed very excited about something and I felt desperately tired. She kept on shaking me. “Quick, Bruce! Something’s happened!”
“I know,” I mumbled, “We didn’t wake you because there was a storm.”
I rolled out of my bunk and pulled a coat on over my pajamas. I was really rather enjoying myself as she took hold of my hand and pulled me through into the ranch house and over to the window.
I don’t know quite how I had expected it to look by daylight, but when I reached the window and looked out across the Kingdom, drab gray and swept by rain, I stood appalled. There was nothing to show we’d ever drilled there or ever had a rig there. I was looking out across a wide expanse of water. It began just beyond the barns and it extended right across to the slopes of the mountains on the farther side. Trevedian had closed the sluice gates and the Kingdom was already half flooded. It was a lake, and the wind was driving across it, plowing it up into waves and flecking it with white. “Oh, God!” I said, and I dropped my head on my arms.
My name is Bruce Campbell Wetheral. On the day my physician told me I had only a few months left to live, I learned that I had inherited the Kingdom from my grandfather, Stuart Campbell. He had spent his life trying to prove there was oil in the Rockies, and his last request to me was to prove he was right.
I found two partners, Boy Bladen and Garry Keogh, and we started drilling. But from the very beginning we knew we were taking a gamble that we might lose. I had proved there was a fortune in oil in Campbell’s Kingdom, a plateau high in the Canadian Rockies. But I lost my race against time. The whole Kingdom was now flooded in the waters of a man-made lake.
A man named Henry Fergus was building a dam just below the Kingdom. When it was finished the entire Kingdom would be flooded. Also, Peter Trevedian, who worked for Fergus, had been trying to sabotage us ever since we started. For months the race was close. Then one evening Trevedian came to our camp with a notice that the dam was done and that the Kingdom would be flooded at any time. After ten o’clock the next morning, he would not be responsible for any of my equipment.
But that very night we struck gas, indicating there was oil just below. A storm broke out and we went to bed.
The next morning when I woke up, the Kingdom was flooded and our oil rig was completely covered. Trevedian had been watching us the night before and closed the dam’s sluice gates ahead of schedule.
Conclusion
Steve Strachan did his best to try to visualize the blowing in of the well as we had seen it, but I knew he wasn’t really convinced. He knew how tense we all were. I suppose he fell that in those circumstances a man is capable of seeing something that never really happened. He did his best. He made polite noises as we described every detail of it. But every now and then he’d say, “Sure I believe you, but just show me something concrete that’ll prove it really happened.”
But what evidence had we? Soaked to the skin, we trudged along the shores of that damned lake, looking for a slick of oil, or stood searching the spot where the rig had been, trying to locate the bubbles that the escaping gas must be making. But little whitecaps frisked across the spot and even through glasses we could see no sign of bubbles.
I remember Garry standing there cursing while the rain streamed down his lined face as though he were crying. We were huddled there in a little bunch by the edge of that sudden lake, our faces gray, exhaustion and despair stamped on our features.
“If only they’d waited till the time they said,” Boy murmured.
Garry turned to me. “Remember the water we ran into when we got clear of the rig? They were flooding then, flooding up to the rig, just in case.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Damn it! One more day!” There was all the bitterness of a gambler who had lost in his voice, “Our only hope is to persuade them to drain the Kingdom.” His voice was high and taut. “Come on, Bruce. We’d better get over there and have a word with them.”
I nodded reluctantly, afraid he might do something stupid when faced with Trevedian, He was at the end of his tether and his big hands twitched as though he wanted to get them around the throat of some adversary. We took two horses and cantered along the shores of the lake, below the buttress and across the rock outcrops to where the wire ran down the mountainside and into the water. They had seen us coming and there was a little group waiting for us. There was Trevedian and the policeman who had come with him the previous day, and two of Trevedian’s men with rifles slung over their shoulders.