“Do you know Campbell’s Kingdom?” I asked the driver.
“Heard of it,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “It’s up there,” he said, pointing to the peaks.
My heart sank. It looked like a long, steep climb. “How far does the road go?” I asked.
“The road? Well, it doesn’t go up to the Kingdom.” He laughed. “There’s two thousand feet of cliff there. Right this minute the road only goes about half a mile farther. But when it’s finished it’ll go as far as the hoist.” He swung the truck round a bend and there, straight ahead of us, two bulldozers and a gang of men were working on a section of the track that had been completely obliterated, “An avalanche did that, by the looks of it,” the driver said. The snow had completely engulfed the waters of Thunder Creek, which flowed out from a black arch underneath it... “Hey, Ben! I got your other bulldozer for you!”
Creasy was coming back up the road toward us. “About time,” he said. “This is a fair cow, this one.” He looked across at me. “You haven’t wasted much time getting out here.” He turned to the driver, who was already in the back of the truck, loosening the securing tackle of the bulldozer.
I walked to the lip of the road and gazed down into the creek bed, half filled with the wrack of the avalanche. It was a pretty terrifying sight. I followed the black thread of the creek up the valley to where it tumbled in white foam over a fall at the bottom of the slide.
Not even repeated and heavy falls of snow could wholly mask that slide or the black face of the fault, towering skyward like an improbable wall two thousand feet high. And above the fault rose the twin peaks I had watched grow bigger all the way up the valley. From their summits powdery snow streamed lazily upward like smoke. Separating the two peaks was a narrow cleft, a dark gash in the mountain face, and across the upper end of it was wedged a shelf of rock like a wall. Something about that wall caught and held my gaze. Though it was breached in the center, it was too regular to be natural and it was of a lighter shade than the rock walls of the cleft.
“Like to have a look through these?” The driver was standing beside me and he was offering me a pair of glasses. I focused them on the cleft and instantly the lighter-colored rock resolved itself into a wall of concrete. I was looking at a dam, completed except for the center section.
“When was that built?” I asked the driver.
“It was begun in the summer of 1939,” he replied, “when the government reckoned they’d need to open up the Larson mines for the rearmament drive. They stopped work when the States came into the war. It became cheaper to get our ore from across the border, I guess. Now, of course, with the price of lead at the level it is today—”
“They’re going to complete the dam — is that it? That’s what this road is for?”
He nodded. “You can just see the cable of the hoist if you look carefully. It runs up to a pylon at the top.”
I searched the cliff face and gradually made out the slender thread of the cable rising to a concrete pylon on the cliff top and snaking back to a squat-housing to the left of the dam and a little above it.
I lowered the glasses, the truth slowly dawning on me. “Where exactly is Campbell’s Kingdom?” I asked him.
“Up there.” He nodded toward the dam, “Just through the cleft.”
“Where’s the boundary of the property?”
“I wouldn’t know exactly.”
I turned as a bulldozer thrust a great pile of blast-shattered rock toward the lip of the road. They’d been so sure I’d sell that they’d started the work without even waiting for me to sign the deeds.
I looked around. Creasy was standing a little way up the road. I got the impression he had been watching me. No wonder they’d been worried last night. Anger boiled up inside me. If they’d given me the details, if they’d explained that there was a dam three quarters built already — I went over to him.
“This road is being built to bring material up to complete the dam, isn’t it?” I asked. “And if the dam is on my property—”
“It isn’t on your property.”
“Well, where’s the Campbell land start?”
“Just the other side of the dam. You may own old Campbell’s Kingdom, but this is Trevedian land, and what happens here is nothing to do with you.”
“I think it is,” I said.
“All right. Then talk to Peter Trevedian and stop worrying me.”
I walked back up the road a bit and stood looking up to the cleft in the mountain they called Solomon’s Judgment. I hadn’t expected anything like this. I might just as well have signed the deeds of sale, borrowed on the result and spent a few pleasant, carefree months traveling.
The driver shouted to me that he was leaving, and I went slowly back up the road and climbed into the cab beside him. Back in Come Lucky I dropped off at the office of the Trevedian Transport Company, but it was locked and I went on to the hotel. There were several old men in the bar drinking beer.
“Do you know where I’ll find a man called Peter Trevedian?” I asked one of them.
“Sure. Over to Keithley Creek. He and Jamie McClellan went in early this morning.” I would have to wait.
I had just sat down at one of the marble-topped tables when a bell rang in the depths of the hotel and the Chinaman came to tell me dinner was ready. As I got to my feet, a man pushed open the street door and came in. He was short and dark, with black hair and a smooth, coppery skin.
“Hiya, Mac,” he said, and he came forward to the bar, a cheerful smile on his face that disclosed the even Line of very white teeth. He carried a leather grip, and the backs of his hands were marked with the dark purple of burns.
Old Mac got to his feet and shook his hand. “It’s grand to see you, Boy.” There was real pleasure in the old man’s voice. “Jean was only saying the other day it was time you came back for your trucks.”
“Are they through to the hoist yet?”
“Not quite. But they’ll no be long now. Creasy’s working through the fall right this minute.” Mac shook his head. “It was bad luck, that fall. How did you make out this winter?”
The other grinned. “Oh, not too bad. Went wildcatting with a hunch of hoodlums up in the Little Smoky country. Have you got a room for me? I guess I’ll stay up here now until the hoist’s working and I can get my trucks down.”
“Aye, there’s room for ye. And ye’re just in time for dinner.”
“Well, thanks, but I thought I’d go and scrounge a meal off Jean.”
“Ye think the lass has been pining for ye, eh?” The old man poked him in the ribs.
“I wouldn’t know about that,” the other grinned. “But I’ve been pining for her.”
Their laughter followed me as I went through into the kitchen. When Mac came in, I asked him who the newcomer was. “That was Boy Bladen,” he said.
“Bladen?”
“Aye. He’s the laddie who did the survey up in the Kingdom last summer.”
Bladen! “Bladen was keen — as keen as Stuart.” — I could hear old Roger Fergus’ words still. It seemed that providence had delivered Bladen into my hands for the sole purpose of discovering the truth about that survey.
“— and he had to abandon all his equipment, leave it up in the Kingdom all winter,” old Mac was saying. “You saw that fall they were clearing when you went up the road today?” I nodded. “Well, that happened just before he was due to come down.” He shook his head sadly. “That’s tough on a boy, all his capital locked up in a place like that.”
“About that survey,” I said. “Did my grandfather know the result of it?”
“No. He went and died while the letter containing the report was waiting for him down here in my office. It would just about have killed him anyway.”