I laughed. ‘I’m not in a position to drill a well,’ I said. ‘In any case, you’re the only person who could do that. You own the mineral rights.’
‘Yes. I’d forgotten that.’ He took my glass and returned it with the bottle and his own glass to the cupboard. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘The mineral rights.’ His voice was a barely audible murmur. ‘I wonder why Bladen was so keen; as keen as Stuart.’ His left shoulder twitched in the slightest of shrugs. ‘I’d like to have seen one more discovery well brought in before I died. I’d like to have been able to thumb my nose just once more at all the know-alls in the big companies. There’s oil in the Rocky Mountains.’ He gave a tired laugh. ‘Well, there it is. Winnick is a straight guy. He wouldn’t pull anything on me. You’d best go home, young feller. You want friends around you when you die. It’s a lonely business anyway.’
The nurse came in and said my time was up. I got to my feet. He held out his left hand to me. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you came. If your doctor feller’s right, we’ll maybe meet again soon. We’ll have a good chat then with all eternity ahead of us.’ His eyes were smiling; his lips were tired and twisted.
I went out to my taxi and drove back to the hotel, the memory of that fine old shell of a man lingering with me.
I went up to my room and sat staring at Winnick’s report and thinking of the old man who had been my grandfather’s friend. I could understand him wanting that one final justification of his existence, wanting to prove the experts wrong. I needed the same thing. I needed it desperately. But there was the report and he himself had said Winnick was straight. I think I had already made up my mind to sign the deed of sale. I might have done it there and then and in that event I should not now be writing this story with the snowcapped peaks all around me and winter closing in. Probably I should have been quietly buried away under the frozen sods of Canada. But I was hungry and I pushed the papers into my suitcase and went down to get some lunch. Instead of pocketing the key I handed it in automatically at the desk. By such a trivial act can one’s whole future be changed, for when I came out of the dining-room I had to go to the desk to get it and at the desk was a short, stockily-built man in an airman’s jacket with a friendly face under a sweat-stained stetson. He was checking out and as I stood behind him, waiting, he said to the clerk, ‘If a feller by the name of Jack Harbin asks for me, tell him I’ve gone back to Jasper. He can ring me at my home.’
‘Okay, Jeff,’ the clerk said. ‘I’ll tell him.’
Jasper! Jasper was in the Yellowhead Pass, the Canadian National’s gateway into the Rockies and the Fraser River valley. The Kingdom was barely fifty miles from Jasper as the crow flies. ‘Excuse me. Are you going by car?’ The words were out before I had time to think it over.
‘Yeah.’ He looked me over and then his face crinkled into a friendly smile. ‘Want a ride?’
‘Have you got room for me?’
‘Sure. You can have the front seat and the whole of the back. You’re from the Old Country, I guess.’ He held out his hand. ‘I’m Jeff Hart.’
‘My name’s Wetheral,’ I said as I gripped his hand. ‘Bruce Wetheral.’
‘Okay, Bruce. Make it snappy then. I got to be in Edmonton by tea-time.’
It was all done on the spur of the moment. I didn’t have time to think of Acheson until I was in the big station wagon trundling north out of Calgary, and then I didn’t care. I was moving one step nearer the Kingdom and I was content to let it go at that. The sound of the wheels was lost in the drift of powdery snow that whirled past the windshield and ahead of me the ranchlands rolled away to the horizon. I lay back and relaxed in the warmth of the heater and the steady drone of the engine, listening to Jeff Hart’s gentle, lazy voice giving me a verbal introduction to the province of Alberta.
We reached Edmonton just before six and got a room at the Macdonald. I had moved into another world. Where Calgary was static, an established, respectable town, Edmonton was on the move. The place bustled with life, an exciting, exotic life that had washed up from as far away as Texas and down — from the Yukon and the North West Territories. It flooded through the lobbies of the hotels and out into the streets and cafes — oil men, trappers, prospectors, bush fliers, lumber men, scientists and surveyors. This was the jumping-off place for the Arctic, the first outpost of civilisation on the Alaskan Highway. It had atmosphere, the atmosphere of a frontier town on which an oil boom had been superimposed.
We left after lunch next day and just about four that afternoon we topped a rise on the Jasper road and I got my first glimpse of the Rockies, a solid wall of snow and ice and cold, grey rock, extending north and south as far as the eye could see. The sun was shining bleakly and in the bitter cold the crystal wall glittered and sparked frostily. And over the top of that first rampart rose peaks of ice and black, wind-torn rock.
‘Quite a sight, eh?’ Jeff yawned. ‘You’re seeing them at the right time. They get to look kinda dusty by end of summer.’
We ran down to the stone-strewn bed of the Athabaska and passed the checkpoint that marked the entrance to Jasper National Park. The mountains closed in on us, bleak, wind-torn peaks that poked snouts of grey rock and white snow above the dark timber that covered the lower slopes. Below us the river ran cold and milky from the glaciers. There was tarnished snow on the road now and a nip in the air. Though the sun still shone in a blue sky its warmth seemed unable to penetrate this glacial valley.
But though the place looked gloomy with its dark timbers and grey rock and the dead white of the snow, I felt the excitement of having reached a milestone on the long road I had come. I could see the railway now, twin black lines ruled through the snow climbing in great banking curves to the Yellowhead Pass. This way my grandfather had come, riding with a caravan of ox carts because he was too poor to travel on the newly-opened railroad.
‘Do you know a man called Johnnie Carstairs?’ I asked my companion.
‘Sure. He wrangles a bunch of horses and acts as a packer for the visitors in the summer.’
Jeff Hart dropped me at the hotel. I couldn’t face any food and went straight up to my room. I felt tired and short of breath. Looking in the mirror I was shocked to see how gaunt my face was, the skin white and transparent so that the veins showed through it. The stubble of my beard, by contrast, appeared a metallic blue. I lay down on the bed, lit a cigarette and pulled from my pocket the only map I had so far been able to acquire — the Esso road map for Alberta and British Columbia. It was already creased and torn for I had acquired it at Canada House in London and all the way over I had been constantly referring to it.
I knew it almost by heart. Through the double glass of the window I could just see the peak of Mount Edith Cavell, a solitary pinnacle of ice and snow. Like a cold finger it pointed into the chill blue of the sky, a warning that my legacy was no soft one. Campbell’s Kingdom was little more than 60 miles due west as the crow flies. Lying there, feeling the utter exhaustion of my body, I wondered whether I should ever get there.
I must have dropped off into a sort of coma, for I woke up to find Jeff Hart bending over me, shaking me by the shoulders. ‘Christ! You gave me a turn,’ he said. ‘Thought you’d never come round. You all right?’
‘Yes,’ I murmured and forced myself to swing my feet off the bed. I sat there for a minute, panting and feeling the blood hammering in my ears.
‘Would you like me to fetch a doctor?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Well, you don’t look it. You look like death.’
‘I’m all right,’ I gasped, fighting for breath. ‘How high up are we here?’
‘About three thousand five hundred.’ He was bending over me, peering at me. ‘You look real bad, Bruce.’