The little man nodded and began to squirm away.
‘Ese tnensaje. De donde lo consiguio? Quien les mando?’ He repeated the question several times. Then suddenly he went over to the fire, selected a half-burned length of wood and turned back to Lopez, who screamed, ‘No. No. No lo haga usted.’ ‘You can’t do it.’ My voice sounded hoarse.
He rounded on me then, his eyes blazing — ‘So her life doesn’t rate against this little rat. You don’t care — ‘ I started to protest, but he interrupted, speaking very quietly — ‘All right then. Let’s see you do it.’ And he held the glowing brand out to me. ‘Better still, pick the little shit up and dump him in the fire. Well?’ He laughed, watching me. ‘So you don’t care where she is. Well, I do — ‘ And he turned, thrusting the ember down towards the man’s face.
‘No lo se, no lo se.’ Lopez was suddenly pouring out an incomprehensible spate of words. He had rolled over and was facing Camargo. Tom joined in, a babble of voices, the three of them all talking at once, their faces lit by the glow of that ember, and I just stood there. I wasn’t thinking of the two men lying on the ground. I was thinking of Tom, what he had been through to bring him to this pitch of desperation… And Miriam. What the hell had he got himself mixed up in, that two gunmen had come north to the Yukon looking for him, bringing him that note from his wife. Bogota … There was Lopez mentioning it again, the big man answering him. Bogota was Colombia, and Colombia was the land of Raleigh’s Eldorado. ‘What are they saying? Where is she?’
Tom shook his head, turning away in disgust. ‘He doesn’t know.’ He tossed the ember back into the fire. ‘Neither of them know.’ His voice sounded bitter and despondent. ‘Let’s get going. You got the key of their truck?’
‘No.’
He bent over Camargo, searching his pockets. Tony began to slip away into the shadows, but he stopped him. The keys of your truck, too.’ He took them and stood for a moment staring down at the two Colombians. They were hired in Bogota and flew up to San Francisco. That’s where they were given Miriam’s note. In a bar down by Fisherman’s Wharf. A man they’d never seen before and he didn’t give his name. Handed them the note and gave them verbal instructions, details of an account they could draw on at the Bank of Canada office in Vancouver, and that’s about all they can tell us, except that they were to report my movements; yours, too, if you came up here.’ He turned to Tony. ‘You’re coming with us. A nice long walk, and while you’re walking, and those two hoodlums are chewing on their ropes, you can be thinking about the Gully and how it’s got you into dangerous company, eh?’ He was laughing.
‘Who do they report to?’ I asked.
‘Just a telephone number.’ He repeated it and I wrote it down, a Bella Coola number.
‘No name?’
‘No.’
‘And the people who hired them didn’t say why they were being sent up here?’
He shook his head. ‘They don’t know anything.’ He was standing there, looking dazed. And yet it seemed obvious. ‘It’s the Gully they want. Isn’t that right?’ I asked. ‘That second claim your father acquired.’ But it was beyond belief that he should have become mentally unbalanced and disappeared, all because the mine he’d lived on all his life had run out of gold, when he had a second mine still undeveloped.
‘Gold?’ He stared at me as though he couldn’t believe it. Then he was laughing again, quite uncontrollably, the sound of it echoing back from the rocks above, and his voice, half-merged with the murmur of water in the creek bed, saying, ‘So it’s true — Miriam didn’t write to you from Vancouver; you really don’t know.’
PART III
1
That drive down the Ice Cold track was in keeping with all the rest of the night, a nightmare ride that in the final stages required all my powers of concentration to stay awake and keep driving. Tom led the way in Tarasconi’s old Ford. For the first ten miles or so I can’t remember anything very much other than the track and the rear lights of the truck ahead bucking and swerving, and myself fighting the gears of the big Chevrolet I had been landed with, bouncing up and down, the front wheels slithering wildly in the ruts, juddering and grinding against the mudguards in the rough stony sections. I was dimly aware that Tom was driving hellishly fast; conscious, too, of the heat in the cab and myself sweating with the effort of keeping up with him in a strange vehicle, but it didn’t occur to me that there was anything odd about it. I just put his speed down to the fact that he was a very accomplished driver.
But then, after he had dropped Tarasconi off, telling him he could either walk back up to Ice Cold and set the two gunmen free or walk out to the highway and thumb a ride up to the Lodge — ‘I advise the Lodge. You’ll find your truck there and you can get some food and think out what you’re going to do about your friends at the mine.’ This was shouted at Tarasconi. ‘But I tell you this, you’ll never get the Gully. Not now.’ And he slammed the truck into gear and went careering off down the track.
I remember Tarasconi’s face, caught in the glare of my headlights, a look of confusion, fear, and hate — yes, hate. It was there in his eyes, glimpsed for a moment. He yelled something as I passed him, and then he was gone, a lonely, pathetic-looking figure swallowed by the night.
It was after that I began to notice the erratic behaviour of the truck ahead. By then I think I was becoming accustomed to the vehicle I was driving so could spare a thought for what was happening in front of me; also, of course, Tom was now on his own. The track became steeper. It was the section where it looked like the bed of a stream, all stone with a drop to the left that was covered with scrub. I had closed up and my headlights showed the whole rear of the pick-up, so that I could follow its course as it meandered from side to side. Tom’s driving was like that of a man half-asleep. My own eyes had felt heavy-lidded, but now I was wide awake. Stones and boulders gave way to mud, my wheels locking as I braked. I changed down quickly and an instant later I saw the truck ahead slithering almost sideways. He got it under control, but then it happened again, and he didn’t correct in time. The left front wheel mounted the edge of the track, careered along it for a moment, then slipped over onto the slope, the cab tilting, the chassis bellying down, tipping slowly over onto its side.
I had stopped by then and I sat watching it slide and crash down into some stunted aspen, snapping the thin boles until finally it came to rest, hanging there.
It didn’t catch fire, and after a moment Tom clambered out, apparently unhurt. He called to me, but the sound of my engine drowned his words. He staggered around for a moment like a man drunk, then he stood still, staring up at me, his face pale and his hair, almost white, standing up in a thick brush. Finally he clambered up onto the side of the cab, yanked open the door again and reached in for his things.
It was some time before I realized he was suffering from shock as well as the after-effects of drugs. Fatigue probably came into it as well. He had been so hipped-up and excited when confronting those men, no wonder his driving had been erratic. I had to help him up the slope, he was so weak. And when I had got him into the cab of my vehicle, he went out like a light, his face so pale I thought at first he had fainted.
In fact, he was asleep, and he didn’t wake up until we reached the lower ford across the Squaw. Dawn was showing a faint glimmer above Dalton’s Post, the trees black in silhouette beyond the creek, the water and the banks of stone and silt no more than a grey blur. I had to shake him really hard before he was conscious enough to guide me across the fording place, and he was asleep again before I had reached the further bank, his head rolling and nodding like some broken doll as my wheels ground their way over the rocks and boulders of the river bed and the water swirled up to the bonnet, seeping under the door and sloshing around the floor of the cab.