‘What do you want it for?’ I had a sudden vision of him shooting those two down in cold blood. He had been to the lavatory quite recently and I didn’t know whether he was drugged-up or not. A man brooding like that…
But he just smiled and said, ‘You can keep the ammunition. I just want the gun.’
We clattered over a girder bridge, and as we entered the tunnel I got up. I had never handled an automatic, and fumbling in my case in almost complete darkness I couldn’t find the catch that would release the magazine. He seemed strangely relaxed when I got back to my seat, sitting there smiling to himself, and when I slipped the gun into his hand I saw him fingering it, then he passed me the magazine. ‘Put that in your pocket — for the moment, just to keep your mind at rest.’ And he patted my arm, turning and peering back down the coach. He was checking on the seating position of our two shadows and I didn’t like it.
The tourist route card we had been given indicated a view of the old steel cantilever bridge immediately after the tunnel, also Dead Horse Gulch and the original White Pass trail of ‘98. Then there was another tunnel, the original one, and after that we would be into the Glacier Loop with its series of trestles carrying the line along the mountainsides to the Skagway River crossing and Glacier Station at Mile 14, the miles measured from Skagway port where the building of the railway had begun in 1899.
We emerged into the daylight, the mountaintops lost in cloud, everything shrouded in mist, the bridge and the old track looking weird in the veiled light. A few minutes later there was a muted bellow from the engines up front, then the drum of the wheels became louder and suddenly we were into the next tunnel, the daylight abruptly cut off and Tom getting up and pushing past me. The lights were dim, almost nonexistent, so that he was little more than a shadow as he made his way down the aisle to where the two of them sat by the cast-iron stove. The big man, Camargo, was on his feet. I half rose at the same time, tense and wondering what was going to happen.
But nothing happened. Tom stood there for a moment, leaning slightly forward as though presenting them with something. Then he had turned and was coming back down the aisle. Daylight suddenly, the engines no longer labouring and the brakes hard on as the world dropped away to our right. ‘The Skagway River,’ he said as he slipped past me to his seat by the window.
I caught a glimpse of the steel bridge, an old girder contraption straddled from rock to rock across a ravine. ‘What were you doing?’ I asked.
He was smiling quietly to himself and I suddenly caught a glimpse of the man Miriam had been so attracted by. There was an almost rakish, devil-may-care look about him. ‘What were you expecting, a fight?’ I waited, knowing by the expression on his face that he couldn’t resist telling me. He looked so pleased with himself.
‘I bowed,’ he said. ‘Very formal, very Spanish. Then in their own tongue I said “Creo que estas les pertenecen.” And I handed the guns back to them, holding them by the barrels of course.’ He laughed gently — not that snorting neigh, but a real, genuine laugh of amusement. That was it. They were too surprised to do anything. And now they’re stuck with the things. They can hardly thrust them back at me in broad daylight with a bunch of tourists looking on.’ a And all the way down to Skagway, which we reached just — before four, he was in that same relaxed mood, constantly quoting from his father’s experiences as the train wound slowly down the pass, a great loop by the Denver Glacier trail that showed the track and the bridge high up above us on the mountainside, the brakes grinding all the time, and his voice going on and on about how it had been that winter with thousands of men back-packing the minimum of a ton of gear up through the snow, horses lying dead and dying on the trail, blizzards, disease and exhaustion making the climb to the pass a living hell.
2
Skagway in the late afternoon of that dismal day was as near to the Styx as I shall probably ever get in this lifetime. The rail tracks, depot and sheds, the quay and the waiting ferry, all lay close under beetling cliffs, the bare rock black with the drizzle that was falling, and beyond was the water of Chilkoot Inlet, grey and flat as polished steel, low cloud cutting everything off, a grey curtain that made it seem the end of the world. And Skagway itself, built on the silt flats of the river and hemmed in by the damp slopes on the far side, was a somewhat phoney version of a gold rush town in limbo, boarded sidewalks and wooden buildings that belonged to the dead world of Soapy Smith.
Since we were booked on the ferry to Prince Rupert, and only in transit through Alaska, customs and immigration clearance was little more than a formality. We dumped our bags at an Edwardian hotel and walked along the Broadway until we ran out of shops and houses. The cloud and the damp were all-pervading and our two friends watched us from the shelter of a doorway. Whether they still had the guns Tom had handed back to them I don’t know. He had disposed of the magazines somewhere along the track where the train had crossed a small torrent that ran in from Mount Hefty and the Denver Glacier. Back at the hotel we had a very expensive beer, then went on board, the ferry sailing promptly at 19.45 local time. It was almost dark then and by the time we had had a meal we were docking at Haines, first of the five ports of call on the Panhandle route south.
We had cabins booked and by the time we left, Tom had already turned in. Throughout our cafeteria meal he had seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper into himself so that I was quite glad to be left on my own to wander round the ship. The vehicle deck was still barely half full and the big lounges that would have been crowded in the season looked almost deserted, row upon row of empty seats and only here and there the poorer passengers settling down for the night, our two followers among them. The throb of the engines, the beat of them against the soles of my feet, the knowledge that next day, and the day after, we would be moving through coastal passages that Cook, and later Vancouver who had sailed with him, had first explored — it was all tremendously exciting, and it would probably have remained so all the way to Prince Rupert and on down to Bella Bella if I hadn’t chanced on something that virtually forced Tom Halliday to open up and tell me the whole pitiful and appalling story.
Some time in the early hours of Sunday morning we reached Juneau. We left at five-thirty and when I surfaced a couple of hours later I found many more people in the lounges, Indians as well as Americans in every sort of dress, a queue forming in the cafeteria. We were in fog, the air on deck cold and clammy, the sound of the foghorn echoing back from the shore on either side and occasional glimpses of rock and trees, dark walls on the edge of visibility. Tom stayed in his cabin, and when I went to check that he was all right I found the door locked. He was taking it easy, he said. He had a book and he didn’t want any breakfast. He sounded half asleep, so I left him to it and spent a pleasant day talking to a variety of passengers: a driller from the oil rigs of the North Slope, two loggers from the Charlottes, a citrus fruit farmer from down near Sacramento, California, and a man who had lived half his life on the slopes of Mount St Helens and had been there during the eruption when it had covered half the state of Washington in a grey pall of ash. By lunchtime we were in Petersburg, the fog thinning and the sun breaking through, so that going through the narrows between Mitkof and Kupreanof Islands we were in a milky haze with the forests on either side glimmering almost silver with the moisture that clung to the needles of the trees. Three hours later we were at Wrangell, and at each of the day’s stops one of our South American friends would be watching the passageway that led from Tom’s cabin, the other keeping an eye on me.