It was about half a mile from the train station down to the harbor, and a light rain was falling. Bushell hired a cab for the journey; walking so far through drizzle carrying heavy bags did not strike him as an appealing prospect. “Going across to the Queen Charlottes, I’ll lay,” the driver said. “You must have some work with the Royal Navy, eh?”
“You might say that,” Bushell answered.
“I knew it,” the cabman said smugly. “I’m right clever about such things, I am.” He was clever enough, apparently, to be one of the few human beings on the face of the earth who did not recognize Bushell. Happy in momentary anonymity, Bushell said not a word to enlighten him. The ferry, the Northern Lights , was smaller and more elderly than the shiny, modern boats that plied the San Francisco Bay. Only a handful of Bushell’s fellow train passengers boarded the Northern Lights. Most of the men on it wore the bell-bottomed trousers and dark caps of the navy; many of them were muffled in sou’westers or duffel coats against the rain. Their expressions showed them to be less than ecstatic at the prospect of returning to Skidegate.
“To them, Prince Rupert must be bright lights and the big city,” Felix Crooke said. Bushell looked back at the halibut capital of the world. “Poor devils,” he said with feeling. Several of the crewmen of the Northern Lights had coppery skins and black, black hair. Every now and then, as they chattered back and forth with one another, they’d use a word or a phrase that didn’t sound like English. Bushell wondered if they were some of the Haida Indians of whom Kathleen Flannery had spoken. He also wondered what Kathleen was doing. He hoped she’d gone back to Victoria and, when the latest issue of Common Sense arrived in her mailbox, had thrown it straight into the wastepaper basket.
The ferryboat let out a deafening blast from its steam whistle and then, black coal smoke pouring out of its stacks, pulled away from the pier. It steamed around the southern tip of Digby Island and then west across the Hecate Strait toward Skidegate.
Most of the sailors went below; for them, the ocean was a place to work, not something conducive to sightseeing. A couple, perhaps men who had indulged too strenuously in the fleshpots of Prince Rupert (if such there were), leaned far over the lee rail and rid themselves of what ailed them. The passage did not strike Bushell as particularly choppy. He’d expected worse in the northern Pacific. As the morning advanced, the sun began to break through the low clouds. Samuel Stanley pointed northward. “Look, there’s an aeroplane,” he said.
One of the ferry’s crewmen said, “Nothing to be surprised at, sir, not up here. You’ll see ‘em all the time, coming back from patrol off the Alaskan coast. They have a field on Digby Island, and another not far from Skidegate, too.”
“Ever see any Russian aeroplanes?” Bushell asked as the biplane Stanley had spotted buzzed away toward the east.
“I haven’t myself, sir,” the sailor answered, “but I hear tell they’ve landed at our fields a time or two, when they had engine trouble and couldn’t get home. They fly patrol same as we do, after all; I reckon our flying machines have used their fields every once in a while, too. Up here, the wind and the ocean are worse enemies than the Russians and us are to each other.”
That’s what you think. Bushell, Stanley, and Crooke met one another’s eyes, each with the same thing in his mind. None of them spoke.
Luncheon was more halibut, baked or steamed. Not long afterwards, the Queen Charlotte Islands came into sight in the west: a low, gray-green line rising up between sea and sky.
“You can see both the biggest islands from here,” a seaman said. “That’s Graham - where we’re going to the north and Moresby to the south. Just looks like one, though, because Skidegate Inlet narrows down to a narrow little channel between them. You don’t want to sail there unless you have charts and you’re with someone who knows the local waters. It’s never the same twice, on account of the tides.”
Bushell had no interest in sailing narrow tidal channels, nor indeed in sailing of any sort. As far as he was concerned, ships were utilitarian conveyances designed to take him from hither to yon when yon happened to lie across more water than he felt like swimming. But he let the crewman rattle on; policemen soon figured out that you couldn’t tell in advance when you’d learn something useful. The fellow pointed ahead. “There’s Skidegate Village, where a lot of the Haida live.” He chuckled.
“One of my great-grandmothers was Haida, though you wouldn’t guess it from my blue eyes. If you look sharp now, you can see a couple of totem poles standing in front of the houses. Skidegate proper’s at the end of the spit of land, a mile or so south of the Haida village. You can spy the navy ships at anchor there.”
“Yes, I see them.” Bushell nodded. “I’d think they’d base them in the far north of the island, to keep watch on the Russians.”
“There’s torpedo boats and such up at Masset,” the crewman answered, “but the harbor there’s not deep enough to let large warships come in.”
Next to the corvettes and the looming bulk of an armored cruiser, the Northern Lights seemed even smaller and dingier than she really was. As the ship tied up at the dock, Navy men shouldered duffel bags and resignedly, queued up by the gangplank, then filed off the ferry. Struggling with their luggage, the three RAMs followed.
“Where now?” Samuel Stanley asked, setting down his bags with a grunt of relief.
“Hotel first, or whatever passes for one here,” Bushell said. “Then the local constabulary - there won’t be a RAM station - and then the naval commandant. And after that” - he let out a long breath of anticipation -”the post office.”
Getting to the Skidegate Lodge proved no problem. Cabmen fell with glad cries on everyone not wearing navy blue who disembarked from the Northern Lights. The driver who took the RAMs to the hotel chattered on about the theft of The Two Georges , and seemed indignant when his passengers replied only in monosyllables. “Up here, by heaven, we care about our country, we do,” he declared.
“Down south, you ask me, they take it for granted.”
“God save the King-Emperor,” Bushell said, and still would not talk about the case. Skidegate, he saw as the cabby took him and his companions through it, was a town whose principal function was to serve the local Navy base and to separate sailors and Royal Marines from their money as enjoyably as possible. It abounded in grogshops, dance halls, and, for those who had already spent their money but still had other chattels, pawnshops. Most of the people on the sidewalks wore navy blue, and most of the rest Marine khaki; the cab rolled past several detachments of truncheon-toting military policemen in white armbands. The truncheons notwithstanding, the redcaps always seemed to travel in groups of two or more.
The Skidegate Lodge was apparently the hotel in town. A stuffed bald eagle glared at Bushell with eyes of amber glass from its perch on the registration counter. His first thought was of the Independence Party flag, which made suspicion flare in him. But a great many eagles soared majestically over Skidegate and rooted, less majestically, in the rubbish pitch at the edge of the naval base. He decided he was overreacting - the bird did make a splendid trophy.
Seeing him eye it, the desk clerk asked, “Will you be going hunting, sir? Game laws say you can’t shoot an eagle within five miles of the town limits, and they’re strictly enforced.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Bushell said, not directly answering the question. “Have you a town telephone directory I might see?”