The Land God Gave to Cain (20 page)

“He'll have to wait till we've dumped the empty steel wagons,” the foreman said. “The train'll be backing up to clear the cut any minute now.”

“Well, see if you can get your speeder on the track and parked down the line before they start. Otherwise, you won't get started for an hour or more.”

“Okay, Mr. Shelton.” The man headed for the door and pushed his way through the group gathered about the swill bin. Shelton stopped to have a word with one or two of the other men seated at the table, and by the time he reached the door the men were leaving the diner in a steady stream.

“Could I have a word with you in private?” I asked. “It's important.”

He was pushing his way through the men, but he stopped then. “What's it about?”

“I had a reason for coming up here,” I said. “If I could explain to you …”

“You explain to Alex Staffen. I got other things to worry about.”

“It's a matter of life and death,” I said urgently.

“So's this railroad. I'm laying steel and winter's coming on.” He forced his way through the doorway. “People like you,” he said over his shoulder, “are a Goddamned nuisance.”

I didn't have another chance to make him listen to me. We were out on the platform now, and as we reached the door to the track a voice called up, “That you, Dave?” The earth of the cut was yellow in the lights of the train and there were men moving about below us, dark shapes with here and there the glow of a cigarette. “They want you on the radio,” the voice added. “It's urgent.”

“Hell!” Shelton said. “Who is it?”

“They didn't say. But it's Two-two-four and they're asking for the figure for track laid to-day and a schedule of shifts worked.…”

“Okay, I'll come.”

“Sounds like the General Manager's there,” the foreman said. “He was due at Two-two-four to-day, wasn't he, Dave?”

“That's right. And one of the directors, too. I guess they're going to turn the heat on again.” And he added, “Christ Almighty! We're laying more than one and a half miles a day already. What more do they expect?”

“I guess two miles would sound better in their ears,” the foreman muttered dryly.

“Two miles! Yeah, that'd be sweet music. But the men can't lay it that fast.”

“You could try paying them a bonus.”

“It's not me. It's the Company. Still, with the freeze-up due …” Shelton hesitated. “Yeah, well, maybe it's an idea.” He turned to me. “You wait here in the diner. And you better wait with him, Pat,” he told the foreman. And he jumped out and disappeared up the track.

The men were streaming out of the diner now and the gang foreman and I stood back to let them pass. I wondered whether it was worth trying to explain to him about Briffe being alive, but one glance at his wooden features told me it wouldn't be any good. He hadn't the authority to help me, anyway.

In fact, at that moment I think I had lost the will to do anything more. Now that instructions about me had been sent up from Base, there didn't seem any point. The whole organisation had probably been alerted, and in that case there was nothing I could do. And yet I would like to have talked with Darcy. Perkins had said he knew more about Labrador than anyone else on the line, and there were things I wanted to know, things that perhaps he could have told me.

“Go on back to the diner,” the foreman said. “It'll be warmer in there.” The stream of men had thinned and he pushed me forward. I checked to let two men come out, and as they reached the exit door, a voice from the track called up, “Take this, will you?” One of them reached down, grabbed hold of a suitcase and dropped it on the platform almost at my feet.

I don't know what made me bend down and look at it—something about its shape maybe or perhaps subconsciously I had recognised the voice. At any rate, I did, and then I just stood there, staring at it stupidly. It was my own suitcase, the one I'd left in the bunkhouse train ten miles down the line when I'd jumped Lands' speeder.

And then I heard Lands' voice, outside on the track. “Okay, but we can't do that till we've seen Dave. Anyway, I want to get a radio message through to Two-sixty-three. My guess is …” The rest was drowned in a prolonged hoot from the locomotive. And when it ceased abruptly I heard somebody say, “Why bring Darcy into it?” And Lands answered impatiently, “Because they're all construction men up there. They got a target on that grade. Ray's the only guy with a vehicle who's got the time.…”

I didn't hear any more and I guessed he'd turned away. Peering out, I could see his padded bulk moving off up the train. There was somebody with him, but I couldn't see who it was for he was in the shadows, close under the next coach.

“What are you up to?” The foreman's hand gripped my arm.

“Nothing,” I said. I was wondering whether it was Laroche I'd seen in the shadow there.

“Well, come on into the diner.”

I hesitated. “That was Lands,” I said.

“Bill Lands?” He had let go of my arm. “Well, what if it was? You know him?”

I nodded. I was thinking that I'd nothing to lose. If I went to Lands now, of my own accord, maybe he'd listen to me. I might even convince him there was a chance Briffe was still alive. At least the responsibility would be his then. I'd have done all I could. And if Laroche were there, then perhaps Lands would see for himself that the man was half out of his mind. “I'd like a word with Lands,” I said.

The foreman looked at me with a puzzled frown. He hadn't expected that and he said, “Does he know you're up here?”

“Yes,” I said. And I added, “I came up on his speeder.”

That seemed to impress him. “Well, you'll have to wait till Dave Shelton gets back. Ask him.” And he added, “You a newspaper man?”

“No.” And because I felt that it would do no harm for him to know why I was here, I said, “I came up the line on account of that plane that crashed. You remember?”

He nodded. “Sure I remember.”

I had aroused his curiosity now, and I said, “Well, Briffe's still alive.”

“Still alive?” He stared at me. “How the hell could he be? They searched for a week and then the pilot came out with the news that the other two were dead. I heard all about it from Darcy, when he was down here a few days back, and he said the guy was lucky to be alive.”

“Well, Briffe may be alive, too,” I said.

“Briffe? You crazy?”

I saw the look of absolute disbelief in his eyes and I knew it was no good. They were all convinced Briffe was dead—this man, Lands, all of them. Shelton would be the same. And Darcy. What about Darcy? He'd been with Laroche for an hour—all the way up to Two-ninety. Would Darcy think I was crazy, too? “I'd like to talk to Lands,” I said again, but without much hope.

And then the locomotive hooted again, two short blasts. “You'll have to wait,” the foreman said. “We're gonna back up clear of the cut now.”

There was a clash of buffers and the coach jerked into motion, the yellow sides of the cut sliding past the open door. It came to me in a flash then that this was my chance. If I were going to contact Darcy, I'd have to make the attempt now. But I hesitated, wondering whether it was worth it. And then I looked down at my suitcase, resting there right at my feet. I think it was the suitcase that decided me. Unless Lands or Laroche had removed them, it contained my father's log books. At least I'd have those to show Darcy, and I felt suddenly that I was meant to go on, that that was why the suitcase was there. It was a sign.

I suppose that sounds absurd, but that was the way I felt about it.

The clatter of the wheels over the rail joints was speeding up, the sides of the cut slipping by faster, and I reached for the suitcase. “What are you doing with that?” The foreman's voice was suspicious.

“It happens to be my suitcase,” I said. I saw the look of surprise on his face, and then I jumped. It was a standing jump, but I put all the spring of my leg muscles into it, and it carried me on to the side of the cut where the ground was softer. I hit it with my body slack, my shoulder down, the way I'd been taught in the Army during National Service, and though it knocked the breath out of my body and I rolled over twice, I wasn't hurt.

As I scrambled to my feet, I saw the foreman leaning out of the coach door, shouting at me. But he didn't jump. He'd left it too late. The locomotive went by me with a roar, and in the light from the cab I found my suitcase. The rail transporters followed, finally the Burro crane, and after that the track was clear and it was suddenly dark.

I stood quite still for a moment, listening. But all I could hear was the rumble of the train as it ran back out of the cut. No voices came to me out of the night, no glimmer of a cigarette showed in the darkness ahead. All that seething crowd of men seemed to have been spirited away, leaving a black, empty void through which a cold wind blew. But at least it meant I could keep to the track, and I followed it north, breaking into a run as soon as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

Behind me the sound of the train faded and died, and when I glanced back over my shoulder, it was stationary on the track, a dull glow of light that glinted on the rails. Torches flickered and I thought I heard shouts. But it was half a mile away at least, and I knew I was clear of them.

A few minutes later I reached the end of steel. It was just the empty grade then, no track to guide me, and I stopped running. Behind me the lights of the train had vanished, hidden by the bend of the cut, and with their disappearance the black emptiness of Labrador closed round me. The only sound now was that of the wind whispering dryly through the trees.

The night was overcast, but it didn't matter—not then. The grade rolled out ahead of me, flat like a road and just visible as a pale blur in the surrounding darkness. But it didn't last. It was like that for a mile, maybe two, and then the surface became rougher. There were ruts and soft patches, and a little later I blundered into a heap of fresh-piled gravel.

After that the going was bad. Several times I strayed from the track into the bulldozed roots of trees piled at its edge. And once the ground dropped from under me and I fell a dozen feet or more to fetch up against the half-buried shovel of a grab crane.

I was more careful after that, moving slower. And then I came to another section of completed grade and for about a mile the going was easier again. But again it didn't last.

It was not much more than twenty miles from Head of Steel to Camp 263, but to understand what the going was like, particularly at night in those conditions, I should perhaps explain the general method of grade construction employed by the contractors. It was not a continuing thrust into Labrador as was the case with the steel laying, but a series of isolated operations, spreading north and south and ultimately linking up.

In the initial stages of the project a pilot road—known as the Tote Road—had been constructed all the way from the base at Seven Islands to the iron ore deposits in the neighbourhood of Knob Lake almost 400 miles to the north. This road, which was little more than a track bulldozed out of the bush, followed the general line of the proposed grade, and though it paralleled it in many places, its course was far from straight, since it followed the line of least resistance offered by the country. It was up this road that the heavy equipment had advanced—the drag cranes, grab cranes, bulldozers, tumble-bugs, scrapers, “mule” trucks and fuel tankers.

At the same time that the Tote Road was being constructed, engineers, flown in by float-plane and operating from small tented camps, surveyed and marked out the line of the railway. Airstrips constructed at strategic intervals were then built, and from these focal points construction camps, supplied largely by air lift, were established and gangs of men deployed to build the grade, section by section.

At the time I started north from Head of Steel the overall plan was to push the steel as far as Menihek Dam, at Mile 329, before winter brought work to a virtual standstill. This dam was a shallow one constructed almost entirely from air-lifted supplies where the waters of the ninety-mile Ashuanipi Lake ran into the great Hamilton River. All it needed now was the generators to make it operational, and the whole weight of the contractors' organisation, backed by some hundreds of pieces of heavy equipment, was concentrated on this stretch of the grade.

The effect, so far as I was concerned, was bewildering. A section of completed grade, scraped smooth as a road, would suddenly end in piled heaps of gravel or drop away into the quagmire of an uncompleted fill. The half-finished cuts were full of rock from the day's blasting, and the whole line of the grade was littered with heavy machines that were a death trap in the dark.

Somewhere around midnight the wind died away and everything was preternaturally still—a stillness that had a quality of hostility about it. And then it began to snow, a gentle floating down of large flakes that were wet and clinging. The darkness around me slowly changed to a ghostly white, and once again a completed section of grade petered out and I was stumbling through ridged heaps of sand, keeping by instinct rather than sight to the open swathe that had been bulldozed through the jackpine.

It was shortly after this that the ground abruptly dropped away from me, and I slithered down into the mud of a gulley, where the corrugated metal sheets of a half-completed conduit stood like the whitened bones of a huge whale. It was muskeg here and I knew it was hopeless to try and cross it in the dark. Weary and cold, I paused for a spell, and then I retraced my steps to an opening I had seen in the white wall of the jackpine, and when I found it, I abandoned the grade, dully conscious that I was on some sort of a track.

But the track was little better than the grade. The ground became soft under my feet as I descended into the same shallow depression that had called for a conduit in the grade construction. Patches of water showed dark against the snow, and as I splashed through them, I could hear the soft crunch of the paper-thin layer of ice that had already formed on the surface. And then it was mud, thick and heavy and black, with deep ruts in it where bulldozers had wallowed through.