High Stand

by Hammond Innes

  He didn’t say anything, and his eyes dropped, one hand under his arm abstractedly scratching himself.

  ‘Did she write you she was coming?’

  He shook his head, his eyes shifting to the window.

  ‘But you knew she was coming.’

  ‘Yes.’ He finished his drink and got slowly to his feet, putting the empty can down and reaching into a drawer stuffed with papers. She hadn’t written to him. She had cabled him. He handed me the flimsy. It was addressed to a box number in Whitehorse. It gave her date of arrival and flight number and asked him to meet her either at the airport or the Sheffield. PLEASE ARRANGE VISIT ICE COLD MINE. MIRIAM HALLIDAY. ‘That’s when I first saw her, at the airport.’

  ‘But you didn’t talk to her then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about the visit to the mine - did you fix that?’

  ‘Yep. She went in with a guy who works a claim on a neighbouring creek. I fixed that for her at the airport. Bit of luck, he was there to pick up some radio spares.’

  ‘An Italian.’

  He nodded. Tony Tarasconi. She was staying at Lakeside Lodge. He picked her up from there and took her in.’

  ‘You fixed that for her, at the airport. But you didn’t make yourself known to her, though you were there and she had asked you to meet her. What were you afraid of?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He said it quickly, his eyes darting. ‘I told you — I was worried about the future. I couldn’t face it, not then.’

  ‘So when did you finally talk with her?’

  ‘Later. I spoke to her later.’

  ‘After she’d been to the mine?’

  ‘Yep.’

  I handed back the cable slip, wondering what had made him change his mind. ‘I’ll be going up to the mine myself,’ I said and an expression almost of hostility showed for an instant in his dark eyes.

  ‘What for?’ He stared at me. ‘There’s nobody there, nothing — only the equipment. Anything you want to know I can tell you right here. Any questions about production, how much it would cost to move the screening plant and have a try up the Stone Slide Gully.’ It was clear he didn’t want me there. But why? ‘I tried to persuade Tom to have a go at Stone Slide, but he wouldn’t. I guess he was finding things difficult by then. Financially, I mean. We’ve cut right back. Everything we can, so no point your going there.’ And he added, ‘It’s bad going at any time, but after all the rain we’ve had -‘

  ‘It’s not the rain,’ I said. ‘It’s something else.’ He shook his head, his face taking on that sullen look, his hands clasped very tight as I told him I was determined to see the mine now that I was here. In the end he agreed to contact the Italian for me. He couldn’t drive me in himself because of his wife. Just why he had been willing to talk to Miriam after she had been to the mine, when he wouldn’t speak to her before, I couldn’t discover. And after she had been to the mine Miriam had only stayed one night at the Sheffield, then in the morning she had taken the train down to Skagway in Alaska.

  ‘And after that?’ I asked. ‘Where was she going after Skagway?’

  He gave a little shrug and shook his head. ‘Vancouver, I guess.’ It wasn’t for him to ask her where she was going, and he added that people who went down to Skagway on the old Yukon and White Pass Route railway were usually headed back to Vancouver by the sea route, in which case she would have been taking one of the American ships as far as Prince Rupert, then changing to the BC Ferries service. I suggested she might not have gone straight back to Vancouver. ‘Did she give any indication she wanted to see the forest land her husband had inherited on the west coast of BC?’

  He didn’t say anything, a slight shake of the head, that was all.

  I asked him then about Brian, whether he had ever met him. ‘No,’ he said. And then, after a pause: ‘Tom wanted him to come out. He said so several times. But Brian never came. First he was in Peru, then India, I think.’ The eagerness of his reply made it obvious he was glad my questioning had switched away from Miriam. Tom thought he’d be interested in the spruce forests here, but I got the impression that what his son was really interested in was people - people in trouble, I mean. Like the Peruvian Indians, or those being exterminated by the destruction of the Amazon rain forest.’ He saw I was surprised and quick as a flash he said, ‘You see, Mr Redfern, we’re not ignorant of what goes on in the world even if we are just a handful of people on the edge of the North Polar Sea. There’s plenty of magazines and we’ve all the time in the world to read - a good library, too.’ He was smiling then and for a fleeting moment he seemed suddenly more relaxed as I asked him about Tom Halliday’s interest in the forestry land. ‘Did he talk about it?’

  ‘He may have done.’ And he added, ‘I don’t know. I can’t remember.’

  ‘Did he ever go down there? Before coming to see you at the mine, or after?’

  ‘He may have done.’ He gave a quick little laugh. ‘Not much interested myself, you see. Trees are all right for shoring and sluicing, building a log cabin. But if you’re a mining man like me you tend to think of them as something that’s got to be cleared out of the way before you start shovelling the dirt.’

  ‘You don’t think he was paying for the continued operation of the mine out of the sale of timber?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know - about his business affairs, I mean.’ He said it quickly, getting up and going to the cupboard for another beer. ‘Sure you won’t change your mind?’

  I shook my head, watching him and wondering why he was suddenly nervous again.

  He snapped the ring seal and took a pull at the can, standing in front of the window, his feet apart, one hand clasped on the bright red elastic of his braces, staring out at the rain. ‘He was a rich man, wasn’t he?’ He looked at me then, his eyes brown and worried under the dark puckers of his brow. I realized then that he wanted confirmation of that. ‘He was rich, wasn’t he? I mean, when he came up here, he’d hire planes, anything he wanted, throwing money about…’ His voice trailed away.

  ‘He was broke,’ I said, thinking it best to tell him the worst straight out. ‘When he disappeared -‘ I stopped. ‘You do know that he’s disappeared, don’t you?’

  He had sat down again, his hands clutching at the beer as though he desperately needed something to hold on to. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, his voice so muted I hardly heard his reply. But of course Miriam would have told him. And then he said, ‘I heard it on the radio. Late one night. It was on television, too. Just the announcement that he’d gone missing. Didn’t see it myself, but the radio said something about financial trouble. It was a hell of a shock, I can tell you, always thinking of him as being so rich - until these last few months, that is.’

  ‘And it was on the media.’ I hadn’t expected the man’s disappearance to be news up here in the far north.

  ‘The mine, you see. Anything to do with mining is news here and he was quite a guy. You talk to the fellers up at the airport who fly the Kluane, they thought the world of him, so did Kevin McKie and some of the others around Dezadeash and the Lakeside Lodge.’

  ‘Do you mean he impressed them, or was he a popular figure up here?’

  ‘Oh, he was real popular — everyone he met, they liked him.’

  ‘So if he’d come over here he would have been recognized instantly.’

  He hesitated, the dark eyes suddenly wary. ‘Sure. If he’d flown in to Whitehorse, the buzz would have been half over town in no rime. Most of them up at the airport knew him.’

  So he wasn’t here. I had vaguely hoped… but the RCMP would have known and they would have notified our local police. Perhaps his son was right and he was dead. ‘Has Brian Halliday been in touch with you?’ I asked, thinking that perhaps he hadn’t headed for the Cascades, but had come up here, as Miriam had done, to see the mine for himself.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s not in the Yukon?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘And he hasn’t written to you?’

&
nbsp; ‘No.’

  All the time I had been talking to him, from the moment I had knocked on the door of his trailer, I had been conscious of a block, a lack of openness. He hadn’t volunteered anything. Maybe it was the north. I was used to a different kind of people. If he were part Indian, that might account for the secretiveness. But not the nervousness. Human nature couldn’t be all that different up here, even allowing for a racial mix. The man was on edge. And yet he had been perfectly open about the mine. He’d answered my questions about that quite freely, but he hadn’t wanted me to go there. Why? What had he got to hide? ‘You mentioned a gully,’ I said. ‘Stone Slide.’

  He nodded.

  ‘You think there’s gold there?’

  ‘There’s traces. That’s all I know.’ And then his eyes suddenly brightened, his voice rising on a note of excitement as he said, ‘But there’s gold there, sure.’ And he went on to explain how the bed of Ice Cold Creek swung away into a narrow valley with benched sides, and at the point where it swung away an old stream bed came in from the right that was all boulders, the mountain beyond gashed by a slide that had opened up a gully big as Hastings Street in the middle of Vancouver… ‘I’ve panned there, in a silted pool after heavy rain brought water flooding through the gully. There’s gold there all right. Now, if you could persuade -‘ He stopped there, a sudden wary look. That’s the way we should have gone. The mountain above is heavily benched, the slide cutting right across the benches. Seven, eight years ago, that’s when we reached the Stone Slide junction, but the consultant Tom called in said the prospect was too small. He advised continuing on up the main valley, so we kept to the Creek and in no time at all we were screening double the amount of rock and silt for the same yield.’ He hesitated, staring past me to the window. ‘We got most all of a million dollars’ worth of equipment up there, just rotting its guts out. Now if you were to talk somebody into moving the screening plant back down to the junction with Stone Slide - Mrs Halliday, whoever it is that’s got the necessary cash …’

  He was still talking about his dream of taking a ‘flyer’, as he put it, at the gully area when Jim Edmundson came back for me. He didn’t get out of the cab, just wound down his window. ‘Hey, Jonny,’ he called, ‘you got a caretaker up at that mine of yours?’

  ‘Caretaker? How d’you mean?’ He looked startled. ‘Who says I got a caretaker up there?’

  ‘Matt Lloyd. He was down at Dezadeash a few days back.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Two men from across the border. They spent a night at Lakeside Lodge. Hunters, they said, but Kevin didn’t like the look of them, so he phoned the RCMP post at Haines Junction. Mart’s report says they had game licences and one of our people went up the Ice Cold and Squaw Creeks to check they hadn’t been hunting inside of Kluane National Park.’

  ‘Ice Cold is just outside the Kluane boundary.’

  ‘Sure. But he thought they might be shacked up there as a convenient stepping-off point for hunting expeditions into Park territory. In fact, as he drove past your screening plant he thought he saw somebody moving up by the hut where you have the table that does the final screening. Nobody answered his calls but there were fresh footprints in the mud by the latrine, and by the doorway of the bunk hut.’

  ‘The huts are all locked,’ Epinard said quickly.

  ‘Yes, they were locked.’

  ‘You say he thought he saw somebody. If he caught only a glimpse, then it could have been a trick of the light, a bird or a deer. We get deer up there.’

  ‘That doesn’t explain the footprints.’

  ‘Could have been those hunters.’

  Edmundson nodded. ‘Could be.’ He turned to me. ‘You ready? As it is, it’ll be just about dark before we get in.’

  I suggested to Epinard that he get the Italian to take me up to the mine. He said he’d try, but he didn’t sound very sure. ‘If not, I’ll drive in on my own,’ I told him as I climbed into the Parks truck.

  He stepped out into the rain then. ‘I wouldn’t do that. The track will be thick with mud, very tricky. Some nasty drops, and after all this rain …’ His voice was lost in the roar of the engine. ‘I’ll be at the Lodge tomorrow night,’ I yelled to him as we pulled away, leaving him standing there in the rain, his eyes wide, his mouth open as though shouting something.

  A few miles and we were at the junction of the Klondike Highway where it follows the Yukon River north to Dawson. We headed west past the tiny settlement of Takhini Crossing. We were on dirt then, the tyres thrumming on the hard, impacted surface, the windscreen wipers flicking back and forth. Ahead of us, the Alaska Highway ran like a great swordthrust, the spruce a black wall on either side, the occasional log cabin surrounded by wheel tracks in a muddy clearing, a horse or two grazing on the broad road verge, that was all, the telegraph poles either fallen or leaning drunkenly without wires, the glimpse of reflector dishes at intervals marking the microwave technology that had superseded them, and the rain incessant.

  Hardly a vehicle passed us, the clouds low and driving curtains of cloud mist blotting everything out except the endless black of the spruce on either side. The truck’s cabinet was overheated and my eyes became heavy with staring into the void ahead, the white posts of the distance markers sliding past, the emptiness and the loneliness of the country taking hold. I began to have an odd feeling that Tom Halliday was with me, that we were in some way linked together. He would have come down this road, heading for Dezadeach and Dalton’s Post, going up to the mine to fish the Creek or stalk moose in the flats.

  He may have been a bit of a playboy, but he was still a part of this country. Epinard had made that clear, so now did Jim Edmundson: ‘Most everybody around here knows about Josh Halliday and the Ice Cold mine.’ And he had told me something then that Tom had never mentioned. A few years after his father had struck gold at Ice Cold Creek he had started taking it out through Dawson instead of Haines. This was when Silver City, the trading post at the head of Lake Kluane, was booming on the back of the placer gold fields of the Kluane Lake district. ‘You can still see the log buildings,’ he said, ‘the old smithy, the lines of stabling, the roadhouse, and the barracks of the North West Mounted Police, which was what the Mounties were called then.’ It was just north of Silver City that he’d run across Lucky Carlos Despera again. There’d been a fight and he had left him lying unconscious where the trail ran close above the lake. Later he had gone back with some friends and found Despera’s body lying in the water.

  ‘Dead?’ I asked him.

  ‘Yup. And the story is Despera had a daughter, by some Indian woman he’d been going with. She was born after his death and Josh Halliday sent the two of them down to Vancouver.’ He looked at me then, a sideways glance - ‘She married an Italian.’ And he had added, very quickly, ‘We got an awful mixture of races out here. There’s Indians, of course, and Scots.’ He laughed. ‘BC was practically run by Scotsmen in the early days. When the Canadian Pacific and the National were pushed through the Rockies - Italians, Poles, Germans, Irish, all sorts of refugees helped to build those railways. Then the mines brought Cornishmen from England, Welsh miners, too.’

  He had already told me that in the plane as we had been coming in to Whitehorse, but it hadn’t meant very much to me then, my mind concentrated on how I was going to handle the mine manager and where I would find him. But now it added to the picture I had of Tom Halliday’s father, so that Tom himself seemed to take on a new dimension.

  I must have dozed off, for my eyes suddenly opened to the sound of Jim’s voice saying something about Champagne. ‘You want to stop for a beer or something? We’re about halfway.’

  ‘I don’t mind. It’s up to you,’ I said. ‘You’re doing the driving.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather keep going. Be dark early tonight.’

  Incredibly there really was a place called Champagne, a huddle of log huts corralled with some trucks in a sea of mud and entered by a timbe
r archway with the name spelled out in large wooden letters. A generator must have been running for there were lights on in two of the huts. And then we were past it, the world empty again, and shortly after that the rain began to strike the windscreen in large blurred spots. It wasn’t sleet and it wasn’t snow, but the speed of our passage made the glass cold enough to freeze it for an instant.

  A truck passed us going fast, four Indians in the back huddled under plastic bags. A sign with a camera design marked a bridge that was a viewpoint for visitors. The rain lifted for a moment, the shadowy shape of white-topped mountains away on either side, the highway running ahead into infinity, the black of the spruce and a solitary horse.

  ‘Another month and this’d be all snow.’

  I nodded, seeing it in my mind, a wilderness of white. ‘Will it be snowing now up at the mine?’ I asked.

  ‘Could be. I don’t know what height it is, but it’s above the timber line, I know that.’

  I tried to picture it deep in snow and myself handling a truck I’d never driven before. Was there really any point in my going up there? Just looking at the mine wouldn’t make any difference to the problems that faced me dealing with Halliday’s affairs.

  ‘That Italian who works a claim on the Squaw, his name’s Tony Tarasconi. Right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’ll be going in with him, I gather.’

  ‘If Epinard can fix it.’

  ‘Something I learned in town this afternoon.’ He hesitated. ‘Maybe just coincidence, but Matt Lloyd thought there might be something in it. He’d been reading up an old police file.’ He glanced at me, then went on, ‘Remember I told you Lucky Carlos Despera’s daughter married an Italian? Well, his name was Tarasconi.’ And he added quickly, ‘Like I say, it may be just coincidence …’ He left it at that, and shortly afterwards we ran into Haines Junction. Seen in the ram and gathering dusk, with the lights glimmering on pools of water, it looked at first glance a dilapidated frontier settlement of wooden shacks and gas stations. But then we turned right, off the highway, and were into the Parks area, a neatly laid-out estate of residential and office buildings.