Bagley, Desmond - Landslide

by Landslide

  I reassured her and bumped up the track in the jeep and made Fort Farrell by late morning. McDougall was pottering about his cabin, and looked at me with a knowing eye. "You look pretty bushy-tailed," he said. "Made your fortune yet?"

  "Just about," I said, and told him what had happened with Howard and Dormer.

  I thought he'd go into convulsions. He gasped and chortled and stamped his foot, and finally burst out with: "You mean you made six hundred thousand bucks just for insulting Howard Matterson? Where's my coat? I'm going down to the Matterson Building right away."

  I laughed. "You're dead right." I gave him the contract. "See that gets to Howard -- but don't part with it until you get a duplicate signed by him. And you'd better check it word for word."

  "You're damned right I will," said Mac. "I wouldn't trust that bastard as far as I could throw a moose. What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going up to the dam," I said. "It seems to worry Howard. What's been happening up there?"

  "The dam itself is just about finished; they closed the sluices a couple of days ago and the lake has started to fill up." He chuckled. 'They've had trouble bringing the generator armatures in; those things are big and heavy and they didn't find them too easy to manage. Got stuck in the mud right outside the power-house, so I hear."

  "I'll have a look," I said. "Mac, when you're in town I want you to do something. I want you to spread the word that I'm the guy who survived the accident which killed the Trinavants."

  He chuckled. "I get it -- you're putting the pressure on. Okay, I'll spread the word. Everybody in Fort Farrell will know you are Grant by sundown."

  "No," I said sharply. "You mention no names. Just say that I'm the guy who survived the accident, nothing more." He looked at me in bewilderment, so I said, "Mac, I don't know if I'm Grant and I don't know if I'm Frank Trinavant. Now, Bull Matterson may think I'm Grant, but I want to keep the options open. There may come a time when I have to surprise him."

  "That's tricky," said Mac admiringly. He eyed me shrewdly. "So you made up your mind, son."

  "Yes, I made up my mind."

  "Good," he said heartily. As an apparent afterthought, he said, "How's Clare?"

  "She's fine."

  "You must have given her place a good going-over."

  "I did," I said smoothly. "I made absolutely sure there's nothing there worth the digging. Took two whole weeks on the job."

  I could see he was going to pursue the subject a little further so I backed out. "I'm going up the dam," I said. "See you to-night -- and do exactly what I said." I climbed into the jeep and left him to mull it over.

  Mac had been right when he said the Matterson Corporation was having trouble with the generators. This was not a big hydro-electric scheme like the Peace River Project at Portage Mountain, but it was big enough to have generators that were mighty hard to handle when transporting them on country roads. They had been shipped up from the States and had got to the railhead quite easily, but from then on they must have been troublesome.

  I nearly burst out laughing when I drove past the powerhouse at the bottom of the escarpment. A big logging truck loaded with an armature was bogged down in the mud, surrounded by a sweating, swearing gang shouting fit to bust a gut. Another gang was laying a corduroy road up to the power-house -- a matter of nearly two hundred yards -- and they were up to their knees in an ocean of mud.

  I stopped and got out to watch the fun. I didn't envy those construction men one little bit; it was going to be one hell of a job getting that armature to the power-house in an intact condition. I looked into the sky and watched the clouds coming in from the west, from the Pacific, and thought it looked like rain. One good downpour and the trouble would be compounded tenfold.

  A jeep came up the road and skidded to a halt in the mud and Jimmy Waystrand got out and stamped over. "What the hell are you doing here?"

  I gestured to the stalled truck. "Just watching the fun."

  His face darkened. "You're not welcome round here," he said harshly. "Beat it!"

  "Have you checked with Bull Matterson lately?" I asked mildly. "Or hasn't Howard passed the word on."

  "Oh, hell!" he said exasperatedly. I could see he was itching to toss me out but he was more afraid of old Bull than he was of me.

  I said gently, "One wrong move from you. Jimmy, and a court order gets slapped on Bull Matterson. That'll cost him money and you can bet your last cent -- if you're left with one -- that it'll come out of your pay packet. Your best bet is to get on with your job and get that mess cleaned up before it rains again."

  "Rains again!" he said savagely. "It hasn't rained yet."

  "Oh? Then how come all the mud?"

  "How in hell do I know?" he said. "It just came. It just.. .M He stopped and glared at me. "What the hell am I doing chewing the fat with you?" He turned and went back to his jeep. "Remember I" he shouted. "You make no trouble or you get whipped."

  I watched him go, then looked down at the mud interestedly. It looked like ordinary mud. I bent down and took some in my hand and rubbed my fingers together. It felt slimy without any grittiness and was as smooth as soap. It would make a good grade of mud for lubricating an oil drill; maybe Matter-son could make a few cents out of bottling and selling it. I tasted it with the tip of my tongue; there was no saltiness, but I didn't expect to find any because the human tongue is not a very reliable guide.

  I watched the men slipping and sliding around for a while, then went to the back of the jeep and picked out two empty test-tubes. I picked my way into the middle of the mess, getting thoroughly dirty in the process, and stooped to fill them full of the greyish, slippery goo. Then I went back to the jeep, put the test-tubes away carefully, and drove on up the escarpment.

  There was no mud anywhere on the escarpment nor on the road which climbed it. They were still working on the dam, putting in the final touches, but the sluices were closed and the water was building up behind the concrete wall. Already the scene of desolation which I had grieved over was being covered by a clean sheet of water. Perhaps it was a merciful thing to do, to hide the evidence of greed. The new lake spread shallowly into the distance with the occasional spindly tree, too poor for even Bull Matterson to make a profit on, standing forlornly in the flood. Those trees would die as soon as the roots became water-logged, and they would fall and rot.

  I looked back at the activity at the bottom of the escarpment. The men looked like ants I had seen -- a crowd of ants trying to drag along the corpse of a big beetle they had found. But they weren't having as much success with the trucks as the ants did with the beetle.

  I took one of the test-tubes and looked at it thoughtfully, then put it back in its nest of old newspaper. Ten minutes later I was batting it out on the road back to Fort Farrell

  I badly wanted to use a microscope.

  Part VIII

  Chapter 1

  I was still giving myself a headache at the microscope when Mac came back from town. He dumped a box full of groceries on the table which made the slide jiggle. "What you got there, Bob?"

  Trouble," I said, without looking up.

  "For us?"

  "For Matterson," I said. "If this is what I think it is, men that dam isn't worth two cents. I could be wrong, though."

  Mac cackled with laughter. "Hey, that's the best news I've heard in years. What kind of trouble has he got?"

  I stood up. 'Take a look and tell me what you see."

  He bent down and peered through the eyepiece. "Don't see much -- just a few bits of rock -- leastways, I think it's rock."

  I said, "That's the stuff that goes to make up clay, it's rock, all right. What else can you tell me about it? Try to describe is as though you were telling a blind man."

  He was silent for a while, then he said, "Well, this isn't my line. I can't tell you what kind of rock it is, but there are a few big round bits and a lot of smaller fiat ones."

  "Would you describe those flat bits as card-shaped?"

  "
Not so as you'd notice. They're just thin and flat." He straightened up and rubbed his eyes. "How big are those things?"

  "The big roundish ones are grains of sand -- they're pretty big. The little flat ones are about two microns across -- they're the clay mineral. In this case I think it's montmorillonite."

  Mac flapped his hand. "You lost me way back. What's a micron? It's a long time since I went to school and they've changed things pretty much since."

  "A thousandth of a millimetre," I said.

  "And this monty-what-d'you-call-it?"

  "Montmorillonite -- just a clay mineral. It's quite common."

  He shrugged. "I don't see anything to get excited about."

  "Few people would," I said. "I warned Howard Matter son about this, but the damned fool didn't check. Anyone round here got a drilling-rig, Mac?"

  He grinned. 'Think you found an oil well?"

  "I want something that'll go through not more than forty feet of soft clay."

  He shook his head. "Not even that. Anyone who wants to bore for water hires Pete Burke from Fort St. John." He looked at me curiously. "You seem upset about this."

  I said, "That dam is going to get smashed up if something isn't done about it fast. At least, I think it is."

  "That wouldn't trouble me," said Mac decisively.

  "It might trouble me," I said. "No dam -- no Matterson Lake, and Clare loses four million dollars because the Forestry Service wouldn't allow the cut."

  Mac stared at me open-mouthed. "You mean it's going to happen now?"

  "It might happen to-night. It might not happen for six months. I might be wrong altogether and it might not happen at all."

  He sat down. "All right, I give up. What can ruin a big chunk of co ncrete like that overnight?"

  "Quick clay," I said. "It's pretty deadly stuff. It's killed a lot of people in its time. I haven't time to explain, Mac; I'm going to Fort St. John -- I want access to a good laboratory."

  I left quickly and, as I started the jeep, I looked across at the cabin and saw Mac scratch his head and bend down to look through the microscope. Then I was moving away from the window fast, the wheels spinning because I was accelerating too fast.

  I didn't much like the two hundred miles of night driving, but I made good time and Fort St. John hadn't woken up when I arrived; it was dead except for the gas-refining plant on Taylor Flat which never sleeps. I was registered by a drowsy desk clerk at the Hotel Condil and then caught a couple of hours' sleep before breakfast.

  Pete Burke was a disappointment. "Sorry, Mr. Boyd; not a chance. I've got three rigs and they're all out. I can't do anything for you for another month -- I'm booked up solid."

  That was bad. I said, "Not even for a bonus -- a big one."

  He spread his hands. "I'm sorry."

  I looked from his office window into his yard. "There's a rig there," I said. "What about that?"

  He chuckled. "Call that a rig! It's a museum piece."

  "Will it go through forty feet of clay and bring back cores?" I asked.

  "If that's all you want it to do, it might -- with a bit of babying." He laughed. "I tell you, that's the first rig I had when I started this business, and it was dropping apart then."

  "You've got a deal," I said. "If you throw in some two-inch coring bits."

  "Think you can operate it? I can't spare you a man."

  "I'll manage," I said, and we got down to the business of figuring out how much it was worth.

  I left Burke loading the rig on to the jeep and went in search of a fellow geologist. I found one at the oil company headquarters and bummed the use of a laboratory for a couple of hours. One test-tube full of mud was enough to tell me what I wanted to know: the mineral content was largely montmorillonite as I had suspected, the salt content of the water was under four grams a litre -- another bad sign -- and half-an-hour's intensive reading of Grim's Applied Clay Mineralogy told me to expect the worst.

  But inductive reasoning can only go so far and I had to drill to make sure. By early afternoon I was on my way back to Fort Farrell with that drilling rig which looked as if it had been built from an illustration in Agricola's De Re Metallica.

  Chapter 2

  Next morning, while Inhaling the stack of hot-cakes Mac put before me, I said, "I want an assistant, Mac. Know any husky young guy who isn't scared of the Mattersons?"

  "There's me."

  I looked at his scrawny frame. "I want to haul a drilling-rig up the escarpment by the dam. You couldn't do it, Mac."

  "I guess you're right," he said dejectedly. "But can I come along anyway?"

  "No harm in that, if you think you're up to it. But I must have another man to help me."

  "What about Clarry Summerskill -- he doesn't like Matter-son and he's taken a fancy to you?"

  I said dubiously, "Clarry isn't exactly my idea of a husky young guy."

  "He's pretty tough," said Mac. "Any guy called Clarence who survives to his age must be tough."

  The idea improved with thinking. I could handle a drilling-rig but the stone-age contraption I'd saddled myself with might be troublesome and it would be handy to have a mechanic around. "All right," I said. "Put it to him. If he agrees, ask him to bring a tool kit -- he might have to doctor a diseased engine."

  "Hell come," said Mac cheerfully. "His bump of curiosity won't let him keep away."

  By mid-morning we were driving past the power-house and heading up the escarpment road. Matterson's construction crew didn't seem to have made any progress in getting that armature towards its resting-place, and there was just as much mud, but more churned up than ever. We didn't stop to watch but headed up the hill, and I stopped about halfway up.

  "This is it." I pointed across the escarpment. "I want to drill the first hole right in the middle, there."

  Clarry looked up the escarpment at the sheer concrete wall of the dam. "Pretty big, isn't it? Must have cost every cent of what I heard." He looked back down the hill. "Those guys likely to make trouble, Mr. Boyd?"

  "I don't think so," I said. "They've been warned off." Privately I wasn't too sure; walking around and prospecting was one thing, and operating a drilling-rig was something very different. "Let's get the gear out."

  The heaviest part was the gasoline engine which drove the monster. Clarry and I manhandled it across the escarpment, staggering and slipping on the slope, and dumped it at the site I had selected, while Mac stayed by the jeep. After that it was pretty easy, though time-consuming, and it was nearly two hours before we were ready to go.

  That rig was a perfect bastard, and if Clarry hadn't been along I doubt if I would ever have got it started. The main trouble was the engine, a cranky old two-stroke which refused to start, but Clarry cozened it, and after the first dozen refusals it burst into a noisy clatter. There was so much piston slap that I half expected the connecting-rod to bust clean out of the side of the engine, but it held together by good luck and some magic emanating from Clarry, so I spudded in and the job got under way.

  As I expected, the noise brought someone running. A jeep came tearing up the road and halted just behind mine and my two friends of the first encounter came striding across. Novak yelled above the noise of the engine, "What the hell are you doing?"

  I cupped my hand round my ear. "Can't hear you."

  He came closer. "What are you doing with this thing?"

  "Running a test hole."

  "Turn the damned thing off," he roared.

  I shook my head and waved him away downhill and we walked to a place where polite conversation wasn't so much of a strain on the eardrums. He said forcefully, "What do you mean -- running a test hole?"

  "Exactly what I say -- making a hole in the ground to see what comes up."

  "You can't do that here."

  "Why not?"

  "Because . . . because . . ."

  "Because nothing," I snapped. "I'm legally entitled to drill on Crown land."

  He was undecided. "We'll see about that," he said belliger
ently, and strode away back to his jeep. I watched him go, then went back to the drill to supervise the lifting of the first core.

  Drilling through clay is a snap and we weren't going very deep, anyway. As the cores came up I numbered them in sequence and Mac took them and stowed them away in the jeep. We had finished the first hole before Jimmy Waystrand got round to paying us a visit.

  Clarry was regretfully turning off the engine when Mac nudged me. "Here comes trouble."

  I stood up to meet Waystrand. I could see he was having his own troubles down at the power-house by his appearance; he was plastered with mud to mid-thigh, splashed with mud everywhere else, and appeared to be in a short temper. "Do I have to have trouble with you again?" he demanded.

  "Not if you don't want it," I said. "I'm not doing anything here to cause you trouble."

  "No?" He pointed to the rig. "Does Mr. Matter son know about that?"

  "Not unless someone told him," I said. "I didn't ask his permission -- I don't have to."

  Waystrand nearly blew his top. "You're sinking test holes between the Matterson dam and the Matterson power-house, and you don't think you need permission? You must be crazy."

  "It's still Crown land," I said. "If Matterson wants to make this his private preserve he'll have to negotiate a treaty with the Government. I can fill this hillside as full of holes as a Swiss cheese, and he can't do anything about it. You might get on the telephone and tell him that. You can also tell him he didn't read my report and he's in big trouble."

  Waystrand laughed. "He's in trouble?" he said incredulously.

  "Sure," I said. "So are you, judging by the mud on your pants. It's the same trouble -- and you tell Howard exactly that."

  "Ill tell him," said Waystrand. "And I can guarantee you won't drill any more holes." He spat on the ground near my foot and walked away.

  Mac said, "You're pushing it hard, Bob."

  "Maybe," I said. "Let's get on with it. I want two more holes to-day. One on the far side and another back there by the road."