The Land God Gave to Cain (19 page)

I thought maybe it was a stone then, thrown up from the track. But the rifle cracked again, unmistakable this time, and suddenly I could hear wild human cries above the noise of the engine. They came from away to my left where a lake glimmered like pewter through a screen of trees. There was a canoe there and an Indian stood in the bows, a rifle to his shoulder, and close inshore a head and antlers thrust towards the shallows. There was a crashing in the undergrowth and the caribou broke cover a hundred yards ahead of me. It hesitated a moment, pawing at the steel of the track, and then with a quick terrified leap it was across and had vanished into the bush on the other side.

I didn't catch sight of the Indians again, for the track went into a long bend, There were levelling stakes beside the track here and in the stretch beyond I found the engineers who had put them there. They stood in a little group round their speeder, which had been lifted clear of the track, and as I rattled past them one of them shouted what sounded like “
Attention!
”

He was a French Canadian with a round fur cap like a Russian and before I had worked out that it was a shout of warning I was into the next bend. It was ballast again and the speeder bucked violently as the gravel flew, and through the rattle of the stones came the lost hoot of an owl. And then I was round the bend, clear of the gravel, and there was something on the line ahead. I slammed on the brake as the weird owl-hoot sounded again, louder and clearer, suddenly unmistakable.

Before the speeder had jerked to a halt I could see the yellow paintwork of the locomotive, could feel the rails trembling under me. There was no hope of getting the speeder off the track in time, not by myself. I did the only thing I could and flung the gear lever into reverse, opening the throttle wide and tearing back down the track, round the bend to where the little knot of engineers stood waiting.

The instant I stopped they crowded round, the lifting bars were pulled out and then they dragged it clear just as the train came rumbling round the curve. The hooter wailed again, loud as a trumpet note between the enclosing walls of the jackpine, and then the heavy locomotive was on top of us, sliding by at walking pace with a smell of hot engine oil and a slow piston-beat of power. The driver leaned out and shouted down: “You want to commit suicide, just jump in the muskeg. Don't pick on me.” He spat into the slush at my feet and went back to the controls. The beat increased with a roar like a power station and the diesel gathered way again, clanking a long line of empty rail flats. And behind the flats came two wooden coaches with men looking down at us incuriously from the windows.

That was when I saw Laroche again. He was in the second coach and for an instant our eyes met. I saw him jump to his feet, and then the coach was past. The caboose followed and as it rattled by Laroche swung himself out of the coach doorway. I thought for a moment he was going to jump. But the train was light, gathering speed quickly. He hung there for a moment and then he thought better of it and disappeared into the coach again.

I watched the train as it dwindled down the track and the only thought in my mind then was that the way was clear for me to get to Camp 263. Laroche was behind me now, and Lands, too, and as long as I kept ahead of them there'd be nobody who knew me at Head of Steel. I turned to the engineers and asked them to get my speeder back on the track.

The French Canadian with the fur cap was looking at me curiously. “Why don't you check when you enter this section?” he asked.

“I was in a hurry,” I said, my voice a little unsteady because I was feeling badly shaken now.

“You might have killed yourself.”

“I was in a hurry,” I repeated. “I still am.”

“Sure. So is everybody else. But Mr. Lands won't thank you if you wreck his speeder.”

I thought he was going to ask me why I was riding it then, but after staring at me a moment, he turned to his men and told them to get the speeder back on the track. “That's the trouble with this outfit,” he grumbled. “Too much' dam' hurry.”

Three miles farther on I was stopped by a ballast gang. Their gas cars had been dumped beside the track to let the supply train through, but the track-lifting and ballast-tamping machines were already back at work on the track and there was nothing for it but to abandon my speeder and continue on foot. Head of Steel, they told me, was two miles up the line.

It was all new grade here, a long fill that ran out across a muskeg swamp. The line sagged in shallow waves where the muskeg sucked at the gravel embankment and the ties were covered with fresh ballast. It was hard walking, and the wind had swung into the north, so that it cut through my borrowed clothing and chilled the sweat on my body. Out across the marsh, where the black line of the scrub joined the iron-grey sky, I caught a glimpse of hills that were long-backed and bare, as though ground down to the bone by ice.

It seemed a long time that I trudged across that desolate area of swamp, but at last I reached the shallow gravel rim that enclosed it, and round a bend I came on a gang of men working with drills and machine-operated spanners, bolting the rails together and driving spikes. The detached chassis and wheels of dismantled rail transporters lay beside the track, and up ahead were more men and machines, and beyond them the steel-laying train. Everywhere about me now there was a sense of movement, of drive and thrust and effort, so that Labrador seemed suddenly crowded and full of life. The track, laid on the bare gravel without ballast, like toy rails in a sandpit, had a newness about it that showed that it hadn't been there yesterday, and walking beside it, through all these gangs of men, I felt conspicuous.

But they took no notice of me, though as I went by them, my gaze fixed self-consciously on the steel or the machines they operated, I felt that each one of them must know I'd no right to be there. I wondered who was in charge at Head of Steel and what Laroche had told him.

It was better when I reached the train itself. There were no gangs working there, just the wagons full of ties and plates and bolts which men threw out beside the track each time the train moved forward. The train was in a steep cut and I was forced to walk close beside it, so that when I reached the bunkhouse section I was conscious of men lounging in the open doorways of the coaches, staring down at me. But nobody stopped me, and I went up past the engine and the rail transporters until at last I could see the steel-laying crane swinging with a length of rail. A whistle blew and the crane swung back, its claw empty. The train hooted and then moved forward a few yards. Another length of track had been laid.

There was something so fascinating about the rhythmic thrusting of this train into the unknown that for the moment I forgot everything else and climbed half-way up the side of the cut to watch it. Each time, before the train had stopped, the crane was already swinging, another length of steel balanced in its claw grip. A man stood signalling with his hands to the crane-driver and shouting instructions to the steel-laying gang, and as the rail came down on to the grade, they seized hold of it, thrusting it into place on the ties and spiking it there with the balanced swing of sledge hammers.

This was Head of Steel and I stood and watched with a sort of awe. And then I saw the bare grade stretched out ahead, naked except for the few ties laid at regular intervals, and my gaze lifted to the black line of the jackpine. The yellow slash of the bulldozed grade ran into it and was abruptly swallowed.

I don't know what I had expected at Head of Steel. Obviously there could be no railway beyond this point. But I had travelled more than a hundred miles of the line, feeling close to the steel all the time, so that in a sense I had felt it to be an integral part of Labrador. And now, suddenly, it ended.

Until that moment I don't think I had faced up to the reality of what I had set out to do. Lake of the Lion somewhere to the north-east—fifty, at most a hundred miles. But looking at the slender line of the grade and the desolate emptiness of the country ahead, it might have been on another continent, so remote did it seem. Even to reach Darcy at Camp 263 appeared suddenly as a journey into the unknown.

“Hey you!” A man stood looking up at me from beside the Burro crane, his scarlet bush shirt a splash of colour in the gathering dusk. “Yeah, you. What the hell do you think you're doing up there—watching a rodeo or somep'n?”

His voice and the way he stood there suggested authority, and I scrambled quickly down, conscious that he was watching me. “If you're not working, just keep clear of the steel-laying,” he shouted. “How many times I got to tell you guys?”

He was still watching me as I reached the track, and I turned my back on him and hurried down the train. Maybe it was imagination, but I felt I had aroused his curiosity and that he'd come after me and question me, if I didn't get away from there.

Maybe he would have done, but at that moment the train hooted—a different note this time, long and summoning. A whistle blew. A voice near me called out “Chow.” And then the steel-laying gang were coming down the cut, walking with the slack drag of men whose muscles are suddenly relaxed. I was swept up in the movement and went with the tide down past the rail transporters and the locomotive to the bunk-house coaches. There were other gangs coming up from the rear of the train, all converging on the diner. I waited my turn and clambered up, relieved to feel that I was no longer alone, but one of a crowd. Besides, I was hungry. If I was going up beyond Head of Steel, then it would be better to go after dark when nobody would see me, and with a full belly.

The lights were on inside the diner, and there was warmth and the smell of food. Nobody spoke to me as I pushed my way into a vacant place at the trestle table, and I didn't speak to them but just reached out for whatever I wanted. There was soup, steak with fried egg and potatoes and cabbage, canned fruit and cream, a mountainous heap of food to be shovelled in and washed down with tea and coffee. And when I'd finished I cadged a cigarette off the little Italian next to me and sat over my mug of coffee, smoking and listening to the sudden hubbub of conversation. I felt tired and relaxed now, and I wanted to sleep instead of going out into the cold again.

There was a sudden cessation of sound from the end of the diner and through the smoke haze I saw the man in the scarlet bush shirt standing in the doorway. The boss of the steel-laying gang was with him and they were looking down the length of the table.

“Who's that?” I asked the Italian.

“The guy in the red shirt?” he asked. “You don't-a-know?” He seemed puzzled. “That's Dave Shelton. He's in charge at Head of Steel.”

I glanced quickly at the doorway again. The two men were still standing there and Shelton was looking straight at me. He turned and asked the other man a question and I saw the gang foreman shake his head.

“You wanna keep clear of him,” the Italian was saying. “He drive all-a time. Last week he bust a man's jaw because he tell him he drive-a the men too hard.”

Shelton glanced in my direction again, and then the two of them were pushing their way down the diner, and I knew I was trapped there, for there was nothing I could do, nowhere I could go, and I sat, staring at my mug, waiting.

“You work here?” The voice was right behind me, and when I didn't answer, a hand gripped my shoulder and swung me round. “I'm talking to you.” He was standing right over me, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, with a sort of thrusting violence that I'd only once met before, in an Irish navvy. “You're the guy I saw gawping at the steel-laying gang, aren't you?”

The men round me had stopped talking so that I was at the centre of a little oasis of silence.

“Well, do you work here or don't you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what are you doing in this diner?”

“Having a meal,” I said, and a ripple of laughter ran down the table. The line of his mouth hardened, for it wasn't the most helpful reply I could have made, and in an effort to appease him, I added quickly,” I'm an engineer. It was supper time when I got here, and I just followed the others—”

“Where's your card?” he demanded.

“My card?”

“Your card of employment as an engineer on the line. You haven't got one, have you?” He was smiling now, suddenly sure of himself. “What's your name?” And when I didn't answer, he said, “It's Ferguson, isn't it?”

I nodded, knowing it was no use trying to deny it.

“Thought so.” And he added, “What do you think you're playing at, pretending you're an engineer? Alex Staffen's mad as hell about it.”

“I am an engineer,” I said.

“Okay, you're an engineer. But not on this railroad.” His hand fastened on my shoulder again and he dragged me to my feet. “Come on. Let's get going, feller. I've instructions to send you back to Base just as fast as I can.” He jerked his head for me to follow him and led the way towards the door.

There was nothing I could do but follow him down the diner, feeling rather like a criminal with the gang foreman close behind me. Once outside, away from all the men, I could probably get him to listen to my explanation. But I didn't see what good it would do. Staffen had set the machinery of the organisation in motion to get me returned to Base, and unless I could make this man Shelton understand the urgency of the matter, he'd stick to his instructions. He'd have to.

Half-way down the diner he stopped abruptly. “Your speeder still on the track, Joe?” he asked one of the men.

He was a big fellow with a broken nose who looked as though he'd been a heavyweight boxer. “Sorry, Mr. Shelton,” he said. “I cleared it just before—”

“Well, get it back on the track right away. You're taking this guy down to Two-twenty-four.”

“Okay, Mr. Shelton.” The man scrambled to his feet, not bothering to finish his coffee.