Free Campbell's Kingdom by Hammond Innes Page B

walked the length of the street along the rickety boards of the sidewalk and saw only one shack with glass in the windows and curtains. The town was the most derelict place I’d ever seen, worse than the bombed villages of Italy during the war. It reminded me faintly of Pompeii—a place where people had lived long, long ago.
    I turned down through the snow towards the bunkhouse. There was a heavy American truck with a bulldozer loaded in the back drawn up outside the office of the Trevedian Transport Company. The driver came out just as I reached it. ‘Miss the bus this morning?’ he asked with a grin. He was a big, cheerful man in an old buckskin jacket and olive-green trousers.
    â€˜How do you mean?’ I asked.
    â€˜Aren’t you working on the road?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜You mean you live here? Christ. I didn’t know anyone under sixty lived in this dump.’
    â€˜No, I’m just a visitor. Are you taking that bulldozer up Thunder Creek?’
    â€˜Yeh. Want to ride along and see how the work’s progressing?’
    There seemed no point in hanging around Come Lucky. Now I was here I had all the time in the world. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I only got in last night. I haven’t had a chance yet to see much of the country.’ I climbed up into the cab beside him and he swung the big truck down the snow-packed grade to the lake-shore road. There we turned right and rumbled along the ice-bound edge of the lake towards the dark cleft of Thunder Creek. ‘Where’s this road going to lead to when it’s finished?’ I asked him.
    He stared at me in surprise. ‘Shouldn’t have thought you could stay a night in Come Lucky and not know the answer to that one. It’s going up to the cable hoist at the foot of Solomon’s Judgment. Pity about the cloud. On a fine day there’s quite a view of the mountains from here. You know this part at all?’
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been in the Rockies before.’
    â€˜Well, I guess you haven’t missed much. Winter lasts just about the whole year round up here.’ He peered through the windshield. ‘Seems like the clouds are lifting. Maybe you’ll get a glimpse of Solomon’s Judgment after all. Quite a sight where the big slide occurred. Happened around the same time as the Come Lucky slide.’ He nodded through his side window. ‘Doesn’t look much from here when it’s covered in snow like it is now. But you see those two big rocks up there? That’s just about where the entrance to the old Come Lucky mine was. They reckon there’s three or four hundred feet of mountainside over that entrance right now.’
    The line of the timber loomed ahead. Soon it had closed round us, the trees silent and black, their upper branches sagging under the weight of the snow. The road was furrowed by wheel tracks and here and there the broad tracks of a bulldozer showed through the carpet of snow. Wherever there were drifts the snow had been shovelled aside in great banks and the edges of the road were piled with the debris that had been torn out to make it; small trees, chunks of ice and hard-packed snow, gravel and dirt and stones and the rocks of minor falls.
    The road was about twelve feet wide with passing points almost every mile. Where streams came down, which was often, the gullies had been packed with timber to form a bridge and damp patches had been surfaced with logs placed corduroy-fashion.
    We were climbing steeply now, reaching back into a tributary of Thunder Creek to gain height. The road twisted and turned, sometimes running across bare, smooth rock ledges, sometimes under overhanging cliffs.
    We topped a shoulder of rock, bare of trees, and I caught a brief glimpse of two snow-covered peaks towering above the dark, timbered slopes and of a sheer wall of rock that fell like a black curtain across the end of the valley, its gloom emphasised