Free The Land God Gave to Cain by Hammond; Innes Page A

coincidence that the names were the same? Was it just because of that your father was interested?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “No, it wasn’t that.” And I added hastily, “It’s just that my father never talked about it.” I, too, felt cheated—cheated because he hadn’t shared the past with me when it belonged to me and was my right.
    â€œNever talked about it? Why ever not?” Ledder was leaning forward. “Let’s get this straight. Are they related or not—your father and this Ferguson who went into Labrador?”
    â€œYes, of course they are,” I answered. “They must be.” There was no other explanation. It explained so much that I’d never understood. It was a pity that my grandmother had died when I was still a child. I would like to have talked to her now.
    â€œWhat relationship?” Ledder was staring up at me. “Do you know?”
    â€œHis father, I think.” It must have been his father for I hadn’t any great uncles.
    â€œYour grandfather, in fact.”
    I nodded. And it would have been grandmother Alexandra who would have given him the names of James Finlay. I was thinking it was strange that my father had been born in the year 1900.
    â€œBut how do you know it’s your grandfather?” Ledder asked. “How do you know when you didn’t even know there was an expedition back at the beginning of the century?”
    I told him about the sextant and the paddle and the other relics hanging on the wall, and about my grandmother and the house in Scotland, and how she’d come to me in the night when I was barely old enough to remember. “I think she must have been going to tell me about that expedition.” Talking to him about it, everything seemed to fall into place—my father’s obsession, everything. And then I was asking him about the expedition. “Can you give me the details?” I said. “What happened to Ferguson?”
    â€œI don’t know,” he answered. “In fact, I don’t know very much about it—only what the Company geologist told me. There were two of them went in, from Davis Inlet. Two white men, no Indians. One was a prospector, the other a trapper, and it ended in tragedy. The trapper only just escaped with his life. The prospector—that was Ferguson—he died. That’s all I know.” He turned to the desk and picked up his log, searching quickly through it. “Here you are. Here’s the geologist’s reply: Expedition 1900 well known because one of the two men, James Finlay Ferguson, was lost .”
    â€œAnd he was a prospector?”
    â€œSo Tim Baird said.”
    â€œWas he prospecting for gold?” I was remembering that my mother had once said I wasn’t to ask about my grandfather … an old reprobate, she had called him, who had come to a bad end and wasted his life searching for gold.
    â€œI don’t know what he was prospecting for. Tim didn’t say.”
    But it didn’t matter. I was quite certain it was gold, just as I was quite certain that this was the past that had bitten so deep into my father in his loneliness. It was just a pity that I’d never bothered to get the story out of him.
    â€œIt’s odd he never talked to you about it,” Ledder said, and I realised that he was still uncertain about it all.
    â€œI told you, he couldn’t talk.” And I added, “It’s so long since he was wounded that now I can’t even recall the sound of his voice.”
    â€œBut he could write.”
    â€œIt was an effort,” I said.
    â€œAnd he left no record?”
    â€œNot that I know of. At least, I didn’t find one when I looked through his things. I suppose it was too complicated or something. That’s what he said, anyway. What else did the geologist tell you?”
    â€œJust what I’ve read out to you—nothing else.” He was sitting there,