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

doodling with a pencil on the cover of his log.
    â€œWhat about this man Tim Baird? Did he tell you anything else—the name of the other man, or where they went or what they were looking for?”
    â€œNo. I guess he didn’t know much about it. I’ve told you all I know.” He shook his head, frowning down at the pattern he was tracing. “Dam’ queer him not telling you anything about it, and the thing an obsession with him.”
    â€œThat was because of my mother,” I said. “I think she must have made him promise. She didn’t want me involved. I think she hated Labrador,” I added, remembering the scene on the platform as the train was about to leave. And here I was in Labrador.
    My mind switched back to the questions my father had asked and I picked up the report again. I was thinking of the map above the transmitter, the name Lake of the Lion pencilled on it. “Did you ask Laroche about Lake of the Lion?”
    â€œNo. I never had the chance.” And then Ledder had stopped doodling and was looking up at me. “You know, it wasn’t so much the strangeness of his questions that made me think him crazy. It was this obsession with an old story—”
    â€œMy father wasn’t crazy,” I said sharply. I was still wondering why he should have been so interested in Laroche’s reaction.
    â€œNo, I guess he wasn’t.” Ledder’s voice was slow, almost reluctant. “If I’d known his name was James Finlay Ferguson it would have made some sense.” He was excusing himself again. But then, after a pause, he said, “But even so, if he wasn’t crazy …” He left the sentence unfinished, staring down at the desk and fiddling with the morse key. “Did he keep a log?” he asked at length.
    â€œYes, of course,” I said. And I gave him the sheet of notes, glad that I’d isolated them from the actual books. “Those are all the entries that concern Briffe, right from the time my father first picked up your transmissions until that final message.” I tried to explain to him again that writing had been difficult for him and that my father usually just jotted down a note to remind him of the substance of each transmission, but he didn’t seem to be listening. He was going carefully through the notes, sucking at a pencil and occasionally nodding his head as though at some recollection.
    Finally he pushed the sheet away and leaned back, tilting his chair against the wall and staring across the room. “Queer,” he murmured. “They make sense, and then again in places they don’t make sense.” And after a moment he leaned forward again. “Take this, for instance.” He pulled the sheet towards him again and pointed to the entry for September 18 which read: LAROCHE. No, it can’t be. I must be mad . “What’s he mean—do you know?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œAnd this on the twenty-sixth, the day after Laroche reached Menihek—L-L-L-L-L—IMPOSSIBLE.” He looked up at me as he read it aloud, but there was nothing I could tell him. “Was he much alone?” he asked.
    â€œThere was my mother.” I knew what he was getting at.
    â€œBut that room you described and the hours he spent there every day with his radio. He was alone there?” And when I nodded, he said, “We get men like that up here. The emptiness and the loneliness—they get obsessions. Bushed we call it.” And then he asked me whether I’d brought the log books with me.
    It was a request I had been dreading. One glance at them and he’d begin thinking my father was crazy again. But if I were to get him to help me he’d a right to see them. “They’re in my suitcase,” I said.
    He nodded. “Could I see them please?” He was reading through the notes again, tapping at the paper with his pencil, his lips pursed, absorbed in his