It wont be very deep, said Matterson. So we figure we can get away with a low cost dam. He stabbed his finger down. Its up to you to tell us if were losing out on anything in those twenty square miles.
I examined the map for a while, then said, I can do that. Where exactly is this valley?
About forty miles from here. Well be driving a road in when we begin to build the dam, but that wont help you. Its pretty isolated.
Not so much as the North-West Territories, I said. Ill make out.
I guess you will at that, said Matterson with a grin. But it wont be as bad as all that. Well fly you in and out in the Corporation helicopter.
I was pleased about that; it would save me a bit of shoe-leather. I said, I might want to sink some trial boreholes depending on what I find. You can hire a drilling rig and I might want two of your men to do the donkey work.
Donner said, Thats going to an extreme length, isnt it? I doubt if its justified. And I think your contract should specify that you do any necessary work yourself.
I said evenly, Mr Donner, I dont get paid for drilling holes in the ground. Im paid for using my brains in interpreting the cores that come out of those holes. Now, if you want me to do the whole job single-handed thats all right with me, but it will take six times as long and youll be charged my rate for the job and I dont come cheap. Im just trying to save you money.
Matterson waved his hand. Cut it out, Fred; it may never happen. Youll only want to drill if you come across anything definite isnt that right, Boyd?
Thats it.
Donner looked down at Matterson with his cold eyes. Another thing, he said. Youd better not have Boyd survey the northern end. Its not
I know what its not, Fred, cut in Matterson irritably. Ill get Clare straightened out on that.
Youd better, said Donner. Or the whole scheme might collapse.
That exchange meant nothing to me but it was enough to give me the definite idea that these two were having a private fight and Id better not get in the way. That wanted clearing up, so I butted in and said, Id like to know who my boss is on this survey. Who do I take my orders from you, Mr Matterson? Or Mr Donner here?
Matterson stared at me. You take them from me, he said flatly. My name is Matterson and this is the Matterson Corporation. He flicked his gaze up at Donner as though defying him to make an issue of it, but Donner backed down after a long moment by giving a sharp nod.
Just as long as I know, I said easily.
Afterwards we got down to dickering about the terms of my contract. Donner was a penny-pincher and, as he had made me mad by trying to skinflint on the possible boring operations, I set my price higher than I would have done normally. Although it seemed to be a straightforward job and I did need the money, there were undercurrents that I didnt like. There was also the name of Trinavant that had come up, although that seemed to have no particular relevance. But the terms I finally screwed out of Donner were so good that I knew I would have to take the job the money would set me up in business for a year in the North-West.
Matterson was no help to Donner. He just sat on the sidelines and grinned while I gouged him. It was certainly a hell of a way to run a corporation! After the business details had been settled Matterson said, Ill reserve a room for you at the Matterson House. It doesnt compare with the Hilton, but I think youll be comfortable enough. When can you start on the job?
As soon as I get my equipment from Edmonton.
Fly it in, said Matterson. Well pay the freight.
Donner snorted and walked out of the room like a man who knows when he isnt wanted.
II
The Matterson House Hotel proved to be incorporated into the Matterson Building so I hadnt far to go when I left Mattersons office. I also noticed a string of company offices all bearing the name of Matterson and there was the Matterson Bank on the corner of the block. It seemed that Fort Farrell was a real old-fashioned company town, and when Matterson built his dam there would be the Matterson Power Company to add to his list. He was getting a real stranglehold on this neck of the woods.
I arranged with the desk clerk to have my bag brought up from the bus depot, then said, Do you have a newspaper here?
Comes out Friday.
Wheres the office?
Trinavant Park north side.
I walked out into the fading afternoon light and back down High Street until I came to the square. Lieutenant Farrell was staring sightlessly into the low sun which illuminated his verdigris-green face blotched with white where the birds had made free with him. I wondered what he would have thought if he knew how his settlement had turned out. Judging by the expression on his face he did know and he didnt think much of it.
The office of the Fort Farrell Recorder seemed to be more concerned with jobbing printing than with the production of a newspaper, but my first question was answered satisfactorily by the young girl who was the whole of the staff at least, all of it that was in sight.
Sure we keep back copies. How far do you want to go back?
About ten years.
She grimaced. Youll want the bound copies, then. Youll have to come into the back office. I followed her into a dusty room. What was the exact date?
I had no trouble in remembering that everyone knows his own birthday. Tuesday, September 4th, 1956.
She looked up at a shelf and said helplessly, Thats the one up there. I dont think I can reach it.
Allow me, I said, and reached for it. It was a volume the size and weight of a dozen Bibles and it gave me a lot less trouble than it would have given her! I supposed it weighed pretty near as much as she did.
She said, Youll have to read it in here; and you mustnt cut the pages thats our record copy.
I wont, I promised, and put it on a deal table. Can I have a light, please?
Sure. She switched on the light as she went out.
I pulled up a chair and opened the heavy cover of the book. It contained two years issues of the Fort Farrell Recorder one hundred and four reports on the health and sickness of a community; a record of births and deaths, joys and sorrows, much crime and yet not a lot, all things considered, and a little goodness there should have been more but goodness doesnt make the headlines. A typical country newspaper.
I turned to the issue of September 7th the week-end after the accident half afraid of what I would find, half afraid I wouldnt find anything. But it was there and it had made the front page headlines, too. It screamed at me in heavy black letters splashed across the yellowing sheet: JOHN TRINAVANT DIES IN AUTO SMASH.
Although I knew the story by heart, I read the newspaper account with care and it did tell me a couple of things I hadnt known before. It was a simple story, regrettably not uncommon, but one which did not normally make headlines as it had done here. As I remembered, it rated a quarter-column at the bottom of the second page of the Vancouver Sun and a paragraph filler in Toronto.
The difference was that John Trinavant had been a power in Fort Farrell as being senior partner in the firm of Trinavant and Matterson. God the Father had suddenly died and Fort Farrell had mourned. Mourned publicly and profusely in black print on white paper.
John Trinavant (aged 56) had been travelling from Dawson Creek to Edmonton with his wife, Anne (no age given), and his son, Frank (aged 22). They had been travelling in Mr Trinavants new car, a Cadillac, but the shiny new toy had never reached Edmonton. Instead, it had been found at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot cliff not far off the road. Skid marks and slashes in the bark of trees had shown how the accident happened. Perhaps, said the coroner, it may be that the car was moving too fast for the driver to be in proper control. That, however, is something no one will know for certain.
The Cadillac was a burnt-out hulk, smashed beyond repair. Smashed beyond repair were also the three Trinavants, all found dead. A curious aspect of the accident, however, was the presence of a fourth passenger, a young man now identified as Robert Grant, who had been found alive, but only just so, and who was now in the City Hospital suffering from third-degree burns, a badly fractured skull and several other assorted broken bones. Mr Grant, it was tentatively agreed, must have been a hitchhiker whom Mr Trinavant, in his benevolence, had picked up somewhere on the way between Dawson Creek and the scene of the accident. Mr Grant was not expected to live. Too bad for Mr Grant.
All Fort Farrell and, indeed, all Canada (said the leader writer) should mourn the era which had ended with the passing of John Trinavant. The Trinavants had been connected with the city since the heroic days of Lieutenant Farrell and it was a grief (to the leader writer personally) that the name of Trinavant was now extinguished in the male line. There was, however, a niece, Miss C. T. Trinavant, at present at school in Lausanne, Switzerland. It was to be hoped that this tragedy, the death of her beloved uncle, would not be permitted to interrupt the education he had so earnestly desired to give her.
I sat back and looked at the paper before me. So Trinavant had been a partner of Matterson but not the Matterson I had met that day because he was too young. At the time of the smash he would have been in his early twenties say about the age of young Frank Trinavant who was killed, or about my age at that time. So there must be another Matterson Howard Mattersons father, presumably which made Howard the Crown Prince of the Matterson empire. Unless, of course, he had already succeeded.
I sighed as I wondered what devil of coincidence had brought me to Fort Farrell; then I turned to the next issue and found nothing! There was no follow on to the story in that issue or the next. I searched further and found that for the next year the name of Trinavant was not mentioned once no follow-up, no obituary, no reminiscences from readers nothing at all. As far as the Fort Farrell Recorder was concerned, it was as though John Trinavant had never existed he had been unpersonned.
I checked again. It was very odd that in Trinavants home town the town where he was virtually king the local newspaper had not coined a few extra cents out of his death. That was a hell of a way to run a newspaper!
I paused. That was the second time in one day that I had made the same observation the first time in relation to Howard Matterson and the way he ran the Matterson Corporation. I wondered about that and that led me to something else who owned the Fort Farrell Recorder?
The little office girl popped her head round the door. Youll have to go now; were closing up.
I grinned at her. I thought newspaper offices never closed.
This isnt the Vancouver Sun, she said. Or the Montreal Star.
It sure as hell isnt, I thought.
Did you find what you were looking for? she asked.
I followed her into the front office. I found some answers, yes; and a lot of questions. She looked at me uncomprehendingly. I said, Is there anywhere a man can get a cup of coffee round here?
Theres the Greek place right across the square.
What about joining me? I thought that maybe I could get some answers out of her.
She smiled. My mother told me not to go out with strange men. Besides, Im meeting my boy.
I looked at all the alive eighteen years of her and wished I were young again as before the accident. Some other time, perhaps, I said.
Perhaps.
I left her inexpertly dabbing powder on her nose and headed across the square with the thought that Id get picked up for kidnapping if I wasnt careful. I dont know why it is, but in any place that can support a cheap eatery and a lot that cant youll find a Greek running the local coffee-and-doughnut joint. He expands with the community and brings in his cousins from the old country and pretty soon, in an average-size town, the Greeks are running the catering racket, splitting it with the Italians who tend to operate on a more sophisticated level. This wasnt the first Greek place Id eaten in and it certainly wouldnt be the last not while I was a poverty-stricken geologist chancing his luck.
I ordered coffee and pie and took it over to a vacant table intending to settle down to do some hard thinking, but I didnt get much chance of that because someone came up to the table and said, Mind if I join you?
He was old, maybe as much as seventy, with a walnut-brown face and a scrawny neck where age had dried the juices out of him. His hair, though white, was plentiful and inquisitive blue eyes peered from beneath shaggy brows. I regarded him speculatively for a long time, and at last he said, Im McDougall chief reporter for the local scandal sheet.
I waved him to a chair. Be my guest.
He put down the cup of coffee he was holding and grunted softly as he sat down. Im also the chief compositor, he said. And the only copy-boy. Im the rewrite man, too. The whole works.
Editor, too?
He snorted derisively. Do I look like a newspaper editor?
Not much.
He sipped his coffee and looked at me from beneath the tangle of his brows. Did you find what you were looking for, Mr Boyd?
Youre well-informed, I commented. Ive not been in town two hours and already I can see Im going to be reported in the Recorder. How do you do it?
He smiled. This is a small town and I know every man, woman and child in it. Ive just come from the Matterson Building and I know all about you, Mr Boyd.
This McDougall looked like a sharp old devil. I said, Ill bet you know the terms of my contract, too.
I might. He grinned at me and his face took on the look of a mischievous small boy. Donner wasnt too pleased. He put down his cup. Did you find out what you wanted to know about John Trinavant?
I stubbed out my cigarette. You have a funny way of running a newspaper, Mr McDougall. Ive never seen such a silence in print in my life.
The smile left his face and he looked exactly what he was a tired old man. He was silent for a moment, then he said unexpectedly, Do you like good whisky, Mr Boyd?
Ive never been known to refuse.