'I might say the same about you,' I answered, my eyes on his hand, which he had put back in the pocket of his jacket.
'Yes, but I don't carry your life in my hands.' He nodded towards the fire. 'Suppose you sit down and tell me about yourself,' he suggested.
I hesitated. The hair was prickling along my scalp as I looked into the utter blankness of his eyes. I suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to get that gun — to get it before he used it. 'Sit down.' It was softly spoken, but there was a harshness in his voice that made me obey without further hesitation. 'Now let's have your story.' He had seated himself across the fire from me. He was puffing nervously at his cigarette. In the bleak light that came in through the entrance his face looked wretchedly drawn, the lines etched deeply into the white skin.
I began to tell him how I had left England when I was four, moved to Tin Valley in the Canadian Rockies, had started washing dishes in one of the local saloons when I was ten, became a miner when I was twelve. But he interrupted me. 'I don't want data. I want your background. Why did your father leave England and go to Canada?'
'My mother left him.' I sat staring into the fire, thinking back down the lane of my life. 'If you want my background,' I said, my father was a drunk. He drank to forget. My mother was very lonely. I found a photograph of her amongst my father's things after his death.' I pulled out my wallet and took from it my mother's photograph. Across the bottom was written in a found, childish hand — To Bob, from his love — Ruth Nearne.' I passed it across to Dave. 'My father talked of nothing but Cornwall. He was desperately sick for home. But he never made his fortune and he wouldn't come back to be mocked. That's what he used to tell me. He was afraid of being mocked for having lost his wife. She went with a miner from Penzance. My father hated her and loved her all in the same breath.'
I had forgotten why I was saying all this. I'd never spoken about it to any one. But suddenly, up on those bleak moors in the derelict waste of that old tin mine, it seemed right that I should be talking about it.
'I don't know about Welshmen,' I went on, 'but Cornish miners go all over the world. There's not many mines that haven't got Cornishmen working in them. And they cling together. Up there in the Rockies my father found plenty of Cornishmen. He'd bring them back to our hut and they'd talk mining by the hour over potties of bad rye, feeding pinewood into the stove until the iron casing became red hot. And when there wasn't any company he'd tell me about our own country and the mines along the tin coast. Botallack and Levant — he'd worked in them both, and even now I reckon I could find my way around in those mines from the memory of what he told me of them. He was a thin, wiry little man with sad eyes and a hell of a thirst. That and silicosis killed him at the age of forty-two.'
'Did you ever hear from your mother?'
I looked up. I had almost forgotten that Dave was there, so absorbed had I become in my memories. 'No,' I said. 'Never. And I was never allowed to refer to her. The only clue I ever got as to her whereabouts was when he was raving drunk one night and mouthed curses upon a place called Cripples' Ease.
There's a village of that name near St. Ives. I found it on the map. But I shall never go there. He was dead drunk for a week then. I think he must have heard something. He died when I was sixteen. I think I would have asked him about her when he was dying, but he had a stroke and never regained consciousness.'