The End of the Line

by Stephen Legault

  The End of the Line

  STEPHEN LEGAULT

  To Jenn, Silas, and Rio: my family.

  With gratitude to those who helped build this country by toiling on the CPR, and for whom this undertaking was the end of the line.

  ONE

  THE END OF TRACK

  DEEK PENNER THUMBED THE WORN edges of his hand of cards, his twisted and blackened fingers stiff despite his youth. He was unaware that before the night was over he would be dead, his face pulverized by the ragged edge of a star drill, his body left in a heap by the frozen banks of the Bow River.

  He glanced around the table illuminated by two oil lamps hanging from wires affixed to the ceiling of the rough-hewn log cabin. The seven men assembled for their nightly game of cards seemed like ghosts. Faces drawn and gaunt, eyes dark under the shadow of their weary brows, these men were among the five hundred who had come to populate the railway siding of Holt City, just below the crest of the Kicking Horse Pass late in the fall of 1883. It was here that the steel rail had reached on December 8th, the snow already amassing in great heaps along the path of the Canadian Pacific mainline.

  Penner regarded the men, and then glanced again at his hand. “One,” he finally said, discarding an ace high into the pile of cast offs, drawing a five of clubs, ruining the full house he had put together. He let a faint smile curl the corner of his cracked lips. He had to work with these men; he couldn’t afford to win every hand.

  As they often did, the men were gathered in the comparatively spacious log cabin of Frank Dodds. Like Penner, Dodds was a foreman on the winter operation. But unlike Penner, Dodds viewed the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway as his best chance to get rich: Frank Dodds was a moonshiner.

  The hand of cards was played and a nervous, slender man in a bowtie surprised himself and everybody else by winning the pot. “Blind luck,” slurred Dodds, his disgust with the slight man obvious.

  “You played a good hand; take your winnings,” said Penner, as the fellow pulled the coins and tattered script towards him, wiping his brow despite the cold.

  “Time to get me another cup of tea,” said Dodds, standing up abruptly and knocking the table so that the paper money and coins the winner was pulling toward himself slid towards the floor. Several of the players’ stacks of money were sent flying so that everybody had to scramble for their coins and paper.

  “Take it easy, Frank,” said Penner in a low voice.

  Dodds took an awkward step backwards from the table and seemed to have trouble focusing for a moment. “Shut your yap,” he growled at Penner, and then turned towards the tin pot next to the stove in the corner.

  Two of Dodds’ sawyers picked up their cups and made their way to where he was pouring his elixir. Dodds filled their cups and they each took a satisfying drink. It was obvious from the contented look on the men’s faces that Dodds’ tea was in fact the moonshine everybody in camp knew he brewed.

  Penner shook his head. Whiskey made a man act like a fool, he thought. In the middle of the winter, when all that needed doing was cutting timber for ties and putting away cordwood for fuel, it was bad enough. But in less than two months there would be ten thousand men in this camp, all needing organizing into teams to make the ambitious descent down Kicking Horse Pass. Those men would need their wits, or more than a few of them would be killed. It was to be a dangerous summer even without whiskey. The bottle would make it downright treacherous.

  And Deek Penner knew that whiskey wasn’t the only thing that would make the summer of 1884 deadly serious for those blasting tunnels down the limestone slopes of the Kicking Horse.

  The room was silent. The bowtied clerk looked from one man to the next.

  “You should leave it alone,” said a man who worked for Penner, looking uncomfortably at his hands.

  “What’s that?” asked Penner.

  “Leave it. Ain’t none of your business.”

  “What ain’t none of my business? Its just tea . . .” sneered Penner.

  The three men found their seats. The stench of whiskey was palpable in the close cabin.

  “Let’s play poker,” said Dodds, sitting down next to the mousey clerk. “You think you can pull another flush?” he asked, his breath like a heavy fog over the table.

  Penner took up the cards, shuffled and cut the deck, and dealt the hand. The betting commenced, and both of Dodds’ sawyers and then Penner’s man folded. Dodds raised the bet, his eyes glassy in the half light of the lantern. Beneath heavy lids he stared at Penner.

  “Let’s see your cards,” Penner said when the round was done.

  “Got me a gunshot straight,” Dodds said, showing a seven, nine, ten, and jack of clubs.

  “Not so fast,” said Penner. He put one card down in front of him. It was the six of hearts. Next the eight of hearts, nine, and jack of hearts. Without even a hint of a smile, he placed the ace of hearts on the table.

  “Son of a bitch,” said the man who managed the stables, sitting next to Dodds. “He beat you with a flush. Deek beat you with a flush!”

  Dodds wheeled on him, his bulk toppling the table, cards, coins, and script sent in a shower to the floor. The three tin cups of whiskey splashed across the table and onto the smooth planks under foot. Dodds’ fist connected with the man’s nose and a crimson spray of blood erupted from his mangled face. The stable manager was on his feet, backing towards the wall of the log cabin, as Dodds advanced on him, yelling incoherently and throwing punches at the man’s face and body.

  The rest of the men leapt to their feet, the lantern knocked swinging so that the light in the room swooned.

  “Get off him, Frank!” Penner yelled. Dodds’ sawyers grabbed at his wildly careening arms, each of them catching elbows in the face and chin as they tried to grapple their foreman as he continued to rain down blows on the smaller man.

  Dodds’ men finally managed to seize his arms, and Penner shouted “That’s enough goddamn it! That’s enough!” He wrapped his own huge arms around all three men and pushed them away from the bloodied man, who stood with his face a gory smear, his hands up in front of his mouth. The others rushed in to attend to him as he slouched over and spit a stream of blood onto the floor of the cabin. There were two teeth in the puddle he expelled.

  “Get your goddamned hands off me!” Dodds yelled.

  “Not till you settle down!” said Penner, his breathing hard but his voice measured.

  Dodds struggled, but his sawyers held his arms and Penner held all three of them against the wall of the cabin. On the opposite side of the room, the bloodied stableman slowly stood up, wiping his face with the sleeve of his coat. “You knocked my teeth out.” he said matter-of-factly. “And you broke my nose!”

  “Lucky that’s all I did, you snivelling prick.”

  “I didn’t do nothing to you.”

  “You’re a pansy. You had it coming. You was making fun of my hand. You got what you deserved.” Dodds’ body was relaxing, his words slurring.

  “Frank, you’re a disgrace,” said Penner, unhanding the man and stepping away from him. “It’s really me you want to punch, but instead you pick on a man half your size. You’re a goddamned coward.”

  The sawyers eyed their boss and slowly released his arms. Dodds stood five feet from Penner. It was true that Penner was the biggest man in the room. Even with his heavy coat on, it was easy to see that his girth was massive.

  “What’s worse,” said Penner, turning to face Dodds, “is that you’re a drunk and a moonshiner. You’re supposed to be a leader for these men, and instead you’re making illegal whiskey, robbing them of their hard-earned pay, and turning this camp into a bunch of drunkards.” Dodds just grinned. “You’re a foreman, Frank. Don’t that mean a thi
ng to you?”

  “Don’t get all high and mighty on me, Penner.”

  “Well then, do your job!”

  “I do my job. Cutting ties. Cutting fuel. Don’t tell me how to do my job. I do it just fine.”

  “With no Red Coats for a hundred miles, our job is more than packing explosives or cutting ties, and you goddamned well know it Frank. Our job is to keep this camp dry. Make sure that when spring comes and this snow melts, we can push the end of the line down the Big Hill and get this job done. Instead, you’re making whiskey enough to keep ten thousand men drunk for the summer. Ain’t a one of them that will be able to work once you’re through with them.”

  Dodds ran a hand across his face, smearing saliva from the corner of this mouth across his beard. “You are such a high and almighty bastard, Penner. Think you’re a big man. Think you’re everybody’s boss. I got news for you, boy. You ain’t my boss. You’re just a lick-finger of a man. You just keep your nose out of my business, or you’re going to be damned sorry.”

  “You’re making this camp drunk, beating on other men. That’s my business now, Frank.” Penner stood erect before Dodds. “It’s my business now.”

  “What do you aim to do?”

  “You won’t stop of your own accord; I’m going to shut you down.”

  “You’re a dead man if you try, Penner.”

  “You threatening me, Frank?”

  “I’m telling you to leave well enough alone.”

  Penner turned to look at the bloodied man again, who was watching him. “Is this letting well enough alone, Frank? What do you think will happen when the first train arrives here come the spring? What do you think is going to happen then? You think those boys will be able to lay track down the Big Hill? What about my men, carrying nitro? What happens then?”

  Dodds laughed. “We’ll just get us some Chinese to do it. Won’t matter then if they blow themselves up!”

  “You’re an ignorant swine, Frank. You know that?”

  “Least I’m no pansy.”

  “When the spring comes and my men are drunk or fighting when they’re supposed to be picking their way down a sheer cliff with a pail of nitro, and they blow themselves up and kill a bunch of good boys trying to earn an honest living, it’s you who will have blood on his hands.”

  Dodds laughed again. “I got blood on my hands now,” and he spat on the floor at Penner’s boots.

  “Tomorrow morning this is going to end. Tomorrow morning I’m going to see Hep and this is going to end.”

  The room was silent.

  “You’re a rotten fink, Penner,” said Dodds, “and it’s going to cost you.”

  “What are you going to do, Frank? You want to take a swing at me? Here I am. Go ahead. You and I both know what will happen. So go ahead.”

  “You think Hep Wilcox don’t know what’s going on? You think he cares a damn?”

  “I take it to him and he’s going to have to care. He’ll have to do something. We’ll call the Red Coats in if we have to. He’ll have to care if I take it to him. That’s a fact. Come the morning, Frank, I’m shutting you down.”

  The rest of the room watched as Penner pulled his cap down over his ears, turned up the collar to his coat, opened the door, and stepped out into the darkness.

  • • •

  The winter camp was quiet when Penner emerged into the night. He looked up at the stars and calculated that it was midnight. It was very cold, and the stars stood in stark relief against a cloudless sky. Beyond the rim of dark forest the mountains rose in silhouette against the wheel of heaven. With no clouds to hold in the day’s faint heat, the evening had become frigid, and Penner guessing it to be minus twenty. His breath formed a dense brume before him.

  By starlight he made his way between the ramshackle huts huddled along the banks of the Pipestone River toward his own cabin, a few hundred yards away from the mainline of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

  Something would have to be done. It was the end of March, and though it was nearly impossible to imagine now, in a little over two months as many as ten thousand men would be making their way west, over the prairie from Winnipeg, Brandon, and Regina, for what without a doubt would be the most difficult construction season of the CPR’s exhausting journey across Canada. Penner would be in charge of the contract to blast the way down the Big Hill, the thousand-foot plunge on the west side of Kicking Horse Pass, into the valley of the Kicking Horse River. Then, if things went well, come the fall, they would have to do it all over again, blasting their way down the Lower Canyon of the Kicking Horse, an even more treacherous descent than the one they would face in the spring. He needed his men to have their wits about them. If they didn’t, many of them would die.

  As Penner walked towards his cabin, the snow scrunched under his boots. He’d heard the stories that men, desperate for drink, would hike ten miles through the woods to find a still where they could drink corn whiskey outside the regulated exclusion zone imposed by the CPR. Ten miles for a drink! Some got so drunk that they would wander lost in the woods. Others would fall into one of the region’s raging rivers and never be found again. Worse, thought Penner, is that they would show up for work a few days later half out of their minds, and imperil the safety of everybody around them. Dropping rail ties on each other’s legs; missing their mark when using a sledge hammer and crushing a man’s hand; dropping a pail of explosives and blowing themselves, and everybody around them, to pieces.

  Penner couldn’t stop all that by himself, but he was a foreman, and he had a responsibility to try.

  He reached his cabin and stopped. Would telling Hep Wilcox, the winter camp’s general manager, make much of a difference? Penner figured Wilcox would have to do something to shut Dodds down, but Penner harboured no illusions that the GM would clean up the entire camp. Not when he had so much else at stake.

  Penner wondered, given his suspicions about the man, if he could trust the general manager at all. Whiskey was just one thing that threatened the safety of those Penner would be overseeing come the spring. He suspected that there were far worse trials afoot for those working with explosives during the coming season.

  He stood at the door to his cabin, regarding the stars and the pale silhouette of the mountains that flanked the valley of the Bow River on either side of him.

  “If I wait till morning, it will give Frank time to pull himself together. If I wait till morning I might loose my chance,” Penner said aloud to the night sky.

  He turned and started back down the path, the snow waist high. Instead of taking the well-worn trail to the general manager’s sleeper car parked on the siding, he followed another path, toward the small station building containing the telegraph machine that sat on the banks of the frozen, snow-covered Bow River.

  There were no lights on at the distant station as Penner entered a patch of trees spared from Dodds’ saw. The forest was close, and the light of the stars grew dim as the trees pressed in overhead. He found his way along the path by feel, unable to stray one way or the other between the six-foot-high snowbanks.

  Something would have to be done about the whiskey. And something would have to be done about the explosives contracts, thought Penner. Why did there have to be so much politics around something as simple as blasting a tunnel through the rock?

  He was absorbed in that thought when he heard something behind him and stopped. He turned, expecting to see a deer stepping from the woods, but instead was startled to see the shadowy shape of a man not a dozen feet behind him. The bulk of the man’s coat, his heavy beaver pelt hat, and the darkness obscured his identity. He closed on Penner fast, and before Penner could move, the figure had raised a metal bar and was swinging it toward his head. Penner called out sharply. The blow struck him across the cheek, crushing his jaw and the bone below his eye, causing his skin to split in two in the frigid cold. He fell sideways into the snow, blood pulsing from the wound.

  His assailant stepped close over him. Penner blinked as blood pool
ed around his eyes. He tried to push himself back in the snow, but was unable to get any purchase in the deep drift next to the path. He felt the life draining from his limbs. His attacker hovered above him like a wraith, hoisting what Penner could now see was a star drill over his head. As he did so, his assailant’s face became visible in the faint light of the stars.

  Penner managed to mutter a bewildered “not you? ” through his broken visage before the drill swung down, connecting with his skull again, this time killing him instantly.

  TWO

  THE RETURN OF DURRANT WALLACE

  THE DREAM WAS ALWAYS THE same.

  He lay on the frozen earth of Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills, his leg blown apart below the knee, his horse dead beside him. His right hand still clutched his pistol, the six chambers of the revolver empty, its barrel hot from the explosion of the cartridges he had just fired. Where it lay against the ground it melted a small impression in the windblown ice. Snow fell on his face as he blinked into the pale grey sky. He could hear a man laugh, his voice fading into the distance. “Good riddance, Durrant Wallace.” Durrant knew that he would bleed to death there on the frozen earth.

  Moments before, he had been guiding Mack, his solid twelve-year-old quarter horse, over the windswept hills that marked a high point on Palliser’s Triangle. Mack had been his mount since the now famous summer of 1874 when three hundred and fifty men took part in the March West, from Dufferin, Manitoba, to various trading posts scattered across the North West Territories, bringing law and order to the Canadian West. The Cypress Hills were a rugged upland of tangled lodgepole pine and white spruce forests on their summits with bare, rough fescue meadows below. In the summer they bloomed like the fabled Garden of Eden, but now, in the winter of 1881, they were as desolate and unforgiving as the plains of Hades.

  Durrant stepped carefully over the stony ground, Mack’s reins in his left hand, his Winchester 76 in his right, as he examined the patchy snow and frozen meadow for signs of recent passage. He heard the snap of a frozen branch and dropped onto his right knee. Mack whinnied, the horse’s head pitching as he took in an unfamiliar scent. The world around him was gripped in a stony silence. Durrant didn’t have time to raise the lever-action Winchester when the woods in front of him exploded with gunfire.