The End of the Line

by Stephen Legault

  “That’s how he’ll stay, Mr. Moberly. This is Dominion country.”

  Moberly holstered his twin Webley revolvers under his long coat and picked up the shotgun and checked the action. He then went to Paine and knelt beside him.

  Durrant reached up to the sled and hoisted himself upright. “Is he alive?”

  Garnet looked back and shook his head.

  • • •

  By the time Durrant had affixed his prosthetic, a dozen or more men had arrived from the operation at Kicking Horse Lake. Moberly had untied O’Brian and propped him up against the sled where he sat with his head in his hands. Moberly then rounded up a crew and had them unload the dynamite and pile it inside the shed that stood back in the trees. While that operation was underway, he turned to Wilcox, who lay on his back bleeding into the snow, and dressed his wounds using burlap from the load of dynamite.

  Durrant, meanwhile, went to Paine and looked down at the man. His leg would not allow him to kneel. Paine’s chest had a rent in it a foot wide where he had been shot at point-blank range. He had given up his gun and been shot with it. Durrant stashed that in his memory bank as a lesson.

  • • •

  Garnet Moberly drove the buckboard, and O’Brian sat beside him in the middle of the seat. Durrant, his Enfield in his left hand, sat on the outside. It was getting dark when they set off for Holt City. The two horses from Devon Paine’s stables trailed behind on long lead ropes. Wilcox was wrapped in a blanket on the bed of the wagon, and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Paine’s body was wrapped in a tarpaulin next to him.

  The sunset was gaudy: a broad smear of purples and crimson across the western sky beyond the valley of the Kicking Horse River.

  Durrant finally had a moment to collect his thoughts. “I thought you’d gone down the Kicking Horse.”

  “I was going to give it a day to settle down. There’s a nasty piece of business down a ways called the Golden Stairs that’s near impossible to negotiate in deep snow, in particular with a heavy load.

  “I was at the company office when your man Paine came in,” continued Moberly. “I don’t think he recognized me. He was just asking about Hep there, and this fellow . . .” he nodded at O’Brian. “I came out and saw two riders heading toward the pass and I knew there was trouble. I was halfway to the clearing when I heard the shotgun blast. I couldn’t even be certain it was you, not till I got to the clearing and saw you on the ground.”

  “You saved us all.”

  “Maybe . . . you might have got that little Bulldog out in time. As it turns out you, saved me.”

  Durrant smiled, “Maybe. I would never have gotten to O’Brian here. Not with one leg.”

  “So what’s going to happen to these lads?” Moberly asked.

  “Well, as soon as a freight comes in from Fort Calgary, there will be a couple of constables on board that can take them back to the barracks there. If Mr. Wilcox lives, that is.”

  “It could have been fixed that he didn’t,” said Moberly. “Still could.”

  “I’m pretty tempted by what he did to Mr. Paine, but no, we need him alive. At least, if at all possible, he needs to stand trial.”

  “The Queen’s laws shall reach to every corner of the Empire,” said Moberly, his voice taking on an exaggerated accent.

  “Something like that,” said Durrant.

  “And what about this rascal?” said Moberly, nodding at O’Brian again.

  “He’ll be up on conspiracy charges, in all likelihood.”

  O’Brian opened his mouth to speak.

  “You’ve got something you want to say?” said Moberly.

  The MP made a sound in his throat. “My family has the best lawyers in the Dominion at their service,” he said. “We’ll see about those charges.”

  “We could always dispose of them both,” said Moberly with a smile.

  The MP made the sound in his throat again.

  Durrant just nodded solemnly.

  “And what of you, Sergeant Wallace?” asked Moberly.

  “Back to Fort Calgary, after a day or so wrapping things up at Holt City . . . at The Summit. I’ll find that truant lad Charlie and head home.”

  “Home?”

  Durrant felt his body deflate a little at the word. He had never once felt at home at Fort Calgary, and wondered if he ever would. He had proven he could ride now, but it seemed unlikely that Dewalt would take him on as a regular in his constabulatory. With the mystery of Deek Penner’s death all but wrapped up, he felt a sudden wave of fear come over him. He could not go back to sorting the mail or sending and receiving wire correspondence. He had been zinged and zipped, but not zeroed, as the Mounties would say. Wounded and sidelined, but still alive. He was still capable and able to defend the right of the Dominion.

  “You should sign on with the CPR.”

  “What would I do?” Durrant asked.

  “Anything you want.”

  “I want to be a Mounted Police officer.”

  “Then that is what you must do,” said Moberly.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THE LAKE OF LITTLE FISHES

  IT WAS AN HOUR PAST dark when Durrant, Moberly and their buckboard arrived back in Holt City. The sky was clear and a new moon balanced on the top of the white-horned mountain and stars beyond counting filled the horizon. They drove the wagon first to the station where they found a cadre of men to attend to Hep Wilcox. Durrant dispatched one of the men to find Doc Armatage, and when he returned Durrant instructed him to do what he could to keep Wilcox alive. Durrant put Bob Pen in charge of the man’s security while he attended to his two prisoners and to Devon Paine’s remains.

  They drove the wagon to the stables and unhitched the horses. Durrant led them and the two trailing animals to the barn where he gave them a bucket of oats and a bucket of water each. Moberly roused some of the men from a nearby cabin to help him carry Paines’ body to the tack shed, where they laid him in his tarp on the floorboards. It seemed a fitting mortuary for the man. Durrant vowed that he would get a proper burial at Fort Calgary when they finally got back that way, and when the frost left the ground.

  Before leaving the stables, Durrant found his crutch where he’d discarded it in front of the barn and propped himself up on it once more.

  Moberly said that he would head back to his own quarters for the night and then return to the Kicking Horse in the morning to meet up with Mr. Jimmy and the rest of his survey crew. Durrant shook his hand.

  “This isn’t the last you’ll see of me,” said Moberly with a grin.

  “I hope not.”

  “I’ll call in on you in the morning.”

  Durrant nodded his agreement and then slowly made his way across the camp to his bunk. He was dog tired and famished and he hoped to hell for his own sake that Charlie was there and had a hot supper waiting for him on the stove. He reached the cabin and with the last of his energy hefted the door wide. The cabin was dark, stone cold and empty. Durrant let his eyes adjust to the dim room, his hand on the hilt of his pistol. When he could see well enough he found the lamp on the table, trimmed the wick, and lit it with a safety match he struck on his thumbnail. The lamp cast a hollow orange glow over the frigid room.

  The space appeared exactly as it had when he had left for the Kicking Horse Pass so many hours before. Durrant scanned for some sign that might indicate that Charlie had come and gone, but there was nothing. His small table with his book and the stub of a candle, his locket, the trunk at the foot of his bed, Charlie’s coat on his tick, the small desk, the writing tablet, and the piece of oily chalk that Charlie used to scrawl messages. The hair on the back of Durrant’s neck stood on end. He picked up the tablet. He had ignored it that morning.

  It read:

  Wallace:

  We have Charlie. Leave Holt City. When you have reached Fort Calgary, send word and the boy will be released.

  Dodds.

  He threw the tablet down on the desk and it broke into a dozen pieces. The exhau
stion that he had felt moments before evaporated in a hot rush of anger. He slammed his fist into the table. Like hell, he through. Like hell he would leave Holt City. Like hell he would leave Charlie in the hands of Frank Dodds. He turned and stepped back out into the night.

  • • •

  Moberly responded to the furious pounding at his cabin door with a Webley pistol drawn. “Good lord man, it’s not been twenty minutes!” he said, opening the door wide. “I haven’t even gotten my boots . . .”

  Durrant cut him off. “They have Charlie!” His face was as white as the winter that lay on the ground. His eyes were wide, a deep line cut across his face tracking his concern.

  “Who does?”

  “Dodds.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They left me a note.”

  “Dodds can’t write.”

  “Charlie can. It was in his hand.”

  Moberly was already pulling on his coat and strapping his pistols around his waist. “What did they say?”

  Durrant recited the note.

  Moberly stepped back inside.

  “Where do you think they might be hiding the boy?” asked Durrant.

  Moberly closed his eyes a moment. “I don’t know, but I know who we can ask.”

  “Ask?”

  Moberly grabbed Paine’s double-barrelled shotgun off the bunk where he had put it twenty minutes earlier. “Ask.”

  • • •

  They stood a moment outside the tarpaulin cabin. Just a few days ago Durrant had won two hands of poker and procured valuable information as his winnings in this hovel. Now a life was at stake; there would be no five-card draw this night.

  A thin stream of smoke rose from the rickety chimney; the sound of a fiddle being played and men’s laughter leaked from the canvas walls.

  “They aren’t going to give up their companions easily,” said Moberly to Durrant. “How far are you willing to go?”

  “An innocent’s life is at stake. I put him in this peril, so I’d say pretty far.”

  Moberly nodded. He kicked in the door and burst into the room, the double-barrelled shotgun pressed to his shoulder. Durrant stepped in behind him, the Enfield pistol cocked and held straight out. He levelled it on one startled face and then the next.

  “Evening, gents,” Durrant said. There were a dozen men in the cabin. Neither of the Mahoney brothers, nor Griffin was among the dark faces that stared back. Two jugs of moonshine sat out on the table and several of the men held tin cups. Durrant picked a clean target and fired the Enfield; the tin cup in the man’s hand jumped from his grasp, moonshine spraying across him. The bullet missed a man’s leg by an inch and then feathers burst into the air from a tick on a low bunk behind him.

  One of the men at the table began to rise quickly. Moberly bore down on him, swinging the butt of the shotgun into his face, mashing his nose, a spray of blood decorating the canvas wall of the shack. The man fell to the floor, clutching his face.

  Durrant drew the hammer on the Enfield back. He searched for another target, but all of the tin cups had been hastily placed on the table.

  “Alright,” he said, “I’ve got a question. Every time I have to ask it after the first, I’m going to send one of you boys to hell. We clear?”

  Nods around the table. Moberly scanned the room with his shotgun.

  “Where is Frank Dodds holding my lad Charlie?” asked Durrant.

  Several of the men looked at each other. Durrant watched their faces, the way their eyes met one another. He stepped towards the table, the Enfield seeking a mark. The room was dead quiet, the air thick with the reek of bodies and booze and tobacco. Nobody spoke.

  “Alright then, I’m going to ask it again in three seconds,” he said, and he took another step toward the table at the centre of the room.

  “Two seconds . . .” The hot barrel of the Enfield found what it was looking for. Durrant pressed it against a man’s forehead. He was a big man, bearded and dark, his eyes ringed with blue, and his fingers still touching the cup on the table. The man’s eyes snapped up to Durrant’s.

  “One . . .”

  “Jesus Christ,” the man said. “He’s at the Lake of Little Fishes.” Durrant pressed the barrel into the man’s forehead. He winced. “He’s at the lake. There’s a shack there. They took your boy there this morning. You’re supposed to leave Holt City. If you don’t they’ll kill him.”

  “The Lake of Little Fishes?” said Durrant.

  “Yeah, that’s what the Indians call it.”

  “Tom Wilson’s lake,” said Moberly. “Emerald Lake, he named it when he saw it a couple of years ago. Edwin Hunter took him there; said the Indians called it the Lake of Little Fishes.”

  “Garnet, you know where this place is?”

  “I’ve been there. I know the cabin.”

  Durrant eased the barrel back from the man’s forehead. There was an angry round mark where the hot barrel had singed his brow. He reached up and rubbed it, keeping his eyes fixed on Durrant.

  “If I so much as smell one of you navvies following me, I’ll shoot you in the face. If I get to this Lake of Little Fishes and find Charlie isn’t there, or that they’ve hurt him, I’m going to come back here and kill every single one of you. Is that understood?”

  The men nodded.

  “This is your last chance to get the story straight,” said Durrant.

  Nobody spoke. Moberly looked at Durrant. Durrant nodded and slowly backed out the door, Moberly following. When they were outside, Moberly reached into his pocket and took out a heart lock and slipped it on the door’s latch. He fastened it shut and smiled at Durrant.

  “Be like one of these idiots to get up and go for a piss right now,” said Moberly. “Wouldn’t want you to have to shoot him because of it,” he smiled.

  “Let’s go,” said Durrant.

  • • •

  The going was extremely difficult, but not as hard as it might have been had several men not trodden the same arduous route up the side of the valley in the last few days. The tracks of those who went before them were obvious. Durrant was certain that someone was in the cabin on the shores of Tom Wilson’s lake and that Charlie was likely there with them. The two men stood on the western bank of the Bow River where the tracks plunged into the darkened woods.

  “From here we start up the side of the valley,” said Moberly. “It’s about three miles, if memory serves, and we’ll have to climb about five hundred feet or more to reach the lake. The going will be steep in places . . .”

  Durrant’s face was set with determination. “Let’s get a move on,” he said, looking at the stars. “We want to be on their doorstep before first light.”

  “All things considered, I figure two or three hours,” said Moberly.

  Durrant nodded and Garnet turned into the woods. He wore his babiche sticks and took the lead, their broad webbing packing the trail down for Durrant to follow. They paralleled a winding creek most of the way, though they would only see its icy waters once or twice; it was under six or more feet of accumulated snow. Even with Moberly’s trail breaking, the going was arduous. The day’s adventure had opened up the wound on Durrant’s right leg so that it bled now. He could feel the warm liquid seeping down his trouser and onto his prosthetic.

  In the shadow of the woods neither man could see much. After an hour of walking Durrant’s senses had attuned themselves to listen to the steady sound of Moberly’s snowshoes against the crusted snow and the rhythmic cadence of his breathing. By now, thought Durrant, Charlie might have lost hope. He could not know that instead of turning tail and slinking back to Fort Calgary, Durrant had instead been waylaid from his rescue mission and had been drawn to the crest of the Kicking Horse Pass to face Hep Wilcox.

  He had drawn this boy from the mundane world of Fort Calgary into a dangerous and reckless adventure, and for what? Durrant had to admit that his purpose had been selfish: his own redemption. As he listening to Moberly trudging up the slope before him, Durrant
had to also ruefully admit that the March West, and all that came after it, had been his own final effort to escape the intolerable suffering he had endured in Toronto.

  • • •

  “Mr. Wallace, the baby is coming!” It was his father’s errand boy standing in the door of his crowded office. The boy’s face was flushed and he was breathing hard.

  Durrant looked up from his ledger. “What are you talking about, Vincent?”

  “It’s Mrs. Wallace, sir. She said to come and get you. The baby is coming!”

  Durrant sat staring at the boy. A thin thread of light pressed through the soot-smeared windows high up on the red-brick wall. The light struck the crates that lined Durrant’s office, stacked seven and eight high, each leaning precariously into the room. The baby wasn’t due for more than a month. Six weeks, if the doctors could be believed.

  “She said to come quickly, sir.”

  Durrant stood up, the ledger slapping shut. He reached for his derby and put it on over his closely cropped hair. He was a young man, built for action, and he bolted from behind his desk, running past the boy and out of his office.

  The outer room was crowded with the men who toiled for his father: shippers, receivers, packers, and inspectors, all milling around a confluence of desks, each piled high with papers and ledgers. Durrant ran past them, not seeing them, the men looking up from their work as the prodigal son, his coattails streaming out behind him, dashed past. He nearly bowled over his father coming through the door from the warehouse. Though Durrant was a solid man at twenty-one, he paled next to the broad shoulders and powerful physique of his father.

  “Durrant, where are you going in such a hurry?” The older man still had the Scottish lilt despite twenty-five years in Upper Canada. He pushed his glasses up on his red nose.

  “It’s Mary, Father. The baby is coming!” Durrant’s face registered fear and joy.

  “Go, son!” his father said, stepping aside and slapping him on the back. “Go! Catch up to Peters before he unhitches the buggy.”

  Durrant ran past him and sprinted through the warehouse. Wallace and Son import-export business had never been busier, but this morning Durrant saw little of it. The baby was coming and it was early. He wondered if someone would have alerted the doctor, and hoped that he wasn’t too late to be at home when the child was born.