The End of the Line

by Stephen Legault

  He found Peters in the drive shed next to the warehouse. There were a dozen rigs outfitted for delivery, but they were slow and cumbersome affairs. What he wanted was his father’s personal carriage, with the two solid black stallions hitched to make haste across the city.

  “Hold up there, Mr. Peters!” Durrant called as he raced across the garage.

  “Mr. Wallace, sir!” said Peters. Durrant took the reins from him and led the horses and their hitch back out into the morning sun.

  “The baby is coming!” Durrant yelled to Peters by way of explanation, and the teamster helped him re-hitch the horses to the carriage. Durrant jumped onto the bench seat and snapped the reins. Peters watched as the horses stepped up and the buggy sprang forward, its wheels catching on the rocks and cobble stones outside the sprawling warehouse.

  Durrant snapped the reins again and the horses jumped to a hard canter, the cart lurching around the corner of the warehouse and out onto Front Street. Durrant half stood in front of the buggy’s bench seat, pulling the reins to steer the horses around traffic on the busy thoroughfare. He heard the yells of men he sidelined in his haste, and the whinny of horse teams that were pulled up fast as he careened through traffic. The red-brick warehouses of the Quay gave way to the grey marble facades of the city’s financial district, and Durrant pressed the horses, yelling at them to pick it up, and calling to people on the streets to stand to and make way. Pedestrians yelled at him and called him a reckless fool, but he pressed on, the horses at a gallop now, the wheels of the buggy going clackaty-clack on the city’s cobblestone drives.

  It took him less than ten minutes to reach his modest home on the western side of the city’s financial district. The horses were sweating and foaming at the mouth when he pulled them up fast in front of the abode. Durrant had lost his hat and his eyes were wild with anticipation and fear. He took the steps three at a time and when he reached the front door he burst inside.

  The house was quiet. He stood in the foyer and looked around. “Mary?” he called.

  Ms. Agatha appeared at the top of the steps. “Mr. Wallace, please, come quickly,” she said. Durrant could not tell if the old woman’s normally stern face was more ardent at that moment.

  He took the stairs at a run and when he reached the top paused. “Is Mary well?”

  “The doctor is with her. She’s been asking for you.”

  Durrant tried to press past the housekeeper but she grabbed his arm. The strength in her hand surprised Durrant and he looked at her sternly.

  “The baby is too early, Mr. Wallace. Too early . . .”

  “Let me pass, Agatha.” She released her grip and he knocked on the double doors at the end of the hall and stepped inside.

  The room appeared bright but felt full of shadow. The doctor was at the bed, his nurse wringing blood from a towel.

  “Mr. Wallace, you’re here,” said the doctor.

  “I came as quick as I was able. Is she alright?” Durrant asked, looking at the shape of his wife in their bed.

  “The baby is coming now,” said the doctor.

  “Durrant?” Mary’s soft voice seemed distant and haunted.

  “Mary, I’m here,” he said, stepping to the foot of the bed. There was a pale ghost between the sheets, a broad stain of blood on the covers.

  “Durrant, I’m very cold . . .”

  Durrant looked at the doctor. The man was focused on his business beneath the reddened sheets. Durrant could smell iron in the room. He stepped to the side of the bed and stood there awkwardly. His wife looked at him, her face white as ash. She reached a hand to him and he took it as if it were made of porcelain.

  “I’m cold, Durrant.” She was sweating.

  He sat and gathered the blankets around her, the doctor focused on his work. Then she screamed, and Durrant, startled, squeezed her hand. But Mary didn’t feel his strength. Her eyes were closed and she had bitten her lip, a thin lattice of blood forming there. He pressed his face to hers and he could hear her breathing, a staccato sound that seemed utterly unnatural.

  “Durrant . . .”

  “I’m here, Mary.”

  “Durrant . . . I’m so sorry.” The sound of her breathing stopped.

  Startled, he looked at her, and then he turned to the doctor, his face so twisted and corded that he looked not twenty-one but much older.

  The doctor fumbled a moment and held up a bloody body that seemed much too small to be that of a human child. The nurse quickly took it from him and swaddled it in a linen blanket, wiping the smear of blood and mucus from it. The child did not cry. The doctor quickly stepped to Mary’s side and put his ear to her chest. He felt for a pulse. Then he simply stood up, his hands red with the blood of his patient, the room suddenly very cold, and very empty.

  • • •

  It took a week for his father to find him. He’d left the home that he and Mary had shared for just over a year just before sunrise the next morning. He had sat with the bodies throughout the night. He named the little boy Donald after his grandfather. The nurse had cleaned the child and wrapped him in fresh linen, and then, upon Durrant’s insistence, had left the house and Durrant in their brooding silence. Durrant had bidden Agatha to leave and locked the front door when she did. He ignored the periodic knocking.

  Durrant placed the boy next to his mother on the bed, and he sat in a chair by the window and watched them throughout the starless night. What thoughts rove through the young man’s mind that evening: the cruelty of God and the desperation of humanity; the farce that fate made of a man’s plans for this world. All of his study, all of his planning, and the planning of his own father, so his life would tack on a predetermined course: law school, passing the bar, becoming a lawyer, inheriting the family business; a wife and children and a stately home. In a moment of unexplainable malice all of that could be capsized and washed away in a sea of tears.

  He shed no tears. When the first birds began to sing outside his window, Durrant simply stood up, unlocked the doors and left the house. He passed a bewildered Agatha on the way out and said, “Call on the mortician today . . .” and closed the door behind himself before she could protest.

  It was a week before his father found him. Durrant had navigated his way through the city like a walking corpse, seeking out the dark locales where he didn’t have to see his own wretched pain and disillusionment, and where he could hide from any familiarities from his past life. When his father found him, Durrant had already made up his mind.

  “I’m leaving in two weeks,” the young man said. He was wearing the clothing of a labourer, with no hat upon his head and his face covered in a week’s growth of patchy beard.

  “For the West?” His father asked, his eyes soft on his son, his hands resting on the table between them where Durrant was drinking beer.

  “For Winnipeg. Fort Garry.”

  His father was silent a moment. “If you wish to travel, son, I can arrange it. Wallace and Son are respected in ports of call around the globe. It wouldn’t be difficult to make the appointments.”

  Durrant finished his beer and looked around for the barman to refill it. He nodded solemnly at his father sitting upright across the table from him. “I don’t want to travel under the family name, father.”

  “You could sign on as a hand, you wouldn’t have to represent me or . . .”

  “It’s not that,” Durrant interrupted him with an upturned hand, his eyes dark and cold against the familiar kindness of his father. “It’s not the name; it’s what it’s associated with. I simply want to leave everything behind, at least for now. I just can’t have anything to do with this life. Not for now.”

  His father nodded. “So you’ll take a train to St. Paul and then sign on to a wagon bound for Winnipeg?”

  Durrant nodded. “And then the March West. Colonel French is assembling a force of some three hundred and fifty men. They are to be called the North West Mounted Police. It’s to be a grand adventure,” Durrant said without enthusiasm. His fat
her noticed that his son clutched a golden locket in his hand. He knew without asking which likeness it possessed. The old man put his hand on his son’s and held it tightly.

  It was the last time Durrant saw his father, but not the last Durrant would see of that great metropolis spreading out into the inland sea.

  • • •

  In the darkness Durrant could make out the sound of running water off to their left. “Creek’s opened up,” said Moberly. He had stopped up ahead of Durrant. The Mountie laboured up the steep incline behind him, each step bringing a searing pain into the stub of his leg, each movement encouraging the pulse of blood that had now seeped into his boots.

  “Is that going to hamper our efforts?” asked Durrant.

  Moberly shook his head, then said, “It shouldn’t.”

  Durrant said, “Let’s keep going.”

  Moberly looked at the man, taking the measure of his stamina, and then continued on up the pathway through the forest.

  The March West was now history, thought Durrant: his own, and his young nation’s. In those lean, desperate days along the Canadian prairie, without enough food, and with their horses falling dead beneath them, the expeditionary force of the North West Mounted Police had forged what was bound to become one of the great stories of the Dominion. For Durrant, it was only the beginning of his own private hell. No matter how far he rode each day, what extra duties he took on around camp each night, how hard he worked himself and what physical discomfort he bore, each night when he wrapped himself in a too-thin blanket, the bodies of his wife and son were there on their bed with him. He could not outride them; only time and the swift passage of days into years could soften his suffering and replace it with a sort of callused fortification born of endless labour and devoted attention to his service to the Dominion of Canada.

  Justice became his armour.

  When he had been shot and left for dead eight years after the March West, the bullet that took his leg and the frostbite that mangled his hand had pierced that armour and left him more than a cripple. For the last two weeks at Holt City he had found some semblance of the peace that being a purveyor of justice had brought him those eight years he sat in the saddle and wore the scarlet serge. For the last two weeks he had remembered the purpose that came with serving your queen and your country. He was a North West Mounted Police officer; he wasn’t a postal clerk. He would either be reinstated as such, or he would leave the service for good.

  Durrant thought about Charlie. What would become of young Charlie should Durrant leave the NWMP? Even if he survived Frank Dodds’ wrath, young Charlie was now forever tainted by his affiliation with Durrant. He would take Charlie with him. Whatever happened next, the boy would be encouraged to accompany him. Durrant needed the boy and now the boy needed him. He might somehow become like the son Durrant had lost.

  They walked for two hours, Durrant ignoring the burning pain in his leg. He could feel the nub of skin and bone bleeding freely where the prosthetic’s suction socket affixed to his ruined leg. By the time the track began to level out and the forest opened to reveal a star-filled sky, he could feel the blood staining his trousers and growing tacky in the heel of his boot.

  In a moment Moberly stopped in the path and hunkered down. Durrant came up beside him.

  “The lake is just beyond that clearing. There’s a large, frozen swamp on its shore. The cabin sits to our left of it, on the southern edge of the clearing.”

  “You think they might have a sentry posted?”

  “I would.”

  “Can we get off this trail and steal through the forest?”

  Moberly looked back at Durrant. “Sergeant, this snow is five feet deep. I might make it, sir, but you will not.”

  Durrant nodded.

  “This is going to have to be a frontal assault or nothing, I fear.” Moberly looked back toward the lake. “Let me be so bold as to suggest a plan. As fate would have it, I have been to this cabin before and am familiar with its . . . peculiarities. That, sir, gives us a considerable advantage.” Moberly was smiling in the starlight.

  • • •

  By the constellations, it was four in the morning when the two men advanced from the cover of the woods and into the clearing that marked the swamp on the shore of the Lake of Little Fishes. Durrant could plainly see the spectacle of wonder that surrounded them. The lake itself was more than a mile long and half a mile wide, ringed on three sides by implacable mountains. At its far end a valley climbed up towards the star-swept heavens. By the light of those stars and the waxing moon they could see snowfields and glaciers mounting a peak that seemed to jut perpendicularly from the earth. That sheer wall of ice and stone marked the Continental Divide.

  They made their way along the snowy trail that skirted the swamp on the left and stopped when they saw the shoreline in full. Moberly pointed out what they had been looking for—the orange glow of a fire on the shoreline a hundred yards or more from where Moberly said the cabin would be. Durrant nodded and the men advanced. They proceeded another furlong and then Moberly spirited off into the deep snow to the right of the trail. Durrant waited, watching, trying to discern the shadowy figure as Moberly crossed the frozen swamp.

  The firelight flickered on the lake’s shore, and Durrant could see the outline of a man there. He waited, counting to one hundred, and then to one thousand, breathing slowly to stay calm. He checked the action on his pistols and pulled his gloves on tight. He ignored the searing pain in his right hand and the freezing blood that coated his leg and iced up in his boot.

  When he got to one thousand Durrant walked slowly forward along the path until he was fifty yards from the fire. He stopped. He could see the outline of the sentry. The man cradled an old single-shot Sharps 74 across his knees. He seemed not to be able to see Durrant.

  Durrant stepped forward a few more feet and then cleared his throat. The sentry snapped to attention. He stood, the rifle being held at port as he tried to see beyond his own fire to the source of the sound. Moberly stepped in behind him and brought the butt of the shotgun down into the man’s skull. The sentry fell over, his body narrowly missing the fire. Durrant closed the distance and arrived as Moberly was throwing the Sharps far out into the snow of the swamp. He reached into the man’s coat and came out with a Colt Navy revolver. He checked the load on the weapon and then tucked it into his belt. They then moved the man back onto his log and propped him up with a piece of heavy wood, hoping that from a distance his posture might appear natural.

  Durrant watched the cabin. It was nestled between the shore of the lake and the heavy dark forest of spruce and pine terracing up the soaring cliffs above. A light seeped from around the main door of the shack. Durrant knew from his discussion with Moberly that there were no windows on this side of the cabin.

  “Alright,” said Moberly. “Let’s go.”

  They moved together along the shore of the lake, Moberly with the shotgun pointed ahead, Durrant with his Enfield held at the ready. There was no sound, and neither Durrant nor Moberly could detect any motion along the shore, or from the cabin itself.

  “Right then,” said Moberly. “For Queen and Country,” and again, he slipped back into the woods that ringed the shore of the approach.

  Durrant stopped and looked back where they had come from. It seemed that no man had followed, and the sentry was still propped against his log. Unarmed as he was, if he woke he would as likely flee as re-enter the fray.

  Durrant counted again. Reaching one hundred, he scanned the dark woods for Moberly but could detect no sign of him. He continued along the path. When he reached the front of the shack, he stopped and listened. He pulled a deep breath into his lungs and then stepped to the side of the front door and knocked. He waited and knocked again, loudly.

  “Blue Jesus, Tanner, is that you? You’re supposed to be on lookout. Pete, get the goddamned door,” he heard Dodds bellow from within.

  He waited and in a moment the door to the cabin swung open. A long yello
w swath of light fell across the snow, interrupted by Pete Mahoney’s massive bulk. Durrant waited for Pete to step outside.

  “There ain’t nobody here,” he said as he turned. He was armed with Durrant’s Winchester 73.

  Durrant stepped away from the shadow of the building and levelled the pistol at the man.

  “Jesus,” Pete said, and began to bring the Winchester up to fire.

  “I’ll blow you to hell, Pete,” said Durrant as he jammed the gun into the man’s face. “Throw down that rifle.” Pete hesitated and Durrant thumbed back the hammer. The young Mahoney boy tossed the rifle into the snow.

  “Now step back inside.”

  Mahoney did as he was told and Durrant stepped inside after him. The room was close and hot. He quickly took in the surroundings, counting four men in the tiny room. Behind Pete, Durrant could make out the man’s brother Ralph and Thompson Griffin standing next to him. Durrant thought he could make out the diminutive form of Charlie in a chair behind Griffin. Dodds was sitting on a cot next to a woodstove. On the stove was a copper pot with a coiled copper worm attached that descended into a cold bath of melted snow. Three or four dozen empty bottles lined the far wall. A giant woodbox was built into that wall, adjacent to the stove.

  Durrant could see that Griffin held a pistol over Charlie. He still could not see the boy’s face around the men standing between him and the lad.

  Dodds leapt to his feet. Durrant levelled his pistol at the man, but continued to watch Pete. “Don’t reach for it, Dodds.” Dodds stood his ground.

  “Well, if the law hasn’t arrived. You should have taken our advice and left Holt City, Red Coat. This is no place for a cripple.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, not without Charlie, and you’re not either,” said Durrant. Dodds laughed. Durrant thumbed the hammer on his pistol.

  Dodds stepped forward. “You shoot me and your friend here gets it right between the eyes,” he said, nodding toward Charlie who was covered by Griffin’s pistol.