The End of the Line (41 page)

“Lake Charlene Louise . . .”

•  •  •

With a billow of black coal smoke and a great frayed balloon of steam the eastbound train slowly pulled from the station. Two days had passed since the rescue on the shores of the lake. Durrant sat on a padded bench next to a window in the caboose of the freight. He stared out the porthole at the snowy forest that rose up in swells toward the peaks above.

The three men he and Moberly had captured alive—including the sentry who had simply stumbled back to Holt City with an aching head—had been taken by freight to Fort Calgary. According to a wire from Sub-Inspector Dewalt, received on a replacement telegraph machine found in the stores at Holt City, the men were all still alive. Frank Dodds was nearest to death, his body riddled with bullets. Even the Fort's doctor was astonished that he had survived. The bodies of Devon Paine, Deek Penner, Pete Mahoney, and John Christianson had also been dispatched to the Fort for burial in the spring. Durrant vowed to attend the interment of Paine and Penner.

The
MP
Blake O'Brian and the spy Patrick Carriere had been dispatched to Regina. They would appear before a magistrate and be charged with various crimes, but not before Durrant had questioned them.

Hep Wilcox had also been dispatched to Regina to await arraignment on charges of murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy. In all, six men had been taken alive at the end of the line. Four more were transported enclosed in rough-hewn pine boxes, constructed from wood fittingly cut on the slopes of Dodds Peak, for burial at Fort Calgary.

Durrant watched as the valley of the Bow River slipped past. The train began to pick up speed on its way to Donald Siding and then Castle Mountain.

“A penny for your thoughts?”

Durrant snapped out of his reverie and looked at Charlie sitting across from him. Her hair had been washed and brushed and no longer stuck straight up like a wire brush. Instead it lay soft and flat around the curve of her face. She wore a heavy skirt borrowed from Evelyn Armatage. Durrant regarded her a minute. He could see, with her hair always under the heavy wool cap, and without recourse to hearing her soft feminine voice, how he could have been fooled. Some investigator, he thought, smiling.

“I was thinking about something that O'Brian told me before we sent him away in shackles.”

“What was that?”

“How easy it had been to come within a hair of engineering such a catastrophic accident.”

“But they didn't. You stopped them.”

“We,” he said. “We stopped them. You and Mr. Moberly get as much credit for that as any.” Charlie blushed and looked down at her hands folded on her skirt. “He said that if it wasn't for Bill Kauffman tipping off Deek Penner, they would have pulled it off. An explosion at the plant might have killed dozens of men, maybe more. That would have set off a firestorm of debate in Parliament. I think O'Brian would have ended up being the hero. He could have stepped up with a solution—the Northumberland company takes over the explosives contract—and history would have been changed. The Kicking Horse would be known not for the extraordinary effort of men forging a path through the most rugged wilderness in this new land, but for a terrible tragedy.”

“You're starting to sound like Mr. Moberly. Have you heard how his surgery went?” Charlie asked.

Durrant nodded. “I got a wire this morning. Two slugs dug out of his arm and shoulder. Said he would add them to his collection.”

“That
does
sound like Mr. Moberly.”

They sat quietly awhile.

“You know what bothers me the most about all of this?” he asked after a spell. “That Deek Penner had to die. I think that he was the kind of man that I would have respected and liked very much. Honest, hard working. A good man. And that John Christianson got so entangled in this.”

“He was a killer.”

“Yes, he was. He was also a victim. He paid the ultimate price for allowing himself to become trapped by greed and by the passions of men who had long ago learned to manipulate others to their will. He had a mania to him, but so do many men. He simply could not control his, but instead allowed others to control it for their own will.”

“I wouldn't spend too much time grieving for John Christianson,” Charlie said.

“Maybe you're right,” said Durrant.

“Of course I am.” She smiled and looked out the window.

The train slipped down the wintery valley. They passed Castle Mountain and then made the long turn in the transect that brought Mount Rundle into view. The train began to slow for Banff Station.

“Did you hear that they have discovered hot springs here?” Charlie said as the train ground to a halt at the tiny station.

“Is that right?”

“Three men, two of them brothers, up in the woods there, just above the river, in a cave.”

“I suppose you'll be wanting a bath then,” he said.

She smiled. “Oh, to dream,” Charlene said.

The train started again and followed the river towards the station and roundhouse at the newly renamed siding of Canmore. They slipped the bonds of the mountains and were steaming towards Fort Calgary. Durrant felt the change in him, and in Charlie. In Charlene.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She sat motionless a while, watching the peaks slip away behind the train through the greasy soot stained window. Finally she said, “I don't know.”

“You won't go back. Not to the ranch. Not to him. I won't allow it.”

“Of course I won't. I don't need
you
not to allow it. I left because if I stayed there, in that bleak place, with that monster of a man, I would likely be dead by now. I ran away, changed everything about my life, so I would not have to endure the horror of life with him. He tried to kill me once. If I was to return, I know he would try again. No, I won't go back to that place, or to that man.”

Durrant felt a hot ember kindle deep in his heart. God have mercy on the soul of that man should Durrant ever meet him. “I just don't think that I can go back to work in the stables now,” continued Charlene.

“I doubt they'd have me. There really isn't much work for a young woman to do in Fort Calgary now. Not that's proper, at least.”

“What are
you
going to do?” she asked after a time. They had crossed near the Morley Ranch and were steaming past the confluence of the Bow with the Ghost River.

He didn't answer. “Durrant?”

He shook his head. “I guess that's going to be up to Steele.”

“Have you heard word?”

“Nothing yet, but I know this: I can't go back to sorting the post. I can't sit at the Fort and send and receive cables. I can't take the census. I'm a North West Mounted Police officer. I may not be able to ride like I used to, but I can police. I think I've damn well proven myself.”

“You've changed, you know.”

He looked at her. “How so?”

She was silent a moment. Her eyes were so very kind. “When I first met you, there in the stables, and on the train up to Holt City, and in the first few days in that place, you seemed so very sad and angry. In time, it was as if . . . Have you ever watched a snake shed its skin?”

He shook his head.

“It's the same snake,” she said. She held out the fingers of her left and with her right hand illustrated how the snake wiggled and twisted its body to lose its old casing. “It just grows out of its skin. It leaves the old skin behind. It doesn't need it anymore. It's the same snake, but it's completely new.
You
became new,” she said.

“I became who I was before,” he said.

There was a long pause. “There's something else,” she said.

He wouldn't look at her. He stared at the foothills as they rose and fell on the horizon.

“Durrant, I saw the locket. The woman, the baby. I saw it on your nightstand.”

“I'm not going to talk about it . . .” His voice was sharp.

“It's okay. You don't have to. I just want you to know that
I
know. And I understand. We've all suffered loss that we can't confer.”

He said quickly, “It was just that you . . . you could have been
that
boy. I joined the March West to escape that loss, and now I feel like I've lost
that
again.” He couldn't meet her eyes.

A long moment passed and they heard the train whistle. He knew that they were approaching Fort Calgary and the outskirts of the town.

“Durrant,” she said.

He kept his gaze down. She reached across and put her soft fingers on his game right hand. He looked up at her. She was looking straight into his eyes. Her eyes were so very blue, and so very kind. “Durrant, I don't think you've lost anything.”

THE NO. 28 LOCOMOTIVE BEGAN
to slow for the first switch. Two blasts of its horn let the switchman know that all was well.

Durrant watched from the window of the coach. The panorama of peaks and forests sped past. He held his breath a beat too long and found himself gasping for air. He had heard that the very first train to descend the Big Hill had derailed, and many others afterward had too, even though safety switches and runaway lanes were in place to keep trains from plunging over the side into the valley of the Kicking Horse. Talk now was that when the
CPR
and the Dominion recovered from the initial cost of the mainline, they would attempt some marvel of engineering by constructing a series of spiral tunnels through the sides of the mountains to lessen the grade of the descent on the Big Hill.

A lot of good that did Durrant on November 4, 1885. Durrant pressed his face to the window and peered back in the direction they had travelled, toward the receding summit of the Pass. He thought of the day a year and a half earlier when an innocent life had been lost on that crest; when Devon Paine had been gunned down in his naive attempt to save Durrant's own life. He thought, too, of the moment on the shore of the Lake of Little Fishes, or as it was now called, Lake Louise, when he came to see Charlene for who she really was.

Tom Wilson, the old rascal, had renamed that sapphire blue lake after his most recent sweetheart. Tom had told Durrant in Fort Calgary recently that while guiding a party from the Association of the British Advancement of Science, he had shown the now famous lake to Sir Richard Temple and his daughter, Louise. Louise had demonstrated a preference for the sparkling lake, and Wilson for Louise, and so it was that Tom renamed it right then and there. If the monarchists wanted to believe the gem of water was named for Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, let them.

So much had happened. He stretched out his right leg. After the debacle at Holt City, Durrant had returned to Regina and received medical treatment for his game leg. Armatage had bandaged him up but there was little more that could be done at the end of steel, and the only prosthetics specialist in the North West Territories was at the fort in Regina. Despite all that had happened in the ensuing eighteen months since he left Holt City, it felt as good as a prosthetic could: so good that except for the harshest conditions of winter, he no longer felt the need for the crutch. He tapped the silver-handled cane on the ground. It had been a gift, albeit indirectly, from another man whose life the Kicking Horse had almost stolen.

“I've no bloody need for a cane,” Moberly had told him after the Honorable Member for Northumberland had given him the relic for saving his hide there in the snowy woods. “You might take note of the handle, old chap,” said Moberly with a wink, when they had met in the barracks in Fort Calgary early in April. Indeed, the cane's secret had come in handy in a tight spot recently.

Durrant tapped it on the floor of the coach again. They had passed the final switch and were levelling out towards the siding of Field.

The Canadian Pacific Railway had at last earned the support of Parliament, but it wasn't because of its merits as a unifier of the fledging nation. The rail held strategic importance for transporting troops and military cargo in combatting what everybody now called the North West Rebellion, or simply the Métis War, but what Durrant had learned to think of as the Riel Resistance.

Durrant closed his eyes. He had come close to losing his life on the frozen earth of the Cypress Hills, and again on the summit of Kicking Horse Pass. At Batoshe, in the aftermath of that bloody battle at the end of May in that very year, Durrant had almost lost his soul. He closed his eyes and pushed that shadow from his memory. He would not dwell on that now. That was a story for another time.

The coach Durrant travelled in was at the back of a six-car train that had left Calgary that morning, and had been steaming west from Montreal for nearly a week. Along the way it had picked up a number of prominent passengers.

Durrant became aware that a man was standing before him. He cleared his throat and looked up.

“Sergeant Wallace?”

“That's me.”

“Sir, Superintendant Steele would like a moment of your time, please.”

“Of course.” Durrant pushed himself up with the help of the fine silver-handled cane.

“Follow me, sir.”

Durrant put his bowler hat upon his head and straightened his wool dresscoat. He followed the man to the end of the coach, through the crowded smoke filled dining lounge, and then into the car named “Metapedia,” an exclusive coach reserved for the
CPR
brass. Durrant had never been inside.

It was plush and warm and had low lights affixed to the wall with ornate brass fixtures. Chairs were arranged as if in a parlor and men sat about in expensive suits, drinking glasses of brandy and smoking cigars. Durrant ignored the violation of the temperance laws. He wasn't a Mountie today, he was a guest of the
CPR
, though several men took note as he passed, eyeing the holster that supported his Enfield hanging below his coat. Several of the men nodded to him and one said his name and he nodded in return and tipped his hat.