The End of the Line (25 page)

“Much obliged,” said Durrant. “Charlie, son, lend me a hand here, would you?”

Charlie gave Durrant a leg up, and once he was settled on the sled's bench, Charlie passed up his crutch. Charlie hopped up with the others on the back of the sleigh and regarded the men. They were dirty from the long journey across the plains from Winnipeg; soot covered their faces and clothing. Most were not much older than Charlie. The journey from Holt City to the height of land began in silence, but soon the men began to exclaim as the mountains hove into view.

Within the hour the sleigh reached the steepest grade, and the teamster called for several of the men to dismount and push. Durrant noticed that young Charlie—by far the smallest of the lot—hopped off with the first of the men and lent a shoulder to the effort. The horses strained and farted and pulled the sleigh up the steep grade, and soon they were atop a broad, forested plateau at the height of land.

“This is it,” said the teamster, looking over at Durrant.

“This is the pass?”

“There's a mile or so of level ground here.” He pointed west. “Over there it drops off pretty steeply, down into the valley of the Kicking Horse River.”

Durrant looked about. To the south rose sheer limestone walls, cirques, and ramparts, each one climbing higher than the next, until they crested with glacier-clad peaks that formed the implacable wall of the Continental Divide. He had heard men speak of a lake so blue that Tom Wilson had named it Emerald there on the eastern slopes of the Divide, just a few miles above Holt City. The men joked and referred to it as the Indians had: The Lake of Little Fishes. On the western side of those mountains was unknown country where the waters ran west into the Kicking Horse and on to the Columbia, and to the Pacific Ocean. The sleigh banked in a wide turn on the ice road and Durrant saw wood smoke rising up from the trees, a sure sign that progress had come to this desolate and lonesome region.

In a moment the sleigh pulled through a break in the trees and a small clearing provided them with spectacular views.

“This here is Kicking Horse Lake,” said the driver. On the far western shore Durrant saw the source of the smoke—a fire burning slash on the bank of the tarn. Beyond it the woods had been cleared and a collection of tents could be seen, white against the dark forests behind them.

The Tote Road went straight across the lake, and in a few minutes the sleigh came to rest next to a snow-cleared area where more than a hundred men were at work constructing the munitions factory. After Charlie helped Durrant dismount, Durrant turned to the driver to inquire about a return journey.

“I'm back up with a load of supplies mid-afternoon. You can hitch a ride back down then if you like,” said the teamster.

“That will suit us just fine.”

“I'll look for you,” said the man, and when his sleigh was free of its human cargo, snapped the reins and drove the two draft horses back across the lake at an easy gait.

Durrant looked around to get his bearings. “Mighty desolate place,” he said, regarding the work going on about him. The snow and trees had been cleared back from a space a hundred feet in length and sixty wide, and that was where the bulk of the construction was being undertaken. Here on the summit of the pass more than fifteen feet of snow had accumulated. Durrant imagined that the task of keeping both the construction site and supply yard clear of snow throughout the winter was a Herculean task. The building had been framed and Durrant noticed a small steam-powered sawmill for cutting timbers for the building's siding and roof. A dozen men scrambled over the structure, while many more worked on the ground. More still could be heard at their saws and axes in the woods, preparing the right-of-way for the Tote Road.

Durrant and Charlie proceeded to the construction site, the smell of freshly milled pine conferring a freshness to the site that ran contrary to the hacked-out appearance of the place. Durrant found the site manager's tent and stuck his head inside. Three men sat at a table, a set of plans open before them. They looked up as he peered inside.

“Name's Wallace,” he said.

“See Tom Bracket if you've not been assigned to a team,” said the man on the far side of the table.

“Sergeant Wallace,” he clarified, “North West Mounted Police.”

“Of course,” said the man. “What can I do for you?”

“I'm going to have a look around the camp, talk with a few of the men; just wanted to let you know.”

“Much obliged, Sergeant. Let us know if you need anything.”

“I will. Thank you. Don't suppose Garnet Moberly is around the camp, is he?”

“No sir,” said a second man. “He's already headed down the Golden Stairs to the Kicking Horse, likely halfway to the Columbia by now.”

Durrant nodded. “He doesn't waste time getting where he's going, does he?”

“Moberly comes and goes like an apparition around here. One minute he's here, the next he's vanished. His team can't keep up with him.”

Durrant turned to Charlie who was waiting behind him. “Let's see if we can't follow the Tote to see what all the fuss is about,” said Durrant. The two proceeded through the construction site and took up the Tote where it headed west through the dense pines growing along the summit.

Durrant moved more confidently, the hobnails on his crutch piercing the icy ruts. As they walked, Durrant's mind began to turn over the question of motive once again. Durrant communicated his thoughts to Charlie out loud, as if he was speaking to himself.

“Okay, we've got four possible motives, here. The first, and most obvious, is whiskey. It seems pretty likely from what we've heard that Deek Penner got his nose into Frank Dodds' business. That's not to say that there ain't others brewing the stuff down there at Holt City, but my guess is that Dodds is principally responsible. If Deek found out, maybe the two of them had some words that night at the card game; Ralph Mahoney as much as said so. If that's the case, maybe Dodds thought to eliminate the risk of our lad Penner ratting on him to Hep Wilcox. Certainly Dodd's a strong enough fellow to hoist a star drill to club Penner from behind . . .”

Charlie looked at him. “Right,” said Durrant, taking Charlie's inference that he himself was slight but had held fast to that self-same drill rod. “But you're a strong lad,” Durrant quickly said.

“So that's theory number one, whiskey as the motivation. Theory number two is the Grand Trunk spy. We're not a lick closer to discovering this man's identity or even if there is a spy. Wilcox insists there is one, and others seem to corroborate, though they are suspects themselves, aren't they? Wilcox insists that Penner was onto this spy, and I can't help but wonder if that's what the correspondence from this fellow Kauffman is all about. The trouble is the code; it's unintelligible, at least to me.”

Again Charlie looked at him. “Just 'cause you can read, son, doesn't make you a code cracker.” Charlie shrugged in a suit-yourself sort of way. “If you want to look at it, I don't see any harm. Ideally I'd like to get my hands on the code that the Grand Trunk uses for their wires. That's the way to do it. I just might see if John Christianson can come up with something for me there.”

In the distance they could hear the shouts and calls of men at work, and felt the earth move beneath them as trees toppled to the ground. “That must be the cutting crew up ahead,” Durrant said.

He stopped and turned to Charlie. “So that's theory two, the motivation for the killing being to avoid detection. If that is the case, mind, I would imagine that the killer would have skipped town on one of the near-daily freights that head back to Banff and onto Fort Calgary. According to Wilcox—a suspect himself, mind you—nobody has gone missing from the camp since Penner died. If they caught a freight, I could have Dewalt look for them in Fort Calgary. If they went for a walk in the woods, they would likely be long past prosecuting by now.

“The third motive is power. Grant McPherson has Penner's old job. With it comes more money, and more power.” Charlie looked at him, his face twisted into a question. “Just because the man pulled you out of the drink doesn't mean he's not capable of killing a fella. He as much as admitted that himself. Plus, there's the matter of the blood.

“Devon Paine is the only man who's had a coat laundered. I know that don't make him a prime suspect as such, but it does make me ask questions. His face was certainly busted up, no doubt about it, and Dodds is the one that done it. Just the same, I haven't seen blood on another man's coat as yet, and nobody else has been down to the laundry. I just don't know what to make of that . . .”

Durrant's voice trailed off into the woods. They heard another tree fall.

“Then here is motivation number four. It's maybe the most obvious one: money. Penner was the foreman for the explosives work to be done on the Kicking Horse. Nitro. It's big money. You heard O'Brian the other night. It's damned near the biggest contract left on the Canadian Pacific mainline. The Canada Explosives people have the manufacturing contract, and now McPherson is going to run the show on the blasting side of things. “

Durrant continued. “It sounds to me like the Honourable Member for Northumberland and our own Mr. Wilcox have doubts about the Canada Explosives factory back there. Maybe they have cause to believe that the operation at Kicking Horse Lake will produce a substandard product. That
could
mean lives lost, and delays in construction, and one hell of a dust-up in Parliament. Mr. O'Brian would certainly benefit from that.”

“Or . . .” he said, looking deep into the woods. They felt the earth shake as another tree fell. “Or . . . I need to learn more about Mr. O'Brian and what his real motivation is for being at the end of steel at this time.” Durrant smiled at the boy. “Come on, let's go have a look at this so-called Big Hill.”

They made their way along the Tote Road to where it came to an end and a dozen men were working with Swede saws and double-bladed axes. Several of the men looked up as the one-legged Mountie and his boy walked into their midst.

“So lads, how far to the Big Hill?” Durrant asked. One of the men spit a stream of tobacco juice that coloured the snow a putrid brown.

“Just through that tangle of wood there,” said another man, his axe set on his shoulder.

“Come have a look, Sergeant,” one of the sawyers said and Durrant knew that his presence in Holt City was known to one and all.

The snow was deep, but there was a thick crust of ice on the summit of the pass, and several of the loggers walked with Durrant and Charlie, lending an arm where necessary. Durrant was suddenly struck that these men, working just five miles from Holt City, lived in a very different world from the one below in the valley of the Bow River. Their distance from the investigation of the murder of Deek Penner must make it seem so remote to them, working as they did at the very tip of man's progress into the wilderness, that they were beyond judgement.

It took a moment, but soon Durrant could hear the roar of mountain waters.

“There's open water,” he said.

“That's Sherbrook Creek. It just opened up a couple of days ago. That warm spell that just passed melted a lot of snow.”

“So this isn't the Kicking Horse River proper?”

“No sir, that there is just a tributary. The main stem comes in a few miles below. They say there is a waterfall up that valley to the north,” the man pointed, “that comes down straight out of the clouds.”

“I'll be damned,” said Durrant.

They shouldered their way through the rough tangle of undergrowth where the woods ended and found themselves on the verge of the raging torrent. The grade gave way below them, dropping steeply into the creek, its banks thick with bubbles and jagged shards of ice. The roaring waters dropped off suddenly where the gentle summit of the pass fell quickly toward the valley of the Kicking Horse River below. Trees grew along the rugged cliffs, but the descent was so steep that the top of one tree seemed to reach just where the roots of the tree below clung. All of this was cloaked in thick white mantle of snow.

Durrant and Charlie's eyes tripped from creek to tree to the vacuum of space beyond. It wasn't a wide open panorama, as Durrant had imagined it might be, but a close and narrow valley, filled with dark shadows and unseen depths. The mountains rose straight up from the valley floor, some eight miles distant, in perpendicular crags.

“So this water doesn't stop till it reaches the Pacific?” said Durrant.

“No, sir.”

“Now these Golden Stairs, where are they at?”

One of the men pointed off to the left of the roaring creek. “The Tote heads off that way, right along that band of stone there. The Stairs is another half mile, where things get real tight, and the trail switchbacks. We'll keep going straight there, though it's going to take a powerful load of nitro to clear the path. It's a precarious track, for certain. There are places where two men have to turn sideways to pass one another. There's no room for a horse to turn around.”

“What happens when one horse meets another on the trail?” asked Durrant.

The men looked at one another. “Well, we try not to let that happen. But let's just say there are a few poor beasts at the bottom of the drop off that didn't go of their free will.”

Durrant looked around and saw that none of the men smiled; none were pleased with this prospect.

“You going to arrest Mr. Dodds, Sergeant?” asked the first logger, spitting another stream of tobacco juice.

“You fellas work for Dodds?” asked Durrant.

“No sir, we're under a different contract. We're following up on Mr. Moberly's team. They prove out the line and we come behind and cut it.”

“Did Mr. Moberly pass this way this morning?”