Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

In front of Marc a naked male Pringle dropped abjectly to his knees in the snow and proceeded to grovel. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” he wailed in the singsong chant of a petrified child. Behind him, a girl was darting about in ever-smaller circles, her shift shredded by her own hand, her bare feet pounding the snow, her shrieks piteous and animal-like. It was clear that the Pringles thought they had awakened in the middle of a collective nightmare, with no mother to comfort them.

One of the constables stepped up to the girl and cuffed her smartly on the neck. He grabbed her frail arm and dragged her like a carcass to the periphery, then returned for another victim.

Marc felt sick to his stomach. He found himself kneeling beside the fellow who had dropped into the snow before him. He might have been fifteen or forty, it was impossible to tell. He was skin and bone, his stare goitred, and his face crawling with scabs and pustules. Fear had turned his pleas into babble. Marc lifted him tenderly up and carried him towards a coop of some sort. He glanced around. It was chaos everywhere: shouts, wails, frantic dashing and collision, sporadic gunfire. Marc opened the hatch to the coop. Animal heat radiated from within.

“Slip in there,” he said, “and don’t make a sound. You’ll be all right.”

As he swung back towards the woods, Marc noticed two things: several torches had been lit on the far side of the enclosing circle, and a fully clothed male had just popped out of one of the huts. Agnes came tumbling out naked in his wake. Hatch was beside Agnes in a wink, but Marc was already plodding madly after Connors.

Despite his uncertainty on raquettes, Marc easily gained on Connors, who sank to his knees at every step and quickly exhausted himself. A few feet into the woods, he gasped like a spent horse and slumped down.

A triumphant huzzah rose behind them, and Marc arched around to see what it was all about. One of the chicken coops-not the one concealing the wretch Marc had pardoned-had been set ablaze. The inquisitors were virtuously cheering the conflagration. But something stopped the celebration in its tracks. Even Connors, panting and searching for a curse to fling at the ungrateful gods, looked on, speechless. A dozen hens scrabbled and tottered and attempted flight out of the fireball of their roost, their feathers in flames. Then one by one they fluttered, faltered, and expired, like crepe-paper baubles. The snow hissed at their demise.

The vigilantes stared, awed by the consequence of their own righteousness. Without a word or sign they doused their torches. There would be no more burning. To men for whom the erection even of a log cabin in the bush represented the triumph of the will over a cruel and dispassionate Nature, the deliberate destruction of any beast nurtured by his care and sweat was deeply reprehensible. Philander Child did nothing to urge them further. Three or four of the better-fed Pringles took advantage of the lull and slipped into the bush.

Connors had gotten back to his feet but was still too weary to skulk anywhere. His face was obscenely bloated. He was hatless. His flies flopped open. All the bravado had gone out of him. He stared at the pistol in Marc’s belt and the sabre in its scabbard, then looked directly into Marc’s eyes. Suddenly he paled and threw both hands in the air.

“Don’t shoot me,” he rasped. “I wasn’t gonna kill ya, honest.”

“Your partner was in Stebbins’s barn, wasn’t he?” Marc said, one hand on the pistol butt.

“We only took the horse’s shoe off, I swear to God! He stepped on that nail by himself. Stebbins didn’t want ya trackin’ us here.” Connors took one step towards Marc, bringing his hands down slowly as he did so but holding them well away from his body, as if readying them for the manacles.

So, Connors, O’Hurley, and Stebbins had conspired to keep him from leaving the farm that night. And Lydia had ensured that he was nicely distracted for the duration. What an ass he had made of himself!

“I’m taking you in to jail,” Marc said with deep satisfaction.

There was a sharp report and Connors’s face widened with astonishment. He opened his mouth to speak, but a bubble of blood flicked out. Then he pitched forward into the snow.

“Jesus!” Hatch cried just behind Marc.

They both turned to see John Collins, pale as a ghost, standing a few yards away at the edge of the woods with a smoking pistol in his right hand.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” he stammered. “I thought he was pointin’ a gun at you.”

“It’s all right, John,” Hatch said. “You probably saved us the cost of a rope.”

Marc had already turned Connors over. Blood was leaping out of a hole in his chest. His eyes were still open. They stared up at Marc in mute appeal. “Father, give me the sacrament … please.”

“I’m not a priest,” Marc said, pressing his fur cap uselessly into the spouting wound.

“I’ve a confession to make.” Connors’s voice was a desperate whisper. “Please. I can’t go out like this.”

Marc leaned closer. “I’m not your confessor, Mr. Connors.”

“I killed a man.”

Hatch was now at Marc’s side.

Blood surged out of Connors’s mouth. He choked, coughed, gasped in pain.

“Who did you kill?” Marc said, willing the villain to speak.

The voice was less than a whisper now. “Smallman.”

Marc’s heart jumped in his chest. He tried to quell the foolish elation, the almost childish sense of triumph rippling through him.

“Joshua?” he said, and waited.

The final two syllables uttered by Ninian T. Connors in this life were crystal clear:

“Jes-se.”

Marc showed Erastus Hatch the list of names on the slip of paper he had found among the American bills in Durfee’s safe. Both men were exhausted, but too much had happened for either of them to entertain the possibility of sleep. The miller’s house at midnight was quiet and growing cold. The women were home and safely in bed. Mad Annie and five of her offspring were gracing the cells of the district jail. The cadaver of Ninian T. Connors had been wrapped in a horse blanket and carted off to the morgue in Cobourg.

“I’ve seen plenty of lists like this over the years,” Hatch said. “Could be customers or potential retailers for the rum. This is definitely an old list: Jesse’s name must’ve been crossed off after he was … murdered.” Hatch stifled a yawn. “Still, I’d feel a lot better if we had the missing half of this paper. A string of names isn’t much in the way of proof.”

Marc sighed. “True. Which leaves us with a confessed murderer but no clear or provable motive.”

“We have to figure it had something to do with a falling-out over the smuggling business.”

“Whatever the exact motive, it’s conceivable that Joshua found something among Jesse’s papers, either about the rum-running or perhaps even the apparent suicide, and tried to confront Connors or one of his cronies.”

“There’s still O’Hurley,” Hatch said between yawns. “He may be the only one alive who can tell us what really happened in that barn a year ago.”

“I’ve got to tell Beth, of course. The one good thing to come out of all this so far is that her husband did not take his own life. You can’t imagine the relief it’ll be to her.”

“She’ll have to know something about the ugly circumstances, though.”

Marc sighed again. “I know.”

“Anyways, O’Hurley should be safe under lock and key. MacLachlan’s sending a courier up to Perry’s Corners and another to Toronto. In fact, there’ll be couriers galloping up and down the province all night.”

“Well, sir, I’m too tired to think straight,” Marc said, getting up.