Don Gutteridge - Turncoat

Even the smithy of words could find none suited to the occasion.

“I followed you out when you went to take a leak,” Marc said by way of helpful explanation, “and heard everything. You’ve gone and made a mess of my hat.”

“What’re you gonna do?” Connors was able to say at last.

“I want you to hop on that donkey and hee-haw your Irish arses out of this province.”

“Now? In the middle of the night?”

“Now. You’re lucky I don’t haul you into Fort York and have you hanged before sun-up. Get going before I change my mind.”

The peddlers tripped over one another scrambling out the door. Connors fell into a drift and lost a glove, but he didn’t stop to retrieve it. They skedaddled to the donkey as if expecting at any moment to feel a lead ball between their shoulder blades. The tinkling of copper and ironware and sundry animal grunts were loud enough to rouse every wintering creature within ten miles.

“Hey,” Connors called back from his precarious perch on the donkey’s rump, “what about our saddlebag?”

“You can pick it up sometime at the Crawford’s Corners post office, if you’ve got the courage to show up there!”

“You bastard! Our life savings are-” The sentence went unfinished as the donkey foundered in the snow and Connors tumbled off.

“If I see or hear of you two anywhere in this province, you won’t have a life worth saving!”

Remounted, cold, wet, and dishevelled, the tinker and the wordsmith cursed the donkey forward, towards the Kingston Road and Toronto.

Marc took one step in their direction, raised his right arm, and fired the pistol. The ball went where it was aimed, into a thick branch just above the fleeing duo.

“Giddy-up, ya jackass! We got a maniac behind us!”

The donkey, true to the breed, slowed down.

That felt good, Marc thought, damn good.

MARC JUDGED IT TO BE ABOUT four o’clock in the morning. The three-quarter moon was shining in the windless, star-filled sky. He saddled up the horse, packed his gear, tossed the peddlers’ saddlebag across the withers, and led his mount back to the Kingston Road. He would ride steadily until he reached Port Hope, rest a few hours, and proceed to his destination early the next afternoon.

He knew he should have taken half a day to escort the would-be murderers to Toronto, but Sir John’s warrant and instructions outweighed all competing considerations. Nor could he ride into Crawford’s Corners with his pistol primed and a pair of cuffed miscreants clanking the news of his arrival everywhere. Instead, he would have to be content with giving their names and a description to Constable Hatch, who would forward the information east and west by the first available coach or courier. Besides, two bumblers who connived to clobber you with a makeshift club in the middle of the night were dangerous only if you allowed them to be. Still, he would like to have known what their motive was.

As he veered onto King William’s high road and let the horse settle into a canter, it occurred to Ensign Edwards that, in a very real sense, he had just experienced his first skirmish in the field, fired his first shot in the heat of battle, and lived to tell the tale.

Up here, about a hundred yards,” Erastus Hatch hollered back to Marc, pointing to a trail of sorts.

“You’d have to know it was here to find it,” Marc said, catching up and drawing his horse to a halt beside the constable’s.

“Joshua Smallman was born and raised in these parts. He knew where he was going all right.” Both men nudged their horses forward into the drifts between the trees.

“Then you don’t accept the story that he became disoriented in the blizzard and wandered into the deadfall in a fit of panic?”

“You’ve been reading the magistrate’s report,” Hatch grinned. They had met less than an hour before, but Marc was beginning to like him already and, prematurely perhaps, to trust him. “I don’t think Child himself believed what he wrote there. But it was the only conclusion that made sense.”

“You think he met with foul play, then?”

Hatch waited until Marc was abreast of him and they had paused to let the horses rest. He turned to look directly at him before answering. “To be frank, I don’t. Major Barnaby, the surgeon, came out here with Child and me on New Year’s Day after the alarm was raised. Barnaby’s an ex-army man and a good tracker. We were able to pick up Joshua’s trail despite a little overnight snow, and it led us where we’re headed right now. The three of us found the body. Charles looked him over real careful here at the scene and later at his surgery in Cobourg.”

“He died when the deadfall struck him?”

“Possibly, but more likely some time afterwards. His neck wasn’t broken. Poor bugger probably froze to death.”

“But why was he out here?”

“I said I didn’t think there was foul play, but I also figure he didn’t trot out to this old Indian trail to enjoy the scenery on New Year’s Eve, leaving his daughter-in-law and guests to fend for themselves.”

“So you do believe he was coming to meet someone. A secret rendezvous, of some kind.”

The horses plunged forward again, wheezing and protesting.

“Or he was out here in search of something.”

“It would have to have been bigger than a moose to be seen in this stuff.”

Hatch laughed, as he had often since their meeting at his house earlier in the afternoon. By temperament and build, the man had been destined to become a miller or smithy. He had a broad, wind-burnished face with a raw, unfinished look to it. That was true of so many of the native-born out here, Marc thought, even though their parents most probably had been undersized, underfed émigrés fleeing famine and persecution. Even their accents vanished, it seemed, in a single generation.

“Don’t make sense, does it?” he said.

They dismounted and, with some difficulty (most of it on Marc’s part), laced on their snowshoes. The horses had done all they could.

“This is where we found Joshua’s big roan,” Hatch said. “Despite last night’s blow, you can still see where the poor beast thrashed about.”

“Nothing had been taken or tampered with?”

“Nothing. And Joshua was carrying no money, according to his daughter-in-law.”

“Bathsheba Smallman.”

“Everybody around here calls her Beth. You’ll get a chance to ask her yourself. The Smallman farm’s right next to the mill. What she told the inquest, though, was that Joshua told her he’d got a message and had to go out. Nothing more.”

“You found no note or letter on him?”

“No. And neither Beth nor any of the neighbour guests at the party remember any note being delivered.”

Marc took his first giant steps on the raquettes, amazed to find himself on top of the snow. He felt the same light-headed exhilaration that might have come from waltzing on a cloud or striding over a Cumbrian lake-that is, until he tipped sideways into a drift and had to be hauled out by the grinning Hatch.

“You can’t tell a snowshoe how to behave,” he said, not unkindly. “Let it take you with it and you’ll be fine.”

“You could still follow Smallman’s trail this far on that morning?” Marc said once he was upright and moving again.

“Just faintly, but clear enough. Till we came round this cedar.”

They stopped. A few feet ahead the massive boles of several trees formed a natural aisle that any hunter or wayfarer would be foolish not to enter. Even now the scene before them was peaceful and innocent under the fresh snow: except for the huge log that stuck up odd-angled out of the drift at the base of the arch. They moved cautiously towards it, as if its murderous power were still somehow extant.