A Winnipeg Christmas

The sun had just come up over the endless frozen farmland when the train slowed down at the Winnipeg Exhibition Grounds.  Liam jumped out of the boxcar door and rolled into a snowbank.  If he stayed on the train as it squeaked and clanged its way into the yards, the railway bulls would be all over him.  They’d as soon crack a man’s head open as look at it.

It was an hour’s walk from the Exhibition Grounds to Union Station, where Lieutenant Melville would be that morning, all fresh, smart, and upright in his blue serge uniform with its red epaulets and collars, ringing his bell, and calling out in his authoritative baritone, chiding passers-by to “keep the pot boiling”. Liam had been one of the hungry indigent the Salvation Army fed, until the night before when he left Brandon with twenty dollars in his pocket.  The feed store in the small town was closing after a busy day so the take was worth a good week’s wages.  He had disappeared into the hobo jungle on the bank of the Assiniboine, and when night fell he had climbed onto an overnight freight to Winnipeg.  It was a cold start because he had to lie flat on top of a boxcar to avoid being seen.  When the train stopped at Douglas to pick up more cars, like a frozen grizzly bear in mitts and long greatcoat, he climbed down from the boxcar and found an open door where he could hunker down out of the freezing wind.  Christmas in Manitoba wasn’t the time or place to be riding the rails.

The row of grain elevators and wooden-shack station at Douglas were familiar because they were only a few miles from Camp Hughes where he did his military training.  He had been conscripted and sent there in what turned out to be the last year of the war.  Although the Army kept him fed for six months, it wasn’t much of an adventure because he was never sent overseas, not even to England to satisfy his curiosity about the old country.  One thing his time in the military had made clear to him was that he intensely disliked people telling him what to do.

After tumbling into the snowbank in Winnipeg, he stamped his feet, brushed off his coat, and slapped his mittened arms across his chest.  Once he was on Notre Dame he could see through puffy columns of steam, the distant huddle of square blocks that was downtown Winnipeg. The cold didn’t matter because he had money in his pocket and would soon see his friend again.  He’d have to think up a good story about where he got the cash because the Lieutenant was not one for criminal activity. He was like a saint in some ways, too elevated to know that after a long period with nothing, a man needs more for his soul than a kind word and a bowl of thin soup.

As Liam crossed the street in front of Union Station, he expected to hear the clanging hand-bell echoing from Lieutenant Meliville’s usual spot.  Instead there was silence and a breath-puffing clump of overcoated people, nodding and shaking their heads.  The tripod, kettle, and Lieutenant Melville were nowhere to be seen.

“Never saw it coming,” one of them said.

“Right out of the blue,” a woman seconded him.

They stood around a dark smear on the pavement.

“God rest his soul.”  An old lady crossed herself.

“What happened?” Liam asked.

“Never took a cent,” someone added.  “The police picked up all the money. Some of it had blood on it.”

“What happened?” he asked again, feeling his heartbeat quicken.  “Where did they take him?” Saint Boniface Hospital was directly across the Red River, but the Lieutenant was definitely not a Catholic.  If he had any life in him he‘d insist on the Municipal Hospital.

“They carried him off feet first not more than an hour ago,” one of the bystanders said.  “And they weren’t in no hurry about it.”

“You’d most likely find him in a morgue,” another said.

“Ay. There weren’t no breath comin’ out of his mouth,” a woman added. On a below-zero morning of the day before Christmas, that in itself was a sure sign there was no life left in the man. Liam felt the blood drain from his face and his feet wouldn’t move.  He hoped he was having a dream and would wake up in the rattling boxcar but the cold wind on his neck told him the dream was real.  Something terrible had happened to his friend.  It was an hour since he had jumped off the train on his way back from an escapade the Lieutenant would have called a sin. “Thou shalt not steal,” was written plain as day in the Bible.  Not sure of God’s mysterious ways, Liam couldn’t help wondering if his crime had brought retribution down on the Lieutenant as a punishment for helping him.

There was nobody inside Union Station except a bundled-up young woman and her two children who ran screaming around the echoing hall.  When Liam asked the ticket agent what happened, he shrugged his shoulders and turned back to his paperwork, as if bloody assaults were an everyday thing. Winnipeg wasn’t the best place to be just then. It was over-run with demobbed and unemployed soldiers, union agitators, bootleggers, and Bible thumpers to make it an easy place to live in peace.  With nobody at the station to ask, he would see what they knew up at the Salvation Army Citadel.  At first light it had been the Lieutenant’s habit to carry his kettle and tripod down Main Street to the railway station where he would set up in the shelter of the soaring arched doorway, hoping to stay out of the freezing wind and catch a few coins from the morning train traffic. Once the main corps of the army had finished with the noon meal and services, the band would march down Main Street playing Christmas songs and set up their own kettle at the station.  Lieutenant Melville would then carry his gear up to Portage and Main to remind the shoppers about less fortunate souls who would have nothing at Christmas besides what little the Army could provide.  Liam sometimes stopped by and took a turn ringing the bell so the Lieutenant could talk to any interested distracted shoppers about Salvation. Whatever had happened to his friend the preacher, Liam should have been there to protect him because clearly God had failed.

Nobody had five minutes for him at the Citadel because lunch was being prepared and the place was crowded, though the assembled needy were quieter than usual.  Though Liam had twenty dollars in mixed coins and a few Princess Patricia dollar bills in his pockets, he stayed on for lunch to find someone to ask for news of the Lieutenant.  A Captain eventually showed up to lead the assembly in prayer, and before he could disappear, Liam cornered him on the way down from the pulpit.

“Do you have news Sir, about Lieutenant Melville?” he asked.

“Ah.  Melville.” The Captain took a step aside to get around Liam, but Liam was a farm boy who had grown up big, strong, and agile.  “You were close to him weren’t you?” the Captain asked, but he avoided the young man’s eyes.

“You could say that,” Liam answered.  He wanted to say they were more than friends but this wasn’t the time. They had been savior and sinner before they had become friends, and recently things had gone further when the Lieutenant confessed he was in love. The Captain would be scandalized if he knew the truth.

“I’m sorry,” the Captain said.  “It was unexpected.  A tragedy.  Now if you’ll excuse me brother, I have rather a lot on my plate.”

“Where is he?” Liam asked.

“Are you with his family?” the Captain replied in a cold, official way.

“His family is in Yorkshire,” Liam said.  “He never married so there’s no wife and kiddies.  The parents are old and never will come to Canada.  He’s got a sister in India.  Nobody is coming to see him unless it’s me.”

“Or us,” the Captain tilted his chin up.  “The Army does not abandon its soldiers. You can rest assured everything will be taken care of in a decent and proper fashion.”

“Is there nowhere I can go to say goodbye?  A funeral?”

“Please, step aside young man,” the Captain stepped forward until he was too close to Liam’s face. “You can be sure that all necessary arrangements are being made,” he said.

Liam let the Captain pass though he wanted to knock the man’s peaked cap off and put him in a headlock.  Instead he sat down for a cup of tea to figure out what to do next, but no matter how hard he swallowed, the tea didn’t want to go down.  As he sat to let the hot mug warm his fingers, he thought about why the Lieutenant was so set against violence.  He had served in the Boer War and come back to England with shell shock.  In convalescence he had embraced pacifism.  There should be no more wars.  When the Kaiser invaded Belgium, the soldier’s home doctor declared him unfit for service so he took ship to Canada and signed up to the Salvation Army, finding comfort in the military structure but doing battle for the souls of the hungry and dispossessed. “I can only serve,” he said, “by throwing my body into the machinery to stop it from grinding up other poor souls.”

When the tea in his mug was cold. Liam ventured back out to the street.  With nobody to see, and nothing to do, he judged it was time to spend some of his loot on creature comforts.  The first thing would be a room with a bath.  Instead of sleeping in the hostel, he wanted to be alone for one night to let the Lieutenant’s death sink in, and have the luxury of crying in private. The Lieutenant had sometimes rented a room at the Dominion Hotel, explaining to the proprietor the importance of a good night’s sleep in keeping the body’s defenses strong.  With all of the Spanish Flu around he needed to recover his resistance.  Sleeping at The Citadel as he usually did, there were disturbances all through the night.

Liam set off down Main Street to rent a room at the Dominion, to let it sink in that his protector, mentor, and father figure would no longer take him in his arms and hug him until the problems of the world disappeared.  The desk clerk at the Dominion would recognize him from when he had visited the Lieutenant.  The less time he was on the street or up at The Citadel the better because if news of the Brandon robbery came through, one of the first places they police would check was the Salvation Army.  After the General Strike there was still a glut of police around just in case things got heated again.  If they came looking for someone in an army greatcoat they wouldn't have much luck since so many returned soldiers had kept theirs. Liam needed to spend some of his riches on a coat to separate him from the other desperate men but a heavy fur-lined one would cost all of the money he had left.

The desk clerk was less welcoming than Liam assumed.

“You are aware of course that Lieutenant Melville is no longer with us,” he said, as if the Lieutenant had been fired from his employment.

“Yes, I’m aware of that,” Liam said.  “I was looking to take a room of my own.”

The clerk paused and looked him up and down.  “And how would the cost be covered?” he said as if Liam was a sales representative with the Hudson’s Bay Company.

“I’ll pay,” Liam said, and fished two fifty cent pieces out of the leather coin wallet he had made while he was in military training.  It had the insignia of the Princess Pat’s Regiment burned into it.

“The price will be $1.25 in advance,” he said, perhaps thinking he would put Liam off.

“It used to be a dollar,” Liam said.

“New guest’s pay $1.25.”

“But I’ve stayed here before,” Liam protested.

“Not under your own name, Sir,” the clerk insisted.  He clearly didn’t want Liam as a guest, but when the extra 25 cents was produced he relented and gave him the key to a room that faced a brick wall at the back of the hotel.

Liam stripped off and had a much longed-for bath.  If it was possible he would have bought a bottle of whiskey to sip on but prohibition had come in, and it wasn’t worth getting caught buying or selling the stuff. Looking for courage in a bottle could land a man in jail.  The Lieutenant had preached on the evils of drink, and Liam had seen in the regulars who showed up at the Citadel for meals, what damage drink can do.

When he was done soaking in the bath, it was late afternoon and the sun had already gone down. He had no clean clothes to put on and didn’t intend to go out until checkout time in the morning.  Washed clean, he slipped naked between the threadbare sheets and stared at the ceiling while what little light reflected into the room slowly died, until he was in complete darkness.  It was time to let his old wounds of abandonment bleed again.

Liam had grown up on a farm and was the handsome result of a healthy hard-working life, but he was as wounded and hollow as the next man.  His grandparents had come to Canada during the Irish potato famine and had made good for themselves growing grain on their allotted section up in Dauphin.  Liam’s father had gone to the Catholic School where he met the girl who he would later marry, and who gave him just one son.  When he was fourteen, his parents took the Empress of Ireland to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins they had never seen. Their ship was hit in the mouth of Saint Laurence by a Norwegian collier and sent more than a thousand people, including his parents, to kingdom come.  Then the war broke out.  He wanted to go fight with the other lads but was too young to sign on, so when it wasn’t harvest season he joined what his grandparents called ‘Them Heathen Pavees’ and rode the rails to various cities, once getting as far as Regina.  The farm had been signed over to Liam’s uncle.

In the dark of his carbolic smelling hotel room he could allow himself to let in the hurt of abandonment.  His parents were gone, his grandparents were getting too old and half a province away, but most of all, he missed the smell of the Lieutenant’s head as it rested on his shoulder..  Sobs came up and he couldn’t stop them, even when he pulled a pillow to his chest to hug and bury his face in, but instead of smelling the Lieutenant, there was only a stranger’s acrid sweat.  He was still crying softly to himself when he was startled by a loud banging on the door.

“Police!  Open up!”

He sat up and listened.  There was more than one of them out there. He immediately remembered the money that was hidden in a deep pocket of his greatcoat.  If the police took him away they would find it and he would be done for sure.  He got out of bed with one of the bed-sheets wrapped around him and saw the greatcoat hanging over a chair.  The money was evidence of his crime, but he didn’t want to lose it.  If the police hauled him away, they would find it at the station, but shoving the coat into a wardrobe and leaving it in the hotel was out of the question. He’d never be able to retrieve it, and it was damn cold out without a coat.  He heard keys jingling, which would be the desk clerk looking for his master key, so he shouted. “Yes!  Alright!  Just a moment!”

He hoped the police had made a mistake and would move on to another room, but the knocks got louder and there were calls of, “Sir.  We know you’re in there!”

He was still hesitating between the coat and the door when with a rattle of keys, a policeman wearing an English bobby’s hat burst through the door.  A sergeant in a peaked cap stood back of the hallway as if ready to catch the wild beast who might escape the constable’s grasp and be let loose on the world. When that didn’t happen, the interfering desk clerk plucked his keys out of the lock and reached in to turn on the overhead electric light.  Under its incandescent glare, the three men saw a white Michelangelo statue with weather-darkened face and arms. Most of his lower body was wrapped in a sheet.

“We’d like a word,” the sergeant said.

Liam stared at them but didn’t speak.

“That will be all.” The sergeant turned a cold eye on the desk clerk and waved him away.  He closed the door behind him but there was no doubt his big ears would be pinned to the outside.

Wrapped in the sheet, Liam shuffled backwards to the edge of the bed and sat down.

“We understand you are acquainted with a Lieutenant Melville,” the sergeant said.

“Yes,” Liam said, “I know him.”  He was surprised they hadn’t come right out and mentioned Brandon.  It was probably a trick.  The police would question him about random, seemingly irrelevant things before they got around to the point.

“You know he was found deceased?”

“Yes.  I know that,” Liam said, and felt his chest tighten.  He wouldn’t cry in front of the police.

“How well were you acquainted?” the policeman asked.

“We were friends.”

“The desk clerk tells me that Lieutenant Melville often rented rooms in this hotel and that you were seen in his company.”

“Probably.  He helped me with some problems I had.”

“And what problems were those?”

Here we go, Liam thought.  They’ll say he was trying to stop me from being a thief but that it hadn’t worked, that he’d been identified in Brandon.

Liam shrugged. “We all have crosses to bear,” he said, hoping the religious reference would scare off the sergeant.  If he really was having a religious crisis that the Lieutenant was guiding him through, it was not the police’s business.

“Where were you this morning at 8am?”

“He was already gone by the time I got there.”

“You haven’t answered my question young man.”

“I don’t even know what happened to him.  Do you know where they’ve taken his body?”

“I’d suggest you get dressed,” the sergeant said.  “We’ll need to take you in to ask a few more questions.”

“About what?” Liam asked.

“That would be our business.  Now please do get dressed.  We’ll wait.”

Liam was about to protest but his attention was caught by the window in the room. He was on the ground floor and he could have escaped but it was too late.  Perhaps the desk clerk might had done him a favour but he was too slow to pick up on it.  If he was going to prison he would need to learn to read his circumstances better, and jump on opportunities for escape if they came up.  Now the police would take away his greatcoat, the contents of its pockets, and his belt, just in case losing everything proved to be too much.  The money from Brandon would be found and the questions about it would be more than awkward.  As the constable marched him by the arm out of the hotel, Liam thought about tossing his wallet aside and coming back to fetch it later, but the move would probably be detected, and if it wasn’t, some other lucky Christian would find it.

At the Central Police Station, which was conveniently just down the road from the Salvation Army Citadel, it was a busy night.  The police had broken up an illegal union meeting and arrested the more intransigent members.  Lieutenant Melville would have been put off by their blasphemous talk.  When it came time for Liam to empty his pockets, he watched the officer on the desk shake out the contents of the leather coin pouch onto his green blotter, and pry out the folded one dollar bills with an index finger, like he was picking a couple of peanut halves out of a shell.

“What’s all this then?” he asked when he had unfolded them.

“What does it look like?”  Liam answered.  “It’s not illegal to have money.”

“Depends how ye’s got it,” the officer said.

Liam was silent. Why volunteer information?

“And how did ye’s come by it then,” the officer squinted up at him.

“I earned it.  How do you think I got it?”

“Got a job then have ye?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Ye’s must have done something to earn a tidy sum like this.”

A hundred things went through Liam’s head.  He could say it came from his grandparents.  He could pretend he had been helping on a farm out of town but the police would want names and places.  He found it in the street.  A rich uncle gave it to him. It was his demob pay from a year ago. All of the excuses would fall flat, but he had no reason to admit he had stolen it.  The police had not presented any proof.

“Sign here.”  The clerk pushed a document across the counter to him and he scrawled his name before he was led away to a holding cell.

It was evening, and between the cursing wobblies and the howling drunks it was impossible to sleep.  By midnight he was about to nod off in spite of the chaos around him, when he was summoned by a guard at the cell door.  He hoped he was about to be let go but was instead escorted to another room where he was seated in front of the same sergeant who had questioned him at the hotel.  It was too late at night for a witness from Brandon to have arrived and there was nobody else in the room.

The sergeant stared at him from across the desk.  “We’ve made inquiries,” he said, “and it seems you have been keeping company with Lieutenant Melville for at least six months.  That’s according to hotel records and to witnesses at the Citadel.”

“That’s not a crime,” Liam answered.

“I wouldn’t be so sure young man.  I don’t know how well acquainted you are with the law, but there may have been infractions.”

“Like what?” he asked.

“What’s your age, young man?”

“Nineteen.”

“You are aware that the age of majority is twenty one, are you?  Until then you are considered a minor and are under the care and custody of your parents.”

“I’m not,” Liam said.  “They’re dead.”

“Your legal guardian in that case.”

“You mean my grandparents?  There are no documents.  They took me in and that’s it.  I don’t belong to anyone.”

“If that’s the case, then you are technically a ward of the state.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It has some bearing on your acquaintance with the Lieutenant.”

“I already told you about that.  He was helping me.”

“We have reason to believe there was more to it than that.  The hotel has been very helpful.”

“If you intend to put me in jail for having a friend, there would be no end to the arrests.  Do you have any young friends, sergeant?”

“Where exactly were you this morning?” The sergeant asked, ignoring the personal jab.

“Here.  Downtown.  I had breakfast at the Citadel and walked downtown.”

“Nobody at the Citadel saw you at breakfast.”

“They must have missed me.  There’s a lot of hungry people out there.”

“Why would you have breakfast at the Citadel if you have twenty dollars in your pocket?”

“For old time’s sake” Liam tried.

“Enough of your games young man.  Do you know what jealousy is?”

“Of course I do, but what’s that got to do with where I was this morning?”

“The Lieutenant was stabbed this morning.  In the neck.  Ten times.  That kind of violence that goes beyond mere killing, is only carried out when the emotions are involved.  This wasn’t a robbery.”

“So what was it then?” Liam asked.

“That comes back to you and the Lieutenant and the nature of your, uh, friendship.”

“You think I killed him?” Liam said.  “He was the only person in the world I cared about and who cared about me.”

“All the more reason,” the detective said.  “Did the Lieutenant perhaps find a new friend and in your anger you lost control?”

Liam stood up abruptly, and realized as soon as he did it that he was demonstrating exactly the kind of anger the sergeant had accused him of.

“Sit down young man,” he said, “and tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I was out of town.  I didn’t find out Lieutenant Melville was dead until I got back.”

“I’ll need proof of that.  Word has it you have been in the presence of the good Lieutenant almost constantly.  It’s strange you would be out of town on the day something bad happens to him.  Did you perhaps plan with an accomplice to bite the hand that feeds you?  You’re the bait and he moves in for the money?”

Liam kept his head down and let the insinuations bounce off his shoulders.  Other people had accused him of unjust things and he had learned to bow his head and take it.  Rising up to fight had worse consequences.  He couldn’t think of the Lieutenant as a dead man that he would never see again.  As strong his sadness pulled him down, he was roused to anger at himself for getting close to someone.  He should have known by now that everyone he loved would disappear and leave him on his own again.  While the police sergeant continued to propose more theories about how, when, and why the murder had been carried out, Liam shut his ears to it, and asked himself if he had gained anything from his time with the Lieutenant, or if he had been handy company at a time they both needed it.  He tried to remember what the Lieutenant had told him about truth and lies.  To protect his fragile ego after his parents died he had turned into a habitual liar, inventing tales about his past and how his parents had died in more personal and grotesque ways than a shipping accident.  The more elaborate the stories he invented the more attention he got. Only the Lieutenant had pierced the facade and drawn out the wounded young man who was buried so deep inside.  He encouraged Liam to tell the truth and promised he would still love him no matter what.  “We are all the same in God’s eyes,” he said.  “Nobody is higher or lower, better or worse than the other.”  Telling the truth was important.   Lieutenant Melville had said, “Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord,” and Liam had wanted to kiss the preacher’s lips and do abominable things with him.  He was going to hell whichever way he looked at it.

“I do have an alibi,” he said.

“And what would that be?” The sergeant leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms in front of him, daring Liam to convince him.

“I was in Brandon,” he said.

“We’ve all been to Brandon,” the sergeant replied.

“The day before the murder.  I came back on the train that morning.”

“Just in time to murder the unfortunate gentleman.”

“He was gone by the time I got there.”

“How did you get back from Brandon?”

“I hopped a night train.”

“There is no night train young man.  I’ve heard all the stories and yours is as full of holes as most of them.”

“It was a freight train.”

The sergeant blinked but didn’t contradict Liam.  They both knew the railways never stopped.  “Got any proof you were in Brandon?” he asked, finally sitting forward and picking up his pen to record what Liam had to say.

“I robbed a feed store,” Liam said.  There was no going back.  The sergeant’s back stiffened and he scribbled a line in the ledger.

“Which?” he asked without looking up.

“Dobbie’s.”

“What did you get?”

Liam sighed.  It would be the last he saw of his money.

“Enough to live on for a week.  Didn’t exactly make me rich.”

The sergeant lifted the receiver from the black candlestick telephone on his desk, dialed a number, and leaned forward to the small trumpet of the transmitter.  “Constable,” he said.  “Would you come and prepare the prisoner for transport?”

“Where are you taking me?”

“You’ll know when you get there,” he said, and placed the earpiece back on its hook.

He had seen the Provincial Jail from the outside because it was only a 15 minute walk from Union Station.  With its yellow brick front, limestone trims, and gently sloped roof it looked more like an Italian convent than a prison.  He was relieved when they took him to the East Wing, the place for less serious offenders, because the West Wing was where they put robbers, rapists, and murderers.  Considering the possible charges against him, he had a good chance of ending up there.  Perhaps the sergeant had noted he had been cooperative, that there had been no violence in the robbery, so had given him the benefit of the doubt until official charges were laid.  His first instinct was to look for ways to escape.  Once he was out he would have to commit another robbery but that would perpetuate the cycle and he might find himself back where he started.

After a month with no word from the police, he resigned himself to waiting though it was not the most comfortable place for putting in time. The jail cells were scarred and stained, then whitewashed and stained again.  The beds were rusty coffin-sized webs suspended from the wall by angle-iron brackets.  The toilet was a bucket that was exchanged every morning by a trusted prisoner. The inmates on his wing were escorted to a mess hall twice a day and had an hour of organized exercise in the yard.  The men in the serious criminal wing were not seen. Life wasn’t much different from the military except that in jail, nobody told the prisoners to be quiet, so there was a constant racket of shouting and clanging of tin cups against iron bars.

If the police didn’t do their work properly and found Liam guilty of the Lieutenant’s murder, he could spend the rest of his life in the feared West Wing where he would be permanently locked up, a man who ceased to exist. It seemed to be taking an eternity for the police to confirm he had been away from Winnipeg on the night of the murder, but even if they found out he had been telling the truth, the robbery charge would still keep him inside. It was Easter Sunday when he heard from a slop-bucket trusty that the police had arrested the Lieutenant’s killer.

“One of them lunatics,” the man said.  “Figured the Salvation Army guy was the devil.  Shipped him off to Brandon asylum they did.”

Liam didn’t feel pity for the crazy man who had taken away the one bright and stable thing in his adult life.  Since he had lost his parents he had never felt truly at home with anyone.  Only the Lieutenant had been able to see through his contrary hard shell and find the wounded boy inside.  Liam couldn’t bring himself to pray for the murderer’s soul, but he knew that like Jesus, the Lieutenant would absolve the man of his guilt. His last words would have been “Forgive him Father.” For Liam, forgiveness was hard to come by.  The crazy man should have been locked up long ago.

The news of his reprieve was like a miracle.  It meant he would not be charged with murder and meet the fate of Bloody Jack Krafchencko who was hanged in that very jail.  The charge of robbery still hung over him, and he understood that if he wanted to survive the rest of his time, he would have to become a different person.  His future was up to him.  It took a lot of tongue biting and fist clenching to learn that when he was tempted to break things or punch someone, he could calm himself by breathing deeply and imagining the Lieutenant’s divine light flowing through him.  He would think of the man’s soothing voice in its broad Yorkshire accent, spilling out childhood memories like water flowing over pebbles in a stream, and his capable hands stroking Liam’s temple, soothing away the bad thoughts.

His court case came up in June.  Most of the takings from the robbery had been returned to the feed store owner and because Liam had been reasonably well behaved in custody, he was given a verbal reprimand by the judge, and a sentence of time served. By the time he was ushered out of the cold imposing prison, it was hot midsummer. With nothing to keep him in Winnipeg, he set off for the Exhibition Grounds and climbed into a boxcar intending to take the train all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  It didn’t matter where exactly he went because wherever he stopped, the Lieutenant was with him to keep him on the right path.