A Good Man Read Online Free PDF

planning his escape route, and tucked her head into his side. As he studied departure and arrival times, he toyed with her curls.
    No other child had a fonder papa than Walsh; Cora was his dearest girl, his angel, the light of his life. Each year, a thousand miles from Prescott where his beloved daughter was blowing out her cake candles, Cora’s birthday was celebrated in the Cypress Hills. On the wall over her father’s chair in the mess hall her name was spelled out in horseshoes. The room was decorated with bunting, paper chains, NWMP pennants, and Union Jacks. B Troop reverently toasted her, and Walsh answered the toast with a rambling, emotional speech that exhaustively catalogued his daughter’s peerless virtues. He always ended it with eyes humid and glistening.
    Shortly before he left for the train station, little Cora had climbed up on his lap and asked, “Will Mother be better soon?”
    “When I am gone, Mother will be right as rain.”
    Very gravely, Cora said, “I won’t be. Stay, Papa.”
    “That is impossible. You must understand, Cora, it is Papa’s work that buys you your bread and butter, your cocoa that you love so much, and your pretty dresses. That is why he must go, to see you happy and content.”
    From the bed, Mary broke in; she had been feigning sleep. “Liar, liar, liar,” she moaned, her voice choked in the pillow. “You care for nobody but yourself.”
    He rained kisses on his daughter’s face, set her on the floor, and closed the door on the whole sorry business. Within the hour he was flying north, racing away from the future his wife had plotted and back to what he was sure he had been born to do. He sat and watched a fiery confetti of locomotive sparks whirl by his window in the darkness. When dawn broke, he counted the telegraph poles flashing by, each one bringing him closer to Ottawa, to his destiny. The burgeoning cornfields, the apple orchards, the fat cattle seemed fertile promises. Washington clattered by, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Montreal, and finally his train chugged into the national capital’s train station.
    Travelling light as he was, there was no need to pause to find lodging. He strode directly up to Parliament Hill, brown Gladstone bag swinging in his hand. Walsh had never met Secretary Scott, but what he had heard about him didn’t impress. By all reports, he was a very queer duck, a vegetarian, a teetotalling, saintly Catholic. A nun with a beard. He expected to have his way with him.
    But almost immediately things began to go amiss. A snotty clerk was not convinced of the urgency of Walsh’s mission; he was curtly told to wait his turn in a queue of shabby-looking office-seekers and petitioners. Two hours later, at last ushered into Secretary Scott’s office and introduced, he couldn’t restrain himself from acidly remarking to the minister, “That officious little majordomo left me kicking my heels in a corridor half the afternoon.”
    Scott, a parched, bony-looking fellow with a long white beard hanging down his shirtfront like a bib, slowly raised his eyebrows and said, “I have a great deal of business to get through in the course of a day. People need to be sifted.” That said, he opened a file, scanned it. Without preamble he announced, “It is the view of the deputy minister of justice, Mr. Richards, that if the Sioux cross the border it will be somewhere in the vicinity of Wood Mountain. I concur with his evaluation.” Walsh could not disagree, but it irked him that this was presented as if it were some astounding revelation. It was not news to him. He had ridden over every inch of that ground, and felt that his opinion should have been solicited. That would only have been polite. He frowned and put a sour pucker to his mouth, but Scott did not notice. “Since you are in charge of the police detachment nearest Wood Mountain, the expectation is that you will be the first representative of the Crown these tribesmen will encounter. That