The Marshal's Daughter Read online

  ‘God save us!’ cried Caroline Hammond and rushed upstairs in a flood of tears.

  Marshal Hammond took a sombre leave-taking of his sister when he set out for the railroad station an hour later. To his disgust, Caroline made the same infamous suggestion to him that his deputies had hinted at: that he should bring in Chris Turner and somehow contrive to leave his own daughter out of the reckoning. ‘I am afeared that there is a deal more wickedness in the world than ever I suspected,’ declared Hammond in a shocked voice, when his sister had the effrontery to put the plan to him. ‘I tell you now, Caroline, that I am grieved to the very heart. First my own men and now my sister – all urging me to perjure myself and put my very soul in jeopardy. I tell you plainly, it is not to be thought of. I will behave righteously although all the world stands against me.’

  Marshal Hammond had figured that the two fugitives would not be wanting to travel too far and were likely to stop at the nearest big town, hoping to lose themselves there. The railroad line went past a few piddling little way-halts before reaching Delano and Wichita. If his instincts did not play him false, this would be where Esther and that wretched boy would be found. The marshal accordingly booked a ticket from Linton to Wichita, catching the train at three that afternoon.

  It was about a hundred and thirty miles from Linton to Wichita and so Marshal Hammond looked forward to a couple of hours of relaxation – which in his case usually consisted of studying the Old Testament. He always found a lot more to agree with in that part of the Bible, as opposed to the wishy washy teachings of the Gospels. The marshal settled down in his seat and reminded himself what Scripture had to say about disobedient and rebellious children. He was immersed in the very sensible rules set out in Leviticus on this subject, when he gradually became aware of a disturbance further down the carriage. With the greatest reluctance, he closed his Bible and went to investigate.

  It might be mentioned at this point that when, as was currently the case, Jeremiah Hammond was not sporting his star, folk oft-times took him to be a preacher rather than a lawman. This was a natural consequence of his black clothes, sober mien and the generally respectable and God-fearing air which he had. The resemblance to a man of the cloth was greatly increased on this particular occasion by the fact that as he moved down the carriage, he was still clutching the Bible in his hand. He did not like wearing his pistol on trains either and so his appearance was entirely that of a peaceable and devout middle aged man. This was certainly the impression which the four rowdy young cowboys who were making a nuisance of themselves gained when Hammond approached them, saying quietly, ‘You boys might want to moderate your language a little. There are women and children nearby who do not want to hear your cursing and blaspheming.’

  Two women sitting near to the cowboys gave the marshal a grateful look. As for the boys themselves, they did not know what to make of the play. One of them said in a jocular fashion, ‘Looky here now you fellows, stop all that bad language. Elsewise this parson will be reading you a sermon.’ He turned to Hammond and said, ‘Ain’t that right, reverend? You will preach to us all if we do not calm down and behave nicely?’

  Jeremiah Hammond regarded the young man benignly and said, ‘No son, I am not a parson and you will get no sermon from me.’

  ‘Well that’s a mercy,’ said one of the other men and made a loud, farting noise, which reduced his companions to helpless laughter.

  One of them then said, ‘Well, if you ain’t about to reprove us for our sinful ways, then I guess it is all right for me to carry on using words like. . . .’ He spoke out loud a word so vile that Marshal Hammond could scarcely believe what he heard. One of the women nearby gasped in horror and covered her little girl’s ears.

  Hammond placed his Bible down gently on a nearby seat and then turned to the four young men. He shot out his left hand and gripped the throat of the one who had said the offensive word. The boy scrabbled at the marshal’s fingers, thinking to pluck his hand away, only to find that the muscles of the hand around his throat were as rigid and immoveable as iron rods. He began to choke and gasp for air. The fellow next to him began to stand up, until Jeremiah’s right fist went forward like the piston of a steam engine, felling him with a mighty blow to his face.

  Hammond released his grip upon the first of the young men to provoke his wrath, leaving him purple-faced and gulping for air. Then the marshal looked at the other two boys, who had not yet had a chance to react to the unexpected turn of events. ‘Either of you two fellows have anything to say?’ he enquired mildly. They did not. He picked up his Bible and then said to the woman who had been offended by the language being used, ‘If you have any further cause to feel uneasy, I shall be sitting over yonder. Just let me know and I shall be glad to come back and deal with matters.’ Then he returned to his seat and opened the Good Book at Deuteronomy.

  While her father was straightening out the young men on the railroad train, Esther Hammond was laying on the bed in a seedy boarding house down by the waterfront in Delano. She was restless and bored. ‘I hope that we are going out tonight,’ she told the young man who lay next to her on the bed.

  ‘We cannot go out to the saloon every night, you know,’ said Chris Turner. ‘That money will not last forever.’

  ‘Well I guess we can get some more in the same way,’ the girl told him impatiently. ‘I did not leave my home just to sit around in a dreary room like this.’

  ‘What do you reckon your father will do when he gets back?’ asked the boy curiously.

  ‘He probably won’t even notice that I have left. He never sets much mind to me, beyond saying “mind your manners” and “have you said your prayers tonight?” ‘

  ‘He is a powerful strong one for religion, ain’t he?’

  ‘Lord, yes. It is all he ever thinks on.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Turner, ‘that he did not become a minister rather than a lawman.’

  The girl laughed. ‘He nearly did. Only thing was, he said that the Lord could make more use of him as a marshal than he could if he was tending to a church.’

  ‘You don’t think much to him, do you?’

  ‘I hate him!’ said Esther Hammond passionately.

  The boy looked faintly shocked. ‘That’s not right. My own Ma and Pa are aggravating, but I would not say I hated them.’

  Esther looked at the boy lying next to her on the bed. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘Did you have birthdays when you were little?’

  Chris Turner’s face lit up with remembrance of a simple pleasure. ‘Why yes, of course I did. There was not much money for presents or such, but still and all, my folks made the day special.’

  ‘I did not have a single birthday.’

  ‘Not have a birthday? Why, whatever can you mean?’

  ‘My Pa, he said that celebrating birthdays was heathenish. We did not mark them at all. My aunt tried once, but he put a stop to it. Talked about the vanities of the world.’

  ‘You had Christmas though, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Esther. ‘We had Christmas. No gifts there either, because the day belonged to the Lord. It would have been sinful to cheapen it by giving worldly things to each other. Christmas Day meant three visits to church and more Bible reading than usual. I used to dread it.’

  Chris Turner did not know what to reply to all this. At last he said, ‘Do you think though that your father will look for you? Meaning that he will try and take you home if he finds where you are?’

  ‘I would rather die,’ said the girl shortly.

  As the train approached Wichita, Marshal Hammond opened his travelling bag and took out the gunbelt that it contained. He buckled it on and then pinned the star to his jacket. Now that the journey was over, he was on official business and wished nobody to make any mistake about his authority. He read through the warrants again to make sure that they were both in order. Then, once the train had fully stopped, he stood up, walked to the end of the carriage and stepped down onto the platform.

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; Wichita and nearby Delano were cattle towns at the end of the Chisholm Trail. They had grown in recent years until they now formed one sprawling settlement which straddled the Arkansas River. The whole area had a reputation for lawlessness and disorder, particularly when the cattle drives arrived at the railheads. A few years before Jeremiah Hammond stepped off the train there, one Wyatt Earp had been the town marshal and even he had found the place hard to control. In addition to the permanent population, there were a huge and constantly fluctuating number of cowboys and drifters in the twin towns. It was the ideal place to come if you wished to lose yourself, which is perhaps why Chris Turner and Esther Hammond had headed there after robbing the depot in Linton.

  Marshal Hammond had no authority to enforce the law in either Wichita or Delano – for that there were town marshals. He did have the right though to search for fugitives and if found, then to arrest them and take them back for trial. The authorities in the two towns were obliged by law to offer him assistance in these endeavours, should he ask for it. Not that Hammond expected to be doing so. If he could not track down and take into custody two youngsters who were little more than children, well then it would be time for him to resign and look for another line of work altogether!

  The Wichita and Delano marshal’s office was only a short walk from the railroad station. The two towns shared many services and the rumour was that they would soon be officially united or, as the citizens of Delano feared, their town would in effect be annexed by its larger and more populous neighbour. There were two men in the office when Hammond walked in and so friendly were they with each other that he naturally, although wrongly, assumed both to be lawmen. He introduced himself and produced the warrants. One of the two men looked them over carefully, before glancing up in surprise. ‘We have met before, Marshal Hammond, although you might not remember me. I see that this warrant is for somebody called Hammond. Not a relative or something, I hope?’

  ‘It is my daughter,’ said Jeremiah Hammond in a stony voice.

  ‘Your daughter?’ exclaimed the other. ‘That’s blazing strange. I don’t know that I ever heard of such a thing before. Could you not have sent one of your deputies? It would sit ill with me to have to arrest my own flesh and blood.’

  ‘Well I am a man who knows his duty,’ said Marshal Hammond, ‘and I do not shrink from it, however hard it might be.’

  The other man who had been in the office when he entered now joined in the conversation. ‘You say that you are in town to arrest your own daughter, sir? That is a most unusual circumstance.’

  ‘All right, Jed,’ growled the deputy marshal who had been speaking with Hammond. ‘That will do. Perhaps I should introduce Mr Jed Culpepper of the Wichita Beacon. Jed is our local newspaper man. Not that he has any business interrupting our conversation, mind.’

  Hammond turned to the reporter and said, ‘I will not be best pleased if I read in your newspaper about my arrival here. If you do anything to compromise my work, you will answer to me for it.’

  ‘Surely, sir, surely,’ said Culpepper smoothly. ‘Nothing would be further from my mind than to jeopardize an official investigation. Perhaps our paper can help you by publishing a description of those whom you are seeking. The Wichita and Delano Beacon, incorporating the Kansas Intelligencer, has no fewer than twenty five thousand registered readers.’

  Marshal Hammond turned a cold eye upon the talkative man. ‘I do not care how many people buy your newspaper,’ he said. ‘Let one word about my presence be advertised there and I will come looking for you.’

  After having delivered himself of this warning, Hammond bade both men good evening and went to arrange a room at an hotel. After he had gone, Jed Culpepper said to his old friend, ‘Really though, Pete, did you ever hear of a man chasing his own daughter for to arrest her? It’s as good as a novel!’

  ‘You plainly never heard before of Jeremiah Hammond,’ said the deputy, ‘He is famous for being a man who will do what is right in his own eyes, come what may. I would not advise you to get crosswise to him, Jed, and that is all that I will say on the subject.’

  Although he did not have to pay for his own travel and accommodation when on official business, it was part of Marshal Hammond’s rigid honesty that he always made sure that he spent as little as possible of the money entrusted to him. It went without saying that he would not walk somewhere and then charge for a carriage, but neither would he be profligate with his choice of hotel. His duty was to save society money, not squander it away on luxury. With this in mind, he wandered around downtown Wichita, seeking a cheap boarding house.

  Eventually, in a narrow, gloomy side street, Hammond came across a dingy looking clapboard house with a faded sign outside announcing that rooms were to be let within. He rapped smartly on the door, congratulating himself on having found a place which would most likely cost half of what he would have paid in a more central and bustling part of the town. As soon as the door was opened though, he began to fear that he had made a dreadful mistake.

  Sweet smelling smoke trickled out into the night as the door of the boarding house was opened and a wizened little Chinaman peered out. ‘Come in, come in,’ said the man. ‘Very cheap rooms, all clean, no cockroaches.’

  For a moment, Hammond thought of bolting and looking for another place, but his ingrained respect for old age prevented him and he stepped into the hallway of the house, wrinkling his nose at the smoke. A horrible thought struck him and he said, ‘What’s with all this smoke? This is not an opium den or some such, I hope?’

  The old Chinaman cackled with amusement. ‘No opium here, no. This is incense. I burn it to honour the Master.’

  ‘Master?’ asked Hammond, ‘What Master? I am looking for a room for a few nights, you have one to rent?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Plenty of rooms. Nobody comes now, whole house empty. Come through please.’ The man led him into a back parlour. The marshal noted that the old man had his hair tied back in a pigtail and was wearing a skull cap. He looked just what you would expect a Chinaman in a story book to look like.

  In an alcove at the back of the room stood a little statue, no more than a foot high, of a traditionally dressed Chinaman. At his feet was set a bowl of chrysanthemums and next to them was a small metal plate which looked to have a few glowing coals upon it. ‘See here,’ said the Chinaman, ‘Smoke comes from here, burn to honour the Master. No opium!’ He gave a little giggle.

  ‘So this here is your “Master”?’ said Hammond, ‘Who is it, some heathen god?’

  ‘No god,’ said the little man, sounding shocked, ‘Great man. Kung Fu Tse. You call him Confucius.’

  ‘I seem to recollect hearing of him.’

  ‘This is not business. You want room, I have room. I am Mr Chang. Come this way please, sir.’

  Despite his protestations about their running out of money, it did not really take a great deal of coaxing on Esther Hammond’s part to persuade Chris to take her to a saloon that night. He was no keener than her to remain cooped up in the little room they were renting.

  Some saloons did not encourage women, but others, like The Lucky Strike, positively welcomed them with open arms. There was drinking, dancing and card play on offer and to Esther it was the most brilliantly exciting place that she had ever seen in her life. Everything about it shouted a full-blooded rejection of the values in which she had been raised. There was gambling, there were women dancing, some of whom she was sure had painted their faces and one or two of whom were even smoking cigarettes. And of course, there was the drinking.

  Esther had never touched a drop of intoxicating liquor in the whole course of her life until she had started around six months previously. She had at first found the taste revolting, but the effects were little short of magical. It acted on her like some enchanted potion that gave her the confidence and strength that she lacked in real life. She had never realized that anything could make her feel so good. Since they had arrived in Delano, she had been drinking every day.

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p; In addition to the liquor, there was the card play at the faro table.

  ‘Do you know,’ said the girl to Chris Turner, ‘until Tuesday night, I had only caught one glimpse of a deck of playing cards in my life? Can you believe that?’

  ‘Knowing, as I do, your father, yes, I can believe it.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have a pack of cards in the house, so I never saw any as a child. One day we went visiting somebody sick from the church. Pa used to get me to go with him on those visits, but I hated seeing sick people. This time we went to an old woman’s house. She was dying and my father thought that it would be wholesome for me to witness how a true Christian met her death. Old Mrs Bridges was playing solitaire when we arrived and my father’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. We didn’t stay long and after we left, he told me that those things she was handling were “the Devil’s picture book”.’

  ‘Hush up, now Esther,’ said Turner, ‘I am trying to follow the play here.’

  The two young people were standing on the fringe of a group surrounding the faro table. All the cards were marked out on a large table and it was possible to bet on what card you thought would be drawn from the wooden box which they called the shoe. The dealer took two cards at a time. One was a winner and those who had bet on it received back double their stake and the other was a loser, which meant that those who had placed their money on that one lost it.

  The trick of faro is to work out which cards have already been drawn, so that you can calculate the odds on the remaining cards being drawn. Chris Turner was trying to do this, but after she had had a couple of drinks, the girl at his side just could not stop talking and this was a distraction.

  ‘Don’t you think that those young men on the picture cards look awful handsome?’ asked Esther.