The Marshal's Daughter Read online

  During this time, Hammond fell into the habit of talking quite a bit to Mr Chang about religion. The old man seemed to have a store of wisdom and also to be one of the most broadminded and compassionate men that he had ever met. True, he was not saved immortally, but even so, the marshal felt an odd affinity for the strange Chinaman.

  In the usual way of things, any conversations on the topic of religious belief between Jeremiah Hammond and anybody else consisted almost entirely of Hammond pointing out through many scriptural texts that those opposing his views were damned to eternal hellfire. With Chang though, he knew that this would not only have been the height of rudeness, but – what was even more perplexing – would almost certainly have been untrue. He knew deep within that the old Chinaman was not heading for damnation, whether or no he accepted the Lord Jesus as his saviour.

  Actually, Marshal Hammond passed very close to his daughter on more than one occasion during his restless prowling through the streets of Delano. It was a wonder really that they did not bump into each other at some point. She and Turner were still going out to saloons in the evenings and after getting back late, they took to staying in bed until long after midday. Since the marshal was doing a lot of his walking about the streets in the morning, this might go a certain way towards explaining how come their paths did not cross over those days.

  On Friday The Wichita and Delano Beacon, incorporating the Kansas Intelligencer hit the streets. There were two articles in that edition of the newspaper which were of particular interest to three people in the town. The first piece was a light-hearted, human interest story by Jed Culpepper. It was Culpepper’s way of getting his own back on Marshal Hammond for being so unfriendly and even threatening towards him. The headline for this piece was, ‘A man who knows his duty, even if he is not always able to keep his own house in order’. It read as follows:

  On the 29th inst, that well-known lawman, Marshal JEREMIAH HAMMOND of Linton, arrived in our fair city. Many and varied though the attractions of Wichita might be, the marshal’s visit to this town was not in the nature of a vacation or pleasure trip. Astounding though it might sound to our readers, Mr HAMMOND had come here hoping to arrest his own daughter: 17 year-old ESTHER. It is rumoured that this young miss, hardly out of the schoolroom, has come to Wichita on an escapade. It is to be hoped that Marshal HAMMOND will not be too hard on the girl once she is recovered and packed off back to her home. The marshal is renowned in his own town for his piety and strict religious observance. It is to be regretted that such an excellent example has not served to keep his own kin on the straight and narrow.

  The other article was a little more serious. The headline was:

  Victim of knife fight struggles for life.

  Life in the famous cow town of Delano grows more hazardous by the day. On Tuesday last, Mr GROVER McPHERSON, a soldier, became involved in a dispute with two people near the Lucky Strike tavern. It is not known what passed between them, but the upshot was that Mr McPHERSON received a serious stab wound to his back. Authorities at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital, to which the injured man was taken, state that the wound is likely to prove fatal. An unusual and shocking circumstance surrounding the affair is that one of those involved is supposed to be a young woman.

  Jeremiah Hammond, who bought the paper to see if there was anything in it which might furnish him with a clue as to his daughter’s whereabouts, nearly had an apoplectic seizure when he read the bit about himself. He swore to himself that he would visit the offices of the Wichita Beacon and wreak vengeance upon the wretched reporter.

  Hammond continued to read the rest of the paper and when he came to the piece about the stabbing in Delano, he honestly thought that his heart had stopped beating. He could not have said how he knew, but he was certain that this crime had been committed by his daughter and Chris Turner. He asked a passer-by the location of the Sisters of Mercy Hospital and made his way straight there.

  Esther Hammond and Chris Turner were up somewhat earlier than they had been of late and were in an eating house, enjoying a late breakfast. It was eleven in the morning and as they finished their coffee, Esther idly turned the pages of one of the newspapers which the establishment provided for their customers. Her face blanched as she read the first article, that which touched upon her father’s arrival in the city. Without a word, she folded the page over and handed it to Chris Turner. ‘Shit,’ he said coarsely, ‘Didn’t I just tell you that your father would come looking for us. Shit, that is all we need. Well, there’s no hope for it, we must just move to another town.’

  ‘I reckon that you are right,’ said Esther irritably. ‘He always has to spoil things for me. Even when I leave home, he still has to do it. Why can’t he leave me be?’ She took the newspaper back from Chris and carried on reading it. When she came to the piece about Grover McPherson, she read it through carefully and then considered whether or not she should tell Chris. In the end, she thought it best to do so. She said quietly, ‘Don’t holler or anything, but you had best read this as well.’ She showed him the piece.

  In the cheap novelettes that she read when her father was not around, Esther had often seen it said of this or that person that ‘the colour left his face’ but never until that moment had she witnessed this event in real life. It was perfectly true though; one moment Chris Turner’s healthy and rather unintelligent face had its usual, weathered and ruddy complexion, the next, he was quite literally as white as a sheet of paper. ‘Lord,’ the girl said to him. ‘Don’t take on so. We are going to be moving on in any case. It does not signify what happens to that fellow.’

  Turner stood up and grabbed Esther by the arm, hustling her out of the eating house. She protested, but for once the boy was not about to be cowed by Marshal Hammond’s daughter. He dragged her along the street for a while, until they were altogether out of earshot of anybody else. Then he said to her, ‘Esther, do you know what this means? Do you understand what you have done?’

  She bridled a little at that and answered, ‘You mean, I suppose, what we have done, Chris. The two of us were there.’

  ‘If that fellow dies, as the paper says he is like to, then this will be a hanging matter. We will hang for murder.’

  Even then, the girl was not disposed to take quite such a serious and gloomy view of the matter as her friend. ‘Well, then maybe he won’t die. Anyways, we are going to move to another town, aren’t we? There is nothing to connect us with this affair. You worry too much.’

  Not for the first time since he had left Linton with her, it struck Chris Turner that there was something missing from Esther’s mind. She truly was not quite right in the head. He was a young man who would break rules and take risks, but at least he knew that such things as rules and risks existed and had to be taken into account. Esther did not even seem to be aware of ordinary feelings about such things. That he had become embroiled in what could be a murder was to Chris a terrible thing, partly because the death of a man was a fearful occurrence and in part because his own life might be forfeit as a result. To Esther though, none of this really mattered. Had he but known it, there were learned men who had the very expression to describe such people as Esther Hammond. They called them ‘moral defectives’ and attributed their unfortunate condition to the ill effects of the way in which they had been raised in childhood.

  The Sisters of Mercy Hospital was run by a religious order and the nuns there were pleased to welcome the marshal and offer him every facility. He was taken to what he supposed passed with them for their boss and when he intimated that he had come about Grover McPherson, her face grew grave and she asked him in a hushed voice if he knew that the poor man was not long for this world?

  Now Hammond knew that he should at this point have explained his position and made it plain that he had no authority in Wichita. A lie was a lie, whether by commission or omission. He said nothing though and allowed the Sister to believe that he was acting on behalf of the city authorities. He was taken along a corridor to the doctor’s
office and introduced to that gentleman as a police officer investigating the attack on poor Mr McPherson.

  The situation as touched upon the genuine investigation into the stabbing of Grover McPherson may be fairly summed up in a few words: there wasn’t one. Fights, rough-houses, beatings, knifings and even shootings were none of them especially uncommon in Delano. The marshal’s office took a pragmatic and wholly reprehensible view of such cases, which was that if they involved a respectable citizen of either Wichita or Delano, then they would act as hard as they knew how to nail the culprit. If the victim was some cowboy or drifter from out of town, then they would make one or two initial enquiries, but unless the case could be rapidly solved, they would more or less leave it be.

  A deputy had visited the hospital when McPherson was first brought in, but he had been unconscious at that time. A cursory examination of the alley where he had been attacked revealed nothing and nor did speaking to the neighbours shed any light on the case, beyond the fact that a man and woman had been involved. The broken broom handle had not even been noticed, it being assumed that so savage a wound must have been inflicted by something like a Bowie knife.

  What Marshal Hammond did not know was that the deputy who had come to enquire after the stabbed man had told the hospital to contact him if McPherson recovered consciousness and was in a fit state to make a statement. When Hammond was ushered into the doctor’s office, the doctor took it for granted that he was working for the Wichita office and spoke to him on that basis.

  ‘I was just about to send word to you people,’ said the doctor. ‘You wanted to be informed if McPherson came to and he has done so in just the last hour. He is very weak though and so if you are wanting to take a statement, then you had best be quick about it.’

  ‘Meaning, I take it, that he is liable to lapse into unconsciousness again soon?’ said Hammond.

  ‘Meaning that he is unlikely to live more than a few hours,’ said the doctor. ‘His bowel was perforated by whatever weapon was used to stab him. He has galloping septicaemia. In laymans’s terms: blood poisoning.’

  As the doctor took him into the ward to see the dying man, Marshal Hammond knew that despite his fierce adherence to duty, he was in effect perpetrating a fraud here. He was allowing the hospital authorities to think that he was investigating the attack on this man and intending to take a statement which might help find the culprits. Yet he could not for the life of him speak out and disabuse them of this simple misunderstanding. He had become a liar and was also breaking the oath which he took when he had been sworn in as a marshal.

  Grover McPherson looked awful. His skin was like yellow parchment and his breathing rapid, as though the air was not entering his lungs properly. You did not need to be a doctor to see that he was in a bad way and probably not apt to live beyond that day. The doctor felt his pulse and then caught Hammond’s eye and shook his head slightly.

  McPherson’s eyes were closed and the doctor leaned over him and said, ‘Mr McPherson, you have a visitor from the marshal’s office.’

  The man in the bed opened his eyes and appeared to be having trouble focussing. He said, in a thin, reedy voice, not at all what one would expect for a man with such a large and solid frame, ‘I don’t feel too good, doc. Can you give me something for the pain?’

  ‘Yes, just talk to the marshal here and I will fetch something for you.’ He patted the man’s arm in a helpless way.

  ‘Hallo, Mr McPherson,’ said Hammond, ‘I am a marshal and I was wondering if you could tell me about the people who did this to you?’

  ‘A boy jumped me. I went to take a leak in an alley and this kid pushed me and tried to take my wallet.’

  ‘I see. What happened next? Did he stab you?’

  ‘No,’ said McPherson. ‘That was the strangest thing. I was able to handle the boy. I got him in a bear-hug. I might have been liquored up, but I was still able to handle a kid like him.’ The effort of talking seemed to have exhausted the man, because his breathing was even more laboured and he closed his eyes as though he wished to rest. The compassionate thing to do would surely be to leave him in peace, but Hammond had to know the truth about this. He shook McPherson’s shoulder roughly and said, ‘Well, how did you come to be stabbed?’

  The dying man opened his eyes again and said, ‘It was the girl. I saw her come up behind me. She did me from behind. Then when I fell down, she said, “Get his wallet, Chris.” That’s all I remember.’

  At this point, the doctor returned with a syringe. He said to Hammond, ‘Have you found out all that you wished to know? If so, then I think that it would be a kindness to let this poor fellow sleep.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hammond, distractedly. ‘Yes, of course.’

  When he had left the hospital, the marshal was in such a state of fearful anxiety that he scarcely knew where he was going. He walked out towards the river-front and just stood there staring. As soon as that poor, wretched man had said the name ‘Chris’, Hammond had known that his worst fears were realized and that his own daughter had done murder. For there seemed little doubt that although the man was still breathing now, he would like as not be dead by the end of the day. That at least was what he had collected from all that the doctor had said.

  This changed everything forever; his life, both as a father and as a law man, was ended this day. How could he continue, knowing that he had raised a murderer and also conspired to pervert the course of justice by representing himself at the hospital as having come to gather evidence to track down a killer? For Marshal Hammond knew very well that despite all his piety and faith, there was not the slightest chance that he would help to deliver his own daughter to the hangman. Even if it mean fighting against and betraying all that he had ever held dear to him, yes even the Lord Jesus himself, he would move heaven and earth to protect his only child from the consequences of her rash and foolish actions.

  As marshal, Jeremiah Hammond had attended a number of hangings, although thankfully never that of a woman. Each one of them had been as ghastly an event as could be conceived in the worst nightmare and it was only his fixed conviction that this was what justice required which made him able to play his part in the process. Now, thinking of Esther being led to the gallows and executed made him feel quite literally sick with horror. He knew then that whatever it might take, he would act to prevent such a thing happening.

  Coming here to Wichita, he had only meant to drag his daughter back home and perhaps see her set up in a court and reprimanded for being present at a theft. Now that she faced the possibility of execution the marshal would take all necessary steps, bar none, to save her from death.

  Chris could not sit still for more than a minute at a time. There was hardly enough space to take two paces in the room where he and Esther were staying, but even so he kept jumping up and peering wildly out of the window, as though he expected at any moment to see the hangman approaching to lead him to the gallows. He was so distracted with fear that Esther could see that it was she who would need to make any arrangement to take them to the safety of another town.

  ‘I am going down to the railroad station,’ said Esther, ‘The sooner we leave here, the better, I would say.’

  ‘Don’t go just yet, Esther.’

  ‘I can’t stay in here with you. You are driving me crazy with your restlessness. Nobody has tied us in with that man. I have thrown the wallet in the river and all that remains is the money. There is nothing to fear.’

  ‘Don’t you care about him, Esther? Does it matter to you, what we have done? He might have had a wife, children. Now he is dying because of what we done.’

  ‘No, I can’t say that I am much worried about him,’ said the girl frankly. ‘See, I never knew him. He is nothing to me.’

  ‘I am not like you. I felt bad when I had hit that fellow at the depot back in Linton. I would not have done that without your urging. This is ten times, a hundred times worse. I don’t know if I can carry on, bearing the burden of it, like.’

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nbsp; ‘Well you had best carry on,’ Esther said, giving the boy a sharp look. ‘If not, then I do not know what will befall us.’

  ‘Just set here with me for a spell,’ said Chris Turner. ‘I will be ready to take action by and by, but for now I durst not go out into the street.’

  Esther pulled an impatient face and said, ‘Well mind that you buck up your ideas a bit, otherwise we are going to be in trouble.’

  Just across the river from where the two young people were staying, Marshal Hammond stood staring right at the building, had his daughter and her friend but known it. He was trying to put his thoughts in some sort of order and work out firstly what he should do and then after that, what he actually was going to be doing. Really, he already knew the answers to both questions, but these were so much at odds with his principles and religious convictions that he was hoping that everything might change if he only stood there long enough.

  While he stood there, his mind working frantically and to no good purpose, Hammond became aware that a small group of people seemed to have come and stood right alongside him. Since the riverside was practically deserted, this was a little annoying and he began to feel crowded. He needed to move about a bit anyway; he had been standing there for the better part of half an hour, just gazing out across the water. He turned to move off and found his way blocked by four young men. They were the cowboys with whom he had had the run-in on the train from Linton and it looked very much as though they had recognized him and were desirous of talking over what had happened on the last occasion that they had chanced to meet Jeremiah Hammond.