The Marshal's Daughter Page 5

  Chapter 5

  The young men had recognized Hammond from behind, but it was not until he turned to leave that the full state of affairs was revealed to them. Their intention up to this point had been simply to rough him up a bit in order to punish him for the way that he had humiliated two of their party a few days previously. The two whom he had assaulted felt very bitter about their experience and had already more than once reproached their friends for not setting upon on the fellow who had attacked them. When Marshal Hammond turned around and faced them though, it looked as though the case was altered.

  For one thing, the target of the boys wrath had not been wearing a tin star when last they encountered him. They still had him pegged for a preacher of some sort, albeit a very forceful and aggressive specimen of the breed. The discovery that the man with whom they had tangled and with whom they now purposed to try conclusions was a marshal was one unexpected development. Hand in hand with this first surprise went another: that the fellow that they hoped to knock about a bit was carrying a gun.

  The marshal, who was feeling more sad than he had ever been in his life, looked at the four boys and saw immediately what they wanted. He said, ‘Well, you fellows obviously have it in mind to start a fight with me. I tell you now, that I wish for nothing of the sort. I have much to do and if you just leave me be, then I will not trouble you.’

  For a few seconds, it looked as though this might be sufficient to avert the violence which had been threatened. The two young men who had not been assaulted by Marshal Hammond stood undecided, as did the fellow he had grabbed by the throat. This was not so for the man who had lost two teeth when Hammond had landed a blow in his mouth. He had a particular grudge against the older man, a grudge which he was determined should be settled there and then.

  ‘Will you set to with me, man to man and forgetting that you are the law?’ said the boy.

  ‘Lord knows, I do not wish to,’ said the marshal, ‘but you have every right to ask it of me. So yes, if that is what you will.’

  ‘You’re damned right, I will,’ said the cowboy.

  ‘You other men, now,’ said Hammond, ‘I suppose that you do not intend to fall upon me if I set aside my gun and fight your partner here?’

  The other three shrugged and shook their heads. Just a few minutes ago, they had been on the point of jumping this fellow, but since he had shown himself decent enough to offer satisfaction to the man who felt aggrieved, they would have thought it cowardly and unmanly to take advantage of the situation.

  It was a chilly day, but without further ado, Hammond removed his jacket and unbuckled his gunbelt. Then he took off his hat, rolled up his sleeves and prepared for combat. The setup was a novel one and not wholly to the liking of the boy who had been so keen to lay into Hammond as part of a group. He had already received proof of the marshal’s physical prowess and was not at all sure that he was ready for the return match. There was, however, no way of backing out of the business now without becoming the butt of his friends’ jokes and so he too stripped down to his shirtsleeves and readied himself for the fight.

  At first sight, all the advantages were with the young cowboy. He was half Hammond’s age, physically as fit as could be and possessed of a mean and vengeful disposition into the bargain. However, the marshal was the more experienced fighter who knew one or two tricks in that line and had never given up in a physical contest in his life. His tenacity and staying power were assets which had in the past outweighed the brute strength and viciousness of various opponents.

  Many fist fights between men are almost of a symbolic nature. One man rushes the other and overwhelms his defences, whereupon the weaker man capitulates and acknowledges the other to be his superior. They are like contests between males proving that they are leaders of the pack in the animal kingdom. None of this had any bearing at all on the way that Jeremiah Hammond comported himself in a fight. The younger man on this occasion rushed Hammond and delivered a furious hail of blows upon his head and upper body. Instead of falling back in the traditional manner, the marshal stood his ground and waited until the cowboy’s energy was dissipated. Then he responded with two or three strong punches of his own to the man’s face.

  A thing that the other three men observed was that while their friend hopped and danced around Marshal Hammond, the older man stood there like a tree, saving the whole of his strength to use in punches aimed at vulnerable parts of the other man’s anatomy. He received blows to his own body, but seemed to ignore them. The consequence was that rather than being over in a few seconds of furious action, the fight between the two men looked set to last for some time. Various loafers caught sight of something happening on the grass by the riverside and drifted over to form a ring of spectators. It was this which attracted the attention of Deputy Pete Atkins as he rode by on other business. He was in something of a hurry, but even so, he could hardly ignore disorderly conduct of this kind.

  So engrossed were they in the fight, that nobody noticed Deputy Atkins ride up and dismount. One or two of the more enterprising of the onlookers had started a book on the fight, both of them giving odds in favour of Marshal Hammond’s eventual victory.

  ‘Come along now, you men,’ came the voice of the deputy. ‘Break it up now. What the Devil do you mean by brawling in this way in public? I have places in the cells for those who disturb the peace in this fashion.’

  Atkins stopped dead and fell silent when he recognized one of the combatants as the marshal of Linton. The crowd melted away, leaving only the two men who had been fighting and the other three cowboys. Pete Atkins shook his head in disbelief. ‘This won’t do at all,’ he said. ‘What has been happening here?’

  The four young men looked to be lost for words and so Hammond spoke up. ‘I had some species of dispute with this young fellow on the train from Linton. He wished for satisfaction and I offered it to him. I am sorry to occasion a breach of the peace in this way, but the fault is mine and not his. I should know better.’

  His manly bearing and readiness to shoulder the blame for the incident greatly impressed the four young men. Hammond turned to the boy with whom he had been scrapping and offered his hand, saying, ‘Sorry son, I hope that we might part on good terms?’

  The two men shook hands, at which point Deputy Atkins said harshly, ‘All right you four, get along out of here now. And no more fighting, you hear what I tell you?’

  When the other men had left, Atkins said to Marshal Hammond, ‘I am surprised at you, you know. I would not have expected a man like you to be brawling in public.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hammond. ‘You speak fairly. I am sorry. I am distracted by recent events and am not thinking straight.’

  The deputy decided to let the matter lie. He said, ‘Fact is, I was in search of you and am pleased to have found you now. I went by Chang’s place looking for you, but he did not know where you were to be found. I wonder you don’t mind staying with an old humbug like him.’

  ‘I like Mr Chang and I think that his view on many topics is perfectly correct,’ said Hammond a little stiffly.

  Pete Atkins looked at the man sidewise, taken aback by this statement. When he had been in Linton the previous year, Marshal Hammond’s detestation of any religion apart from the true one which he himself professed was universally remarked upon. He limited himself to observing, ‘You are becoming more liberal perhaps than was once the case.’

  A few days earlier, a remark of this nature would have been enough to set Jeremiah Hammond’s hackles on end, but today he simply said in a tired and dispirited way, ‘That is nothing to the purpose. What was it that you wanted to speak to me about?’ He had a grim foreboding that the deputy was about to tell him either that his daughter had been taken up on a charge of murder or that his own role in suppressing the evidence of a dying man had been discovered. It was somewhat of a relief to learn that it was neither of these things.

  ‘I will tell you how it is, Marshal Hammond. My boss is out of town for a while and ther
e is only me and two other men running the show here. A young woman was taken advantage of last night and also badly beaten. We know, or leastways, have a strong suspicion who is responsible for the crime and now have to apprehend him.’

  ‘Forgive me, Atkins, but could I ask you to tell me where I enter the picture? I have no authority in this town and am here solely in pursuit of a fugitive.’

  ‘I am coming to that. The young man wanted for the attack on this girl, who by the by is only fifteen and entirely respectable, is a fellow called Clint Barker. He lives with his father and four other brothers out about seven or eight miles from here. The father and all five of his boys are the meanest and most vicious crew you could hope to meet. They have all run foul of the law more than once and they live in a farmhouse which could be defended against a small army.’

  ‘I am reminded of Proverbs ten, verse nineteen,’ said Hammond with a rare flash of humour. ‘ “In the multitude of words, there wanteth not sin.” You have yet to reach your point, though you have spoken many words.’

  ‘Well, in short, I need more than just me and the other two deputies to go out and arrest Clint Barker. There is no enthusiasm for any sort of posse and I wondered if you would care to lend a hand?’

  It might have been thought that, bowed down as he was with his fears for the fate of his daughter and the way in which he had himself strayed from the right path, Marshal Hammond would have rejected such an idea as this out of hand. However, just as with his recent fight with the young cowboy, such an affair promised to take his mind away from his own troubles and so he said, ‘If I can be back here by nightfall, then yes, I don’t mind. I have no horse with me, mind.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Atkins. ‘We can find a mount for you. I will ride back to the office and make arrangements. Will you follow on on foot?’

  ‘Yes, yes I will.’

  The best thing that Esther Hammond could have done, given the unfortunate circumstances in which she found herself, would have been to sit quietly in the room with Chris Turner and keep out of public sight. Such a course of action did not at all accord with her desires. It was to avoid being trapped indoors during the day that she had run off from her home in Linton. She was not about to trade one sort of imprisonment for another. So it was that when Turner fell into a fitful sleep, tormented by dreams of the hangman’s rope, the girl slipped out of the cheap hotel so that she could get some fresh air. In her purse, she carried two $100 bills from the wallet of the man whom she and Turner had robbed. The bulk of Grover McPherson’s money had consisted of eight $100 notes: this being the money which he had won at the faro table the night that he was attacked and mortally wounded. There had been a little over ten dollars in small change, but the young couple had now spent that.

  Had she been a little older or perhaps more versed in the ways of the world, it might have occurred to Esther Hammond that for a young girl to offer a $100 bill in a store would invite attention. As it was, she had led a sheltered life and seldom been called upon to handle money. Her aunt had seen to the shopping and suchlike and her father had not approved of the idea of giving children an allowance or ‘pocket money’.

  Although she was not in the pitiful state that Chris Turner was, Esther still had the idea that her mood might perhaps be improved by a couple of glasses of whiskey. She had begun to drink secretly around six or nine months ago, meeting at odd times with a bunch of youngsters who were, like her, determined to defy their parents. Then, on arriving in Wichita, she had been drinking in saloons each day. Never yet though had she thought of having a whole, entire bottle of intoxicating liquor for her own self.

  The store sold all sorts of things, from lamp oil to bolts of cloth. The only thing that interested Esther though was a shelf high up behind the counter, lined up on which were bottles of spirits, chiefly whiskey. She found the notion of buying a bottle of whiskey quite alarming, but so strong was her desire for the effects of a few drinks that she overcome her initial reluctance and, waiting until there were no other customers waiting to be served, went up to the clerk behind the counter.

  ‘Say, could you give me a bottle of that whiskey?’ she asked. The clerk looked at her oddly and Esther wondered if she should first have asked how much it was.

  She felt herself reddening, which caused the man behind the counter to ask, ‘Are you of age?’

  ‘I am twenty-one, yes,’ she replied boldly. He looked as though he did not believe her but reached up anyway for the whiskey.

  ‘That will be one dollar and sixty cents, please.’ said the clerk. His eyes widened in disbelief at the $100 bill which Esther produced. ‘I can’t change that, miss. I will need something smaller.’

  Esther began to grow confused and the shop man suddenly reached over and snatched the bill from her hands. ‘I am not stealing this from you,’ he told her, ‘but something is not right here. How come a girl like you has half a year’s salary in her hands? I shall send my boy to the marshal’s office and they will look into the matter.’

  The frightened girl knew that she had to get out of there before any lawman came enquiring about the source of her wealth and so without more ado, she bolted from the store, hearing the man shouting for her to stop as she ran into the street.

  When he got back to the office after having enlisted Jeremiah Hammond’s aid in the projected visit to the Barker place, Pete Atkins found that Culpepper was hanging around and shooting the breeze with Dave Fletcher, another of the deputies. Pete said, ‘Jed, you will catch it damned hot if you are still here five minutes from now. Marshal Hammond is on his way here and I do not think he is best pleased at seeing that bit of yours about him and his daughter in the paper. ‘None of that was true, but Atkins wanted to be able to plan how to go about bringing in Clint Barker without having the fear that Barker would read of their plans in the Wichita Beacon before ever they arrived at his father’s farm. The reporter took the hint and made himself scarce.

  After the newspaperman had gone, Fletcher said, ‘So Hammond agreed to throw in with us and ride up to get Barker? That’s good of him; he doesn’t need to help like that.’

  ‘He’s not himself,’ said Atkins. ‘I tell you, I have seen him before in Linton and heard a deal about him. He is reckoned to be the coldest man alive, but do you know what he was about when I ran him to earth down by the river?’

  ‘No, go on.’

  ‘He was engaged in a fist fight with some cowboy. Just fighting in public.’

  ‘Was he trying to arrest him?’

  ‘No,’ said Atkins. ‘He was just fighting. I tell you, there is something troubling that man.’

  ‘It probably concerns his daughter. I could not believe it when I heard about that warrant for her that he had sworn out. He is a strange one all right.’

  Ten minutes later, the man himself arrived at the office and plans were laid for the arrest of Clint Barker.

  The gelding that Pete Atkins had secured for him was a mite too skittish for Marshal Hammond’s tastes. Every minute or two, the creature would take it into its head to take a few paces sideways, like it was practising dressage or something of that sort. The first few times it happened, Hammond ignored it, but when it became clear that this was a regular vice, he cracked down on the horse and was pretty firm whenever he detected it in the act. If there was going to be any chance of gunplay or rough stuff, then the marshal wanted a beast that he could rely upon, not one that might unexpectedly bolt and take him into the line of fire.

  Ethan Barker and his five sons lived in a stone-built farmhouse which sat perched on top of a rise of ground. The mother of the boys had dug up and left some ten years before, leaving the old man to raise his sons as best he was able. The rumour in town was that his wife had finally had enough of the vicious beatings that Ethan Barker dished out when he was in his cups. Whether or not that was the reason, there was now just the five men living in the house.

  Ethan and the five ‘boys’, who ranged in age from nineteen to twenty six, had
all been in trouble with the law on many occasions. If it wasn’t distilling and selling moonshine liquor, it was selling guns in the Indian Territories. There was usually at least one or two of them in gaol and it was very rare for all five to be living in the old house, as was presently the case. Clint, who was twenty four, was said to be the meanest of the bunch and this was not the first time that he had been in trouble for knocking women about. Beating up a child of fifteen was bad though, even for him.

  Marshal Hammond and the two deputies from Wichita sat on their horses watching the smoke trickle up from the chimney into the still autumn air. ‘Well,’ said Pete Atkins. ‘They look to be at home.’

  ‘Some of them are, at any rate,’ said the more cautious Hammond. ‘We need to recollect that while we are coming at the house from this direction, we could find some of them boys coming up behind us. We do not want to be caught between the hammer and the anvil, as you might say.’

  Marshal Hammond had not been displeased to be roped into a game of this kind. At least while he was fooling around like this, he did not have time to brood upon the business about his daughter.

  The two younger deputies seemed inclined to give way to him in the matter of tactics, notwithstanding where this was more properly their home territory than it was his. Hammond said, ‘Well, how do you boys want to play it?’

  ‘Me and Fletcher were wondering,’ said Atkins. ‘How you would yourself play it, if you were in charge, that is to say?’

  ‘That is a hard question to gauge, seeing that I do not know the men. How apt are they to cut up rough if we knock on the door and demand that they hand over this Clint?’

  ‘They are every one of them as tough as all-get-out-and-push,’ said Fletcher. ‘They might very well refuse to deliver the boy up to us or even start shooting if they have been drinking.’

  ‘Still and all,’ said Hammond. ‘We cannot just act as though we are besieging the house. We must give them a chance to play the game by the rules. I will go up and knock on the door.’