Getting up to the side wall of the Barker’s farmhouse had not been a particularly difficult enterprise, with Fletcher and Atkins keeping up a pretty regular fire to stop those in the house from looking out of the windows too freely. Having gained the side of the house, Hammond then had to work out his next move. Since the action all seemed to be focused at the front of the place, it seemed to him to make sense if he were to creep round the back and see what was what.
Very few people will bother keeping the back door of a farmhouse locked and bolted during the daytime. Marshal Hammond therefore peered round the side of the house and then dropped to his hands and knees. In this way, he crawled past the rear windows unseen until he gained the door. Carefully and being sure to make no rattling noise, he grasped the handle of the door and turned it very slowly. He then pushed the door inwards slightly, until he had established to his own satisfaction that it was neither locked nor bolted. Then he pulled it to again and allowed the door handle to return to its usual position.
Jeremiah Hammond crouched for a moment or two by the back door, considering whether it would be better to charge in with his pistol blazing, or if it would make more sense to tip-toe in and try to take the men from behind, unawares. In the end, he decided that this course of action was the one to favour and so, drawing and cocking his pistol, he again turned the door handle with agonising slowness and then swung open the door. He stood up and looked into the kitchen, but could see nobody. Hammond slipped into the house and closed the back door gently behind him.
All the time, the shooting was continuing sporadically; from both inside and outside the house. Marshal Hammond moved softly through the ground floor rooms of the house, without encountering anybody. He went into a large room at the front of the house and then cautiously approached the window. He had no wish to be shot by the deputies who still maintained an intermittent fusilade. He waved to the two deputies, who he could just see sheltering behind a pile of logs down the slope a ways. Once he was sure that they had seen him and were likely to hold fire for a bit, he made his way up the stairs.
“What do you think?” said Atkins, “He is in the house now. Should we just crouch here while he does all the work?”
He and Fletcher had stopped firing and the shooting from the house also appeared to have ceased. Dave Fletcher said, “Truth to tell, I feel mean staying here while Hammond runs the risks. What say that we charge to the house? I think that if Hammond is about to tackle those who have been firing at us, then he will need our help in distracting them.”
“You are right,” said Pete Atkins, “Let’s go now.” The two of them jumped up and began running towards the house. They zigzagged as they went, but there did not look to be any need. Nobody fired at them. Half way up the slope, they heard the crack of pistol shots from within the house. The two deputies put on a spurt and ran even faster towards the front door of the farmhouse.
The door was unlocked and Fletcher and Atkins charged into the house and ran straight up the stairs. They almost shot Jeremiah Hammond, who they met coming down towards them. “Well, man,” said Atkins, “What’s the score? What has chanced?”
“There were two men up there,” said Hammond, “I have shot them both and they are dead.” He led the others to a front bedroom, where Ethan Barker and his youngest son were sprawled lifeless upon the floor. Both men had been shot through the head and by each corpse lay a rifle. “Is either of these the man you sought?” asked Marshal Hammond.
“No, this is the father and that there is Jake, his youngest boy.” said Atkins.
“Why the hell would they shoot at us?” asked Fletcher in perplexity, “They must have known that Clint would not be likely to spend more than a few months in gaol for what he did.”
Hammond indicated some large glass containers in the corner of the room. “I will hazard a guess and say that they had been imbibing freely of illicitly distilled spirits.” He went over and picked up one of the jars, holding it up to his nose and sniffing. “Yes, I should think that the two of them had been drinking this stuff heavily. I dare say that they knew that we would be coming for that fellow Clint and just hoped to drive us off by a few shots.”
Pete Atkins went over to the bodies and knelt beside them. “They both reek of poteen. I think you have the case pretty well figured out, Hammond. I wonder where the other three boys are to be found?”
“Then I guess we ought to look around and see if your man is hiding out anywhere” said Hammond. They all went downstairs into the kitchen and Pete Atkins opened the kitchen door, coming face to face in the process with Clint Barker. Barker, who had been down in one of the fields and, hearing the gunfire, had come running back to the house, looked as surprised to see Atkins as Atkins was to bump like this into the man he was seeking. It was a close thing as to which of the two men recovered first from his surprise and took action.
As the deputy brought up his pistol, Clint Barker drew his as fast as a bolt of lightning and shot the other man dead on the spot. When the bullet hit him in the chest, Atkins said, “Oh!” as naturally as if he had just remembered something that he needed to do. Then he dropped lifeless to the kitchen floor. Almost immediately, Fletcher fired at the man who had killed his partner and Clint Barker too, fell dead.
Marshal Hammond and Deputy Fletcher tried to revive Atkins, but it was a hopeless endeveour. The bullet had passed clean through his heart and he must have been dead before he even fell. The plan had been for a simple and uncomplicated arrest of a man for an offence which might at worst have drawn him six months in gaol and now four men were dead. It was, thought Hammond, a dreadful end to the day. He had only known Atkins for a short time, but had liked what he saw. It was a senseless waste of a good man’s life.
Fletcher and Hammond laid Pete Atkins carefully over his horse, with a view to taking his body back to town. The three Barkers, they decided to leave where they were for the time being.
As they rode back to Wichita, Marshal Hammond reflected that this would make it even less likely that anybody would be prosecuting any serious enquiry into the attack on Grover McPherson. He felt ashamed of himself for even thinking such a thing, but he could not help being a little glad that this business would serve to put further distance between the crime which his daughter had committed in this town. With their own Marshal still out of town and only two deputies now to look after law and order in the town, Hammond could not see that anybody would even remember the McPherson case in another week.
When they got back to the office, Fletcher said to the Marshal, “I appreciate what you done for us, back there. You are not to blame for Pete’s death. I need to rouse up the other deputy, who must be told that he needs must come on duty right this minute. Could I ask you to mind the office for a space, while I take Pete to the undertaker and find Jack Seagrove?”
“You go along son. I will set here until you return. Do not hurry yourself, I know how to run an office of this sort, don’t you fret about that.”
“Lord knows what we would have done without you.” said Fletcher and left the office. Ten minutes after Fletcher left, a middle aged man walked through the door and said to Hammond, “I have some evidence as might touch upon the robbery and knifing of that poor fellow the other night.”
It was obvious that this man assumed that Marshal Hammond was the duly appointed authority in charge of the office; which in a sense was exactly right. He did not look for Fletcher to return in under an hour and so the trick of the thing was to find out how much this man knew about the attack in which Esther had been involved and then work out how to get him to keep his mouth shut. This was not how Hammond put the case of course, not even to his own self, but this was without doubt the substance of the matter.
“Come in and sit down,” said the Marshal, welcomingly, “Tell me what you know about the case.”
Like so many law abiding people who seldom have dealings with the police, the man who gave his name as Harry Hawkins was ill at ease in the Marshal’s Office. “I am not accusing anybody mind,” said Hawkins, “And likewise, I hope that nobody will accuse me of anything if I am wrong.”
“What could anybody accuse you of, Mr Hawkins?” asked Hammond.
“Why, of stealing a hundred dollars.” he answered anxiously.
Slowly and patiently, Marshal Hammond drew out of the storekeeper the whole story of how the young girl had come in to buy whisky and how she had run off when challenged and left him holding the $100 bill. Hawkins was most particularly concerned to hand this over to the authorities. He had heard from friends who frequented the Lucky Strike that the man who had been attacked and robbed had had a series of good wins at the table there and was supposed to have been carrying almost a thousand dollars when he left. For this reason, and bearing in mind what the newspaper said about a young woman being implicated, Mr Hawkins had been suspicious of the $100 bill being offered like that. Anyways, he hoped that he had done his duty now.
Jeremiah Hammond felt weak with relief that it had been he who was sitting here and taking down this statement and not one of the Wichita deputies. He was a shrewd judge of character and it was his considered opinion that Mr Harry Hawkins had never seen the inside of the Marshal’s Office before and would most likely go the rest of his life without setting foot in the place after this day. After taking the $100 bill into safe keeping, getting Mr Hawkins to sign a statement and then finding out the precise location of his store, the Marshal shook the man’s hand and thanked him profusely for being such a good citizen. Hawkins’ detailed description of the girl who had tried to pass the bill could only be of Esther.
“If only there were more people like you around, Mr Hawkins,” said Hammond, “It gladdens my heart and restores my faith in human nature. There is one final point though and that is this. Our investigation into this case is at a very delicate point and if anybody heard anything about this incident which you have reported, it could wreck the whole of the investigation. I must ask you to promise that you will not breathe a word of this to a living soul. I know that you are a decent man and do not want any trouble with the law.”
The slight menace of the final sentence was, Hammond guessed, going to be enough to ensure that the man kept his mouth shut.
When Hawkins had gone, Marshal Hammond rooted around the office until he found a street map of the city, a map which included Delano. He marked the site of the attack on Grover McPherson and then added a cross for the site of Harry Hawkins’ store. Then, as an after thought, he also put in a mark to show where the Lucky Strike saloon was to be found. I just know, he thought to himself, that Esther is hiding somewhere near those three spots.
By the time that Fletcher got back, it was dark. Hammond had a very clear view of what was needful for him to do now. Before heading for Delano though, he thought that it would do no harm at all to visit the Sisters of Mercy Infirmary again. He got there forty minutes after Grover McPherson died of blood poisoning.
“Ah, Marshal Hammond,” said the doctor, when he caught sight of the Marshal in a corridor. “You seem to a have a knack of turning up at crucial moments. First you arrive just as the patient came to, and now you come here just after he dies.”
The doctor took Hammond to a small room, hardly bigger than a large closet, which functioned as the mortuary. “Do you want me to go over the cause of death?”
“No,” said Hammond, “That seems fairly straightforward. It was a stab wound from behind which caused a fatal infection of the blood. Would that about be the case in brief?”
“Yes, pretty well. What do you wish us to do with the corpse?”
“What is the usual procedure when some indigent dies in your hospital? Who arranges the burial?”
“We do. Then we bill the city afterwards. I thought it might be different in this case though, because of the circumstances of the death.”
“No,” said Marshal Hammond casually, “You can go right ahead and fix up the burial. Then just send in the bill as usual.”
The doctor did not appear to find anything odd about Hammond’s instructions, merely nodding and indicating that he would see to it. For a man who had always stuck to the rules with an almost fanatical rigidity, Jeremiah Hammond was finding it amazingly easy to twist, bend and break those self-same rules now that he had a strong motive for doing so. And really, no motive could be more powerful than to protect his young daughter from suffering a painful and degrading public death at the hands of the hangman.
It was astonishing how readily people trusted a Marshal and answered the questions that he put to them with no apparent hesitation. Perhaps the fact that the management of The Lucky Strike were especially anxious to stay on the right side of the law had some bearing on their willingness to cooperate. They knew that if they crossed the Marshal’s Office or failed to provide enough information, then there would be all sorts of difficulties when their gambling license came up for renewal.
“I am investigating a crime,” said the Marshal, “It is a complicated financial matter and I cannot say too much about it. I am sure that you will understand my discretion.”
The under manager to whom he spoke, had not the least idea what Marshal Hammond meant, but he nodded his head vigorously to show how keen he was to help.
“Tell me,” continued Hammond, “Have you had a young woman, barely more than a girl really, in here lately who fits this description?” He gave a brief word portrait of his daughter and could tell at once that the man knew the girl.
“When you say that she was little more than a girl,” said the deputy manager of The Lucky Strike, I hope that this has no reference to our serving minors with intoxicating liquor or allowing them to gamble? We are right strict about this here, but short of asking to see birth documents and such, there is little we can do to stamp out that evil.” The man suspected, quite correctly, that it might sound as though he was overdong his virtuous indignation about under-age drinking. If so, the Marshal standing opposite him did not appear to note the fact.
“To speak bluntly, Mr Trelawny, I don’t care about the serving of under-age patrons with alcohol,” said Hammond and marvelled that he could make such a statement without dying of shame. “I want only to find this young person.”
“Well then, she came in with a man every night for close to a week. I am pretty well sure that this was the girl, I mean woman, who you described.”
“What did she and her companion do here?”
The man looked puzzled and wondered what the Marshal thought that young folk generally did in a saloon or gambling house. “Well,” he said, “They played a little faro and imbibed a certain qualtity of whisky. Not to the point of intoxication, you understand, we never allow that.”
Jeremiah Hammond was not over-fond of saloon keepers at the best of times and right now he was in a hurry. He moved a little closer to Roland Trelawny and said quietly, “Mr Trelawny, you have a choice. You can tell me just exactly what I wish to know, in which case I give you my oath that I shall leave here and never set mind to you or your establishment again. Or you can stand there and fox with me, wasting my time with a lot of nonsense and lies. If you take that road, then I will do my damnedest to make your life a burden. I will try to have this pesthole closed down and you thrown out of work. After that, I will hound you until you have to move to another town. Now make up your mind which you would have, I am in a hurry.”
Having the case presented to him in this concise and unambiguous way, focused the manager’s mind ina marvellous way and also loosened his tongue. He said, “The girl that you talk of was a bad one. She was drinking, using foul language and encouraging the young man with her to all manner of foolishness. People complained about her conduct and she was warned on more than one occasion that she was coming close to being thrown out.”
“Did she look to you to be acting under coercion? By which I mean, was the young man ordering here about?”
Trelawny gave a short laugh. “As to that, I would say that the boot was all on the other foot. Struck me that he was a weak willed kind of boy and that she was pulling his strings, as they say. No sir, she was the strong one there and no mistake.”
“There now,” said the Marshal, “That was not too hard, was it? When last did you see her in here?”
“Couple of nights ago.”
“Thank you kindly for your help, Mr Trelawny. There is one last thing.” Hammond moved even closer to the man. “If I hear that anybody under the age of twenty one is ever served liquor in this place again, I will have you locked up. Is that understood?”
The deputy manager of The Lucky Strike nodded. This was the sort of thing that he understood very well.
***
Esther had expected Chris to be furious about the loss of the $100 bill to the man in the store, but he hardly seemed to care about it at all. He said in a dull voice, like he was not really paying attention, “Gee, that’s a shame.” But beyond that, he did not mention the matter again. There was a weary and dispirited air about him which Esther found a little worrying. She wondered if he was sickening for something. All he wanted was to stay in the room and lay on the bed, staring blankly up at the ceiling.
“Chris,” said the girl to him, “We need to make our plans. Recollect that we are going to get a train west soon. How are we to break one of those $100 notes if we are viewed with such suspicion as soon as we present them?”
“I don’t know, Esther,” Turner told her, “I don’t think that I ever had more than five dollars in my life before meeting you. It is not a problem that has ever faced me before.”
“Ah, you’re no use to me sometimes, Chris Turner, you know that? I thought that you would be fun to go off with, but I would have had more high jinks with your kid sister!”
Turner did not even have the strength to be annoyed at Esther for twitting him in this wise. All he could think of since he heard about the man they had robbed being at the point of death, was the liklihood of his answering for the crime on the scaffold. Nothing else mattered in the least. His only wish, and a right fervent one at that, was that he would wake up at his mother’s house and find that all this had been a bad dream.
For Marshal Hammond’s daughter, the death of a stranger was not something which concerned her much. She did not have any vivid memory of sticking that piece of wood through his back and even if she could have remembered the incident clearly, it is to be feared that what passed for a conscience with her would not have been troubled.
Right from her earliest childhood, virtue for Esther had meant concealing wrongdoing from others; chiefly her father. That one would choose to do good for the sake of it, had never once crossed her mind. Hers was a most practical system of ethics, in which right behavioir might lead to praise from those around one and eventually a place in heaven. Unacceptable conduct had therefore to be hidden away and, if nobody knew of it, then it could safely be forgotten. Incredible to relate, stabbing a man to death had been banished to that far corner of her mind where she was accustomed to thrust minor pecadillos like raiding the cookie jar.
***
After speaking to the fellow at The Lucky Strike, Marshal Hammond explored the streets surrounding the saloon, paying particular attention to those in the direction of the store where his daughter had tried to pass the large bill and also those near to the place where Grover McPherson had been set upon. He had not the remotest doubt now that Esther was staying nearby with that wretched boy Chris Turner. It was getting late and he determined to make a thourough and systematic search of every likely place where the young people might be holed up, first thing in the morning.
Hammond thought it fitting to return to the office before retiring for the night, in order to condole with Dave Fletcher, who had lost his friend and partner that day. He directed his steps towards that end and, as he had expected, found that the lights were still burning in the Wichita Marshal’s Office. What he had not expected to find was a wire waiting for him from Linton which simplified his task enormously.
Before leaving Linton, he had let it be known to his own deputies that they could contact him at the Marshal’s Office here. Fletcher handed him the flimsy telegram which said, “Night watchman Howard has left town stop Learnt that he is wanted in New York stop Case of robbery is suspended for lack of witness or other evidence”
Jeremiah Hammond read the communication over several times. In spite of what he had said to his men, he could not be altogether sure that they had not engineered this; they were both fond of Esther and might have done so regardless of her father’s wishes. Whatever the circumstances, he now found himself feeling profoundly grateful to them. His wish to haul an errant daughter back in disgrace had vanished away to nothing. All he hoped now was to rescue the child from the consequences of her own folly.
Fletcher, after giving him time to read the telegram, said, “We need to talk about what happens next with the Barker case, Marshal.”
“I have no official standing here, deputy. You need not address me as though I am your superior or anything of that sort.”
“Well then we still need to talk about the business.”
“What business?” asked Hammond, a little irritably, “The man you wanted is dead and so too are his father and one of his brothers. From all that I am able to apprehend, the affair is finished.”
“Begging your pardon, Marshal, I mean Mr Hammond, that is not how I see things at all, not by a long sight. That family are as mean a bunch as you could hope to meet. All of them have been in gaol and we most likely don’t know the half of what they have been up to over the years. It was a strange thing for them to do, opening fire like that as soon as you called out. Even taking into account the fact that they were drunk, I think there is more to their activities than we currently know. There are still three brothers left though, including Robert. He is a regular desperado and is suspected of involvment in robbing a train last month. He was not at the house today, but he is somewhere hereabouts and when he hears that we have wiped out half his family, I think that he will be apt to come looking for those responsible.”
“You are hinting perhaps, that since I shot his relatives, he might be gunning for me? Well, it may be so. We shall see.”
“It’s not just that. I don’t think that he will be holding an inquest on who pulled the trigger. He is the sort who will fly into a rage and start firing at anybody who he feels had a hand in the thing. I know Robert Barker, he is like to a mad dog.”
Marshal Hammond was not best pleased to hear this speech. He said, “Your partner asked me to come in on that raid up at the Barker place. I did it as a favour and, now we are talking of it, I will say straight that I took all the risks while you and he cowered behind the woodpile. Now you are trying to tell me that as a result of lending you my aid there, I have incurred another duty to help you tackle the rest of the family? Is that the strnegth of it?”
When Hammond mentioned cowering behind the woodpile, David Fletcher flushed crimson like a schoolgirl. Once the other man had finished his piece, Fletcher said, “Do you say then that you will not help?”
“No, I don’t say anything of the kind. I am arguing that I have no moral obligation to do so.”
This was too high falutin’ for a simple man like Fletcher, who said, “So I can count upon you?”
“Yes. Yes you can, although my own problems come first. Where is this famous gunman at the present time?”
“I have an idea that he and his two brothers are up in Hutchinson. Bad news travels fast and I would be surprised if somebody is not already on the way to tell him what has happened.”
“Well then,” said Hammond, “The lightning is not liable to fall tonight. I will wager that we will not see this trouble erupt until tomorrow at the earliest. I am going home to bed now and have a deal to do on my own account early in the morning. Howsoever, if I am spared until midday, I shall come here and we will talk matters over.”
Hammond was dog-tired when he got back to Mr Chang’s house. Tired and feeling like he was on deadly teeter totter. One moment, everything was looking up and he thought that things might pan out; the next, disaster looming for both him and his child. Perhaps the old Chinaman read some of this in the Marshal’s face when he opened the door to him, because he invited Hammond to share a pot of tea with him.
If it were not sacrilegious to make the comparison, Jeremiah Hammond found that Mr Chang’s back room put him in mind of a church. There was the smell of incense, the statue, the flowers and the holy book laying near at hand. If anybody had asked him two weeks ago what the eternal fate of unbaptised heathens amounted to, Hammond would have had not the least hesitation in consigning them to perdition. Now, sitting there with an old man who had heard of, and presumably rejected, the Lord Jesus; he was not so sure. He said to Chang, quite without meaning to, “I killed two men this day.”
The Chinaman asked quietly, “What happen? You set out to kill them or they try to kill you first?”
“Well, they had guns and they had already taken a shot at me. If I had not fired first, I would be dead now.”
“Then their evil bounced back on them. Like man who throws a stone at a wall and it comes back and hits him. Law of the world.”
“That’s a mighty comforting thought to tak to bed with me,” said Marshal Hammond, “You always have the way of making a man feel better, Mr Chang. I don’t know how you do it.”
The old man smiled. “Not me. I read about the way and then tell what I find in old writings. Thank Kung Fu Tse. You hear word of your daughter?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“What now if you find her?”
“I shall take her home with me and protect her the best way I know how.” said Hammond in a low but passionate voice, “I have made her what she is.”
“Great change of mind.” observed the old man.
“Yet I found the answer in the Bible,” said Hammond, “The sins of the father are visited upon the children. That is what has happened in this case. My character, my sins have punished that child. I made her.”
Mr Chang smiled. “Good to find these things before is too late, I think.”
Jeremiah Hammond smiled back. “Yes, I think so too. I do not know what will become of me and her, but I must try to mend the harm I have done.” He stood up. “Goodnight, Mr Chang. I hope that we shall meet again, if I am spared. But tomorrow promises to be a tricky row to hoe and no mistake.”