Regulator, chapter 5

You know what this Old West story needs? Three teenage girls. In Oklahoma.

Chapter 5 is a fresh start of sorts for Regulator. Up until now, we’ve been spending time with Charlie, the Pinkerton man. Now there are three teenage girls walking on a dirt road in Oklahoma. What the hell are they doing in this story?

by Frank Spring

Three teenaged girls walked abreast down the main road of Plainview, Oklahoma, trailing a small dust cloud.

“Comes by its name honestly,” said one, looking about and surveying the browns and grays.

“I believe I’ve had all I care to of Oklahoma,” said another.

“Is it the heat, or the cold, or the boredom that’s getting you down?” asked the third.

“Ah, the agony of choice,” replied the second.   

The first nodded, her eyes scanning the street. Katherine  - Katy - Laughlin was a head taller than her two companions and therefore generally thought older (in fact the third, Violet, was older by a couple of years), which meant that strangers and shopkeepers spoke to her first among them, assuming that if any of the three had any sense it must be her, and this initially fictional leadership role had taken on a hint of reality.

“Not to say we don’t have some bully fun here every now and again -” said the second, whose birth name was lost even to her and who went by Jessamine Halley, the former a possible birthplace and the latter picked up from a more-or-less kindly older couple, some relations maybe, who’d looked after her for a short spell as a child. Her diminutive stature and small features would have made her seem several years younger than the others were it not for a faded scar running out of her hairline and down her forehead like the trail of a heavy raindrop, and which gave her a rather wild and ageless quality.

The third giggled, thinking of the bully fun they’d gotten up to. Violet Roann, in face, person, and personality, was round and pink. She laughed easily and frequently, and after their initial meeting more than a year previously Katy and Jessamine had been both charmed and jealous, assuming that such a bubbly person must have had a smooth and easily childhood, protected and provided for by a large pack of brothers, a happy circumstance that they quite resented. But it would have taken greyer souls than Katy Laughlin and Jessamine Halley to resist Violet’s good humor; “peppy”, they called her, and were not wrong, while any fantasies they’d entertained about her easy early life with the brothers Roann vanished with Violet’s stories.

“- but I guess what I am saying is that I’m ready to have it somewhere other than here,” Jessamine concluded.

“And where do you imagine this new fun is to be found?” asked Katy.

“I don’t know. California?”

“California!” Violet practically clapped her hands and looked at Katy. “What do you think?”

“I expect that of heat, cold, and boredom, most places have at least two of three,” said Katy distractedly, her gaze still roving over the town and its inhabitants until she became aware of a pointed silence at her side. Violet was looking crestfallen and Jessamine was glaring at her as if she’d kicked a kitten. Hell. “But I guess California would have fresh oranges. It’s worth a thought.”

Given more time, she could have conjured a more graceful recovery, but it seemed to do the trick; Violet brightened a little, and Jessamine’s stone-faced grimace eased.  

They were coming up on a store, windows displaying bolts of cloth and advertisements for sewing patterns. Violet leaned in, whispered “good luck, ladies” and peeled off into the store.

Katy and Jessamine trudged on, silent for a moment.

“I know,” Jessamine said.

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“You certainly were.” 

“All it is,” Katy said, “is maybe you don’t get the poor girl’s hopes up like that.”

“And you ought not dash them so easily,” Jessamine replied, without heat. “No reason it couldn’t happen.”

“Serious?” 

They turned quickly down a narrow, deserted side street that ended in the open plains.

“I guess I am,” Jessamine said. “I was not lying, we do have some fun, and it beats all hell out of being back in Missouri and poorer than Job’s turkey, but, well, I don’t know that this -“ gesturing down the alley to the windswept plains - “was what I had in mind. Charming though it is.”

“Yes, the thought of leaving all this magnificence makes me feel cold,” said Katy, avoiding a pile of horseshit.

“And the work…” 

“Mmm-hmm.”

Wind, their footfalls crunching on dirt.

“We could do it,” Jessamine said.

“Could we?”

“California. Or Mexico - we could learn Mexican.”

“We could learn Canadian.” 

“We could go to England, finally learn us some English.”

“I doubt I have the talent.” 

“We could.”

Katy paused. “We could. But she…”

“She wants to,” Jessamine said. “I think.”

“Wanting and doing ain’t the same thing,” Katy replied.

“I wish she could.”

They came to the edge of town, pale yellow plains rolling out into the distance. 

“If she can, she can,” Jessamine said. “And if she can’t, well.”

They looked around, seeing no one. A horse snorted nearby, its bridle looped around a solid tree branch jammed into the ground as a temporary hitching post. 

Katy leaned down and smoothed a patch of ground, tossing away some sharp stones.

“Hell, you ain’t gotta do that,” Jessamine protested.

“Should come from above.”

“Shit, it don’t have to be perfect.”

“No. But it should be good.” Katy knelt. “Go on.”

Jessamine backhanded her across the mouth. Katy gave a sharp gasp, “Jesus”, and swung with the blow like a door catching a gust of wind. 

“Alright?” asked Jessamine, after a moment.

Katy nodded and splat blood, turned her face back upward. “How’s it look?”

Jessamine surveyed the growing bruise, the split lip. 

“It’ll serve,” she started, but Katy caught her hesitation.

“Another.”

“No, I believe it’s -“

“Another.” 

Jessamine raised her hand.

“And close your fist.”

The blow fell. Jessamine knelt down and held Katy until she drew a deep breath and once again turned her face to her friend.

“How now?”

Jessamine took in the purpling bruise. “Perfect.”

They stood, Jessamine rubbing her knuckles.

“They’ve hit harder,” said Katy.

“But none fairer,” Jessamine said with a grin.

“Get out of here,” said Katy, prompting a courtly bow from her companion, who pulled up the hem of her skirt, revealing a full-heeled riding boot and a pair of trousers. She bounded over to the horse.

“Scream good, now,” Jessamine called after her, swinging into the saddle.

**

Every person who was in Plainview that day - and a good number who weren’t - would give their eyewitness account of what happened many times during their lives. The testimonies, as these things will, varied somewhat initially, and over time diverged more and more until in some cases it was not clear that the narrators had witnessed the same events at all.

On a few points they were consistent, however, one of which was that the trouble began when the tall girl turned up on the main road bruised and bloody and screaming blue murder. ‘She threw out the first pitch,’ one saloon raconteur was fond of saying to the indulgent smile of the barman and the barely-restrained frustration of his drinking buddies.

And such a pitch, the young woman, a girl, really, wailing and shrieking and calling for her father, her pa, where was her pa, and her sister - presumably her sister? cousin? at any rate the other girl, the one with the round face - hurtling out of Ida’s clothing store, dropping a bolt of fabric in the dust and fussing over the other before she, too, set up a keening.

It was a lot to take in, even before the father arrived on the scene, a strongly-built character with tremendous black sidewhiskers. This was not his first time in town, on this the storytellers agreed; he’d first appeared several weeks before the incident, buying the necessities with which to set up on a not-too-distant farm he’d recently purchased. 

He was out there with his three daughters - or maybe the round-faced one was his ward, some distant relation he’d taken in as a good Christian? this, again, was unclear - and he was glad to be there, although what with keeping one eye on the farm and one eye on the girls and one eye on the hired hands, he’d said to someone with a laugh, why, he hadn’t enough eyes to go around.

He’d been back to town a few times since to acquire this or that for the farm, occasionally bringing one or more of the girls with him. Their custom did not amount to much, and it was generally assumed that he’d sunk most of his money into buying the property, whatever it was, a theory that would have been supported by his meagre deposit in the town bank had the bank clerk inclined toward gossip.

Even so, he was held in some esteem within the town for his jovial manner, his good looks, and his obviously upright nature, for he pointedly abstained from drink, was heard to lecture the girls on the evils of tobacco, and when invited by the grocer to attend the town’s congregation he replied that because he and his family had been obliged to move around so much, he’d taken it upon himself to minister to his girls, his little flock if he might be so bold, reading to them and educating them from the Good Book every day of the week and twice on Sundays, which declaration he followed by quoting Scripture with a gleam in his eye. 

It was a pleasant surprise for the townsfolk, therefore, when he and the girls rolled up to church in a wagon on a Sunday not long after, and remained briefly after the services for the general visiting. The girls were deemed satisfactory. They were pretty in their way (the round-faced one, in particular, aroused a number of feelings throughout the congregation, very few of them creditable), although they seemed oddly demur, oddly young for their ages - but then, no doubt their father sheltered them fiercely from the world, a natural enough inclination and one almost certainly exacerbated by whatever it was, no one could say and none dared ask, that had happened to their mother. 

How often they had visited town after that Sunday was a matter of mild dispute; it was certainly not enough to put them at the front of anyone’s mind, but often enough that they were never exactly forgotten, and the feeling in the town was that it would be a good thing if Plainview were to see more of them.

That sense of the family’s novelty, their desirability as members of the community, would come up frequently and figure centrally as townsfolk who were hardy and canny enough to survive draughts and blizzards and banditry and in one case the Battle of Antietam Creek tried to explain, if only to themselves, what in the sam hell happened after the wailing girls were reunited with the father.

A small crowd had gathered around the girls by the time he arrived, and the tall girl, between gasps and howls, told how she and her sister had been tempted into the side street by a young man who had offered them the forbidden fruit called cigarettes. 

They knew they ought not, she’d wailed, but they’d always wanted to try, just a gasper, he’d said, and he had manners, he was a gentleman, she was sure of it, until he’d struck her savagely and carried her sister off on his horse, and oh it was her fault, the tall girl cried, her fault, this was all surely her fault. At her father’s urging she described her attacker, but no one in the crowd could recognize him. 

The father took her bruised and bleeding chin gently in his hand and kissed her on the forehead, speaking soothing words no one could quite hear. Then he stood to his full height - more than one raconteur would later swear he had grown several inches - and roared for the town marshal. 

As luck would have it, the marshal, alerted to the commotion, was at hand, and the father lit into him like a preacher delivering himself of his views on sin. How could this have happened in this town, he demanded, did the marshal not know to run off the kind of vagabonds who would do such an evil thing? 

Oh the force, the moral power of the outraged father, his dark eyes blazing, his voice cutting right across the marshal’s splutter and rising over the gathering crowd as he proclaimed that he’d address the wretched lawman’s awful responsibility later, after they’d gathered every last armed man, every last one, d’ye hear me?, and set out in pursuit of the villain who’d taken his little girl. And, placing the tall girl in the round-faced one’s care and directing them to rest in the nearest building, he stormed off for his horse, intermittently railing at the sheriff and calling for someone to bring him a rifle, for alas and by god he’d not thought this was the kind of town where he’d need to bring his own.

No one at the time thought it noteworthy that the building nearest the infamous side street, the one to which the two girls went to rest during the rescue, was the bank.

There were two armed guards at the bank that day, which was two more than usual (‘That should have been the only clue I needed’, the marshal would later say, face in hands.). They were not bank employees, but paid by the Hollander Meat Packing Company of Kansas City, an unusual arrangement resulting from a recent deal between Hollander and a local rancher, who’d agreed to sell them all of his ready stock at a price favorable to them. 

The only hitch was that Plainview’s modest bank was not large enough to guarantee a bank draught of that size or to secure cash in the same amount, and the rancher absolutely refused to accept a draught on a banker he hadn’t met. Cash it must be, and, newly and reasonably concerned about banditry, the rancher had asked Hollander to undertake its security in Plainview until a better arrangement could be made. 

This would normally have been out of the question, but the deal was a good one and the security was the rancher’s only condition. Swift, easy negotiations, with virtually no haggling, posturing, or threats of violence, had become a rarity since the ranchers in the area somehow came by the notion that the handful of meatpacking companies who bought their stock were colluding to suppress prices. That this was entirely correct did not, in the companies’ view, justify the naked hostility they were increasingly meeting on the plains. 

Reluctant, therefore, to endanger an easy deal, Hollander agreed to provide guards for the cash all the way to Plainview and then until the guards should either be no longer necessary or ninety days had passed, whichever came first. Someone in the Kansas City office had suggested retaining the Pinkertons for security, but was first shouted down - was it his view that money grew on trees? - and subsequently shunned. 

Instead the company found two men they judged too honest or lazy to try to steal the money for themselves and willing to work for room and board and a wage so small it was scarcely worthy of the name, they to find themselves in arms and ammunition. This, in the opinion of the Hollander Meat Packing Company, was sufficient risk management for a bank located in a small town already possessed of its own marshal.

It had been the easiest, dullest money the two men had ever made until one of the town’s two hostlers burst in and in his declared capacity as a deputy marshal demanded that both of them join a posse in pursuit of a filthy degenerate and a kidnapped girl.

The Hollander guards had been in town for nearly two months but were no more part of the community than the horses (indeed, less so), and so considered that they had no civic duty to speak of, and more to the point their orders did not include posseing up for anything. On the other hand, they had to live in this town for another month and refusing to help rescue its daughters seemed like a good way to make life pretty well unlivable, besides which neither of them much cared for the idea of degenerates going around carrying off teenage girls. One of the guards was a family man, in that he had several, and it was eventually decided that he would go, while the other remained and attended to their duty.

The remaining guard was just reflecting that this was more action than he’d expected or cared to see when two girls, one bruised and bleeding and supported by the other, staggered into the bank.The guard and the clerk exchanged a worried glance - neither had signed up for this and frankly had little idea what the hell they were supposed to do here - but not being monsters they rushed over and, through the round-faced one’s explanations, got hold of the bruised girl before she could topple over in a dead swoon. 

There followed a testy exchange in which the bank clerk’s dogged insistence that the back office and its sofa were only for bank business wavered and then routed before the onslaught of the round-faced girl’s pleas and the remaining guard’s venomous whisper of “goddammit, you fool, just do as she says.” It was only a matter of time before a well-meaning gang of townswomen appeared to offer what comfort they could, and if they found that the bank clerk and the guard had not made every possible accommodation to the poor dear girls, no power on earth could save the unfortunate men. 

The back office it was. The sofa proved to be too short for the poor girl’s height, but having opened the office and procured a jug of water the bank clerk was officially out of the solutions business, and both men left the girls to their devices just as the marshal’s posse thundered by outside. 

The guard and the clerk were not cold-hearted men, and were moved by the girls’ plight, the guard so much so that he actually spoke again. 

“Hell of a thing,” he said, and the bank clerk nodded. This heart-to-heart concluded, they lapsed into a barbarous gloom, each feeling that the other really should have done more.

Their meditations were broken by the reappearance of the round-faced girl, who introduced herself as Sarah, thanked them for their kindness, curtsied prettily, and, to the unspeakable astonishment of both, went over to the guard and started to talk to him, particularly admiring his shotgun (a double-barreled fowling piece that would not have distinguished itself anywhere but a duck pond).

“Oh, I’m making a fool of myself,” she said, blushing prettily. “It’s just that we’ve had such a fright, and I’m so very, very glad you’re here.” 

Is there any figure more ridiculous than a man who is being flirted with for ulterior reasons and does not know it? If there is, it is a man in the same position who does know it and goes along with it anyway. It will never be clear to such a man - as it never was to the guard - why he allowed himself to be deliberately beguiled. There was no conceivable way a girl of sixteen could have found that bank guard in the least bit interesting, much less desirable, and he knew it, and yet here he was, answering her questions and smiling back and even, god help him, letting her touch the shotgun. Had it been that long since a young woman had paid him any mind he hadn’t paid her to? Or was it that the whole situation was so absurd, so ridiculous that he had no idea how to extricate himself?

In the end, it did not much matter - not to the girl who called herself Sarah, not to the guard (at least at the time), not to the bank clerk who watched the scene with amusement, contempt, and (in his heart of hearts) a touch of envy, and not to the three men who burst through the bank’s doors and interrupted the whole affair. James Salt Lick Johnston, Randall O’Connell, and young Davy O’Connell did not have “bad man” tattooed across their foreheads, but when three rough characters storm into a bank armed to the teeth they can only be after one thing and there’s no point in anyone pretending otherwise.

Whether the guard would have stood any chance at all of stopping them would remain forever in doubt; he was not given the chance for heroics or even a brave if pointless death because at the moment the three intruders pointed their pistols, the girl who called herself Sarah was actually holding his fucking shotgun. How, how he had allowed this to happen was frankly the least of his problems, he discovered when he turned to snatch it back and found himself staring down the wrong end of it, with Sarah smiling sweetly at him from the right one.

The bank clerk was a little quicker on the uptake, and before the bank doors swung closed he ducked behind the bank’s broad counter and reached for the new model slide-action Winchester shotgun resting on a shelf. It was a gun above his station, frankly, and had cost a mint, but the bank considered it an investment and the clerk was glad of it; with the wide, high counter he could keep the robbers in front of him, and if six quick shots from a twelve-gauge pump gun didn’t bring the robbery to a messy end it would at least make some noise and buy him some time. He’d taken it out to knock down some pheasants and found the slide quite workable, although the damn thing had jammed on him once, the ejected shell getting stuck in the action, which some idiot had put on the top of the gun instead of the bottom. 

Still, worry later, shoot now. The guard and the girl would probably catch some buckshot, but if the guard didn’t want to get shot he should have kept his own shotgun, and as for the girl, he didn’t much care if she lived or died because she was obviously in on the robbery.

The full implications of this final thought struck him around the same time that he heard the back office door swing open behind him and a high, gentle voice say “Please put your hands on your head.” Shit. Was she armed? She sounded armed. She must have concealed the gun on her person. How big could it be? A pocket pistol? The door was ten feet away. How much damage could she do with a pocket pistol at ten feet? 

That kind of thinking will get you killed, but even if he’d never admit it, this was the bank’s clerk’s lucky day, because Katy Laughlin was quick on the uptake, too. She was young yet but he was not the first man to doubt her abilities or intent and, seeing his hesitation, she knew what he’d be about. She took a few swift steps and as he turned toward her she kicked him full in the face. The man blinked bloodily up at her through eyes that were already swelling shut; she stood over him, holding a small caliber pistol that was still big enough to have killed him several times over from ten feet away or farther.

“I said ‘please’,” she said, and kicked him perfunctorily in the ribs.

Subscribe to The Experiment to keep up with future chapters of Regulator. Check out Frank Spring’s previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” For legal reasons, I want to make clear that Frank Spring owns the rights to Regulator, free and clear. Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.

---

To keep up with Frank Spring’s Regulator, subscribe to the The Experiment.

Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.

We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment. 

We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some

Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House.