On the Town:
Versus Harry B. (I)

THE ROMANCE

 

This is what we know about a certain dark event in 1898 near Matfield Green, where there have recently been three unsolved murders: a man on horseback rides down the dirt-packed lane just south of town. His name is Frank Rinard, and he is a hired hand on the Captain Henry Brandley place. It is Sunday, July the twenty-fourth, dusk. Neighbors see him pass on his way to the Brandley farm on the western terrace of the South Fork, a favored piece of ground. Rinard (pronounced Rine-erd) is about twenty-one, unmarried, a local man, and he is on his horse, Bender.

The captain, a Union army veteran whose left hand crippled by a Ute arrow is a kind of always evident campaign ribbon, has retired from the Kansas senate and now develops his realty investments. In less than thirty years he has become one of the wealthiest and most influential countians. He and his second wife, Elizabeth, have eight children. (His first spouse died several months after they had married and taken up housekeeping in his log cabin.) Lizzie is a pretty woman with thick, glossy hair, her Teutonic eyes of such transparent blue they could almost be window glass. She is shrewd and determined and a member of the school board, and she is disappointed that their eldest son, the third child, Harry, has shown no interest in his education. When he was two years old, he fell into a well and would have drowned had a young woman not climbed down in after him. Now he is twenty-four and unmarried.

What is about to happen will concern him and his strikingly comely seventeen-year-old sister, Pearl, and the man riding the horse. It is common knowledge that Miss Pearl pays more than passing attention to Frank Rinard, and he to her, but as a farmhand his prospects are ordinary. Several times the two have been seen walking toward the Brandley quarry, where men are cutting stone for the foundation of the big house the captain is building to replace the log home he put up after staking a claim here. Miss Pearl was also observed in the hired hands’ bunkhouse above the bam, when she and Rinard sat on his bed as he showed her pictures. One of her five sisters is married to Edward Crocker and another is seeing his younger brother, Arthur; the history and achievements of the Crockers match the Brandleys’. Power and influence have been building on the upper South Fork since the end of the war.

Young Brandley has ridden in from the ranch house at Jack Spring, four miles west, where he lives and works. He has brought in his laundry, and as he talks with his mother in the kitchen, hired hand Cecil Richards comes in with the fresh milk and interrupts the conversation—seemingly at an inopportune moment—and leaves. Some time later, hour not certain, Harry heads back to the ranch while his fifteen-year-old brother, Bob, arrives from Matfield, fixes himself something to eat, and then goes to the south porch to sit alone. Daisy Brandley, a couple of years older than Pearl, sits talking with Arthur Crocker on the unfinished foundation of the new house. She will marry him, and he will become a state legislator. The eastern sky darkens, and the crickets and bullfrogs start up. It is about nine o’clock.

Frank Rinard rides onto the place, heads to the barn and unsaddles Bender, but does not unbridle him. Then: from near the granary and hog lot comes the loud report of a large-caliber gun. The night goes still for some moments, then the gentle sounds of the vale resume. Gunshots are not especially unusual. Again the dark is staggered, this time by a woman screaming and moaning. It is Lizzie, and she is saying, Someone’s been shot! Is it Bob? Is it Bob? Her son runs to her and says he isn’t hurt. He doesn’t know who fired the gun.

There is confusion. Bob and Daisy and Arthur Crocker go toward the barn. Near it lies a body. Arthur raises the head and sees it is Frank. He’s been shot in the face. He lies weltering in his blood. He is unarmed, and no one sees any gun near him. In the turmoil, the men take Rinard up to the porch, where they can see bad powder burns on his face, and within minutes he dies. Lizzie sends John Knowles, a farmhand, for the doctor. An hour or so later the captain arrives, apparently from his real estate office in Matfield. Around midnight, the Brandleys hear a horse gallop through the gate, but the captain tells Knowles not to follow—by the time he gets a horse up, the rider will be gone. About daybreak Lizzie sends Knowles, a cousin of Rinard, to tell Frank’s father of his son’s death.

 

THE GUN

 

On Monday, the twenty-fifth of July, an inquest is held in Matfield and Harry Brandley summoned. The coroner has extracted a single forty-four-caliber slug from Rinard, and the county attorney asks Brandley to show his pistol. He rides off to get it, returning shortly. In his forty-four are six live rounds, five tarnished and one brightly new. Harry says he shot at a coyote on Thursday, but the gun seems to have been fired more recently. He says he often carries the pistol to protect range cattle. The attorney asks whether he objects to Rinard’s attention to Miss Pearl, and he says no, he and Frank are on good terms, but someone challenges his assertion (in a small community, the one thing neighbors know about is bad blood). There are no other suspects. Circumstantial evidence is strong enough for the justice of the peace to call for Harry’s arrest and have him taken to the jail in Cottonwood.

The community is tense: people remember the hooded men who, four years earlier, pulled the confessed murderer George Rose from the courthouse jail and hanged him under a Santa Fe trestle because they doubted justice would be done, and those men, the belief is, were not hoodlums but eminent citizens. Reporting a few days later the preliminary hearing on the Rinard murder, the Leader writes that emotions are unlike anything seen here before and crowds composed of an unusual number of women throng the courtroom.

Over the next nine months, the witnesses are many and the evidence voluminous but the trial of The State v. Brandley ends in a hung jury, one man holding for acquittal, and the attempt to impanel a second fails altogether. Believing Chase countians prejudiced against them, the Brandleys want a change of venue to Emporia, where the captain has several influential friends, but the Leader claims:

 

If the attorneys for the defense are responsible for the statement that “Chase County is against Brandley,” they utter what is not true for the purpose of excusing their own failures. The attorneys for the defense at no time seemed to appreciate the status of their client. They attempted to belittle the prosecution from the start and when they could not ridicule witnesses for the state they resorted to abuse and badgering, and one of the defendant’s attorneys appeared to be more interested in making the audience laugh than in proving the innocence of his client. Brandley’s case was undoubtedly badly managed. A change in management of his case and not a change of venue is what the defense needs.

 

Finally, in March of 1900, the motion is granted, and on the fourteenth of May a second and decisive trial begins in Lyon County. The crowds, still marked by a large number of women, continue in Emporia, and the reasons are evident: the son of a wealthy landowner and real estate investor, a senator and war hero, accused of shooting down a poor farmhand sparking his sister: privilege versus the people, Romeo dying for Juliet in a family feud.