SADDLEBAGS, Trunks, and Tombs

Chapter 4

Cornish, New Hampshire 1905

     Franklin J. Winchester was livid!  He’d finally had enough!  Out of all of his sons, this one had to be the most infuriating, impetuous young man he had ever met!  For all of the hair brained schemes over the years, especially the little “trips” Jackson started taking at five years old, this was possibly the worst thing he could have done and Franklin would have it no more! 

     Franklin remembered the night he had heard his wife’s frightened screams.  It had been just past 8:00 pm and she had gone upstairs to say her final "goodnights" to the boys when one of the servants said that Master Jackson was not in his room.  The whole manor had been searched from top to bottom.  The sheriff had been called as his wife stared out of the large window in their last child’s room, the pale tan curtains blowing in the wind from a breeze that was making its way through the window which had been left slightly askew.

     The child had been found of course, crossing the Cornish-Windsor Bridge.  Franklin inflicted the thrashing that he felt he could not help but to administer, even as his teary eye though, relieved wife protested.  What in the world would make a five year old child climb out the window in the middle of the night?  The boy had said he had to see something and over the years, Jackson would go on his little adventures to “see” things.

     Over the years this roaming streak in his son continued and worsened.  He had thought that sending Jackson to New York for college would quell the wandering streak and help him prepare to settle down and become a lucrative member of the family business.  It hadn’t.  Well, this time, Franklin was going to send his twenty-five year old, youngest child on what would hopefully be his grandest journey and far enough away from Cornish so that his father could clean up this last and hopefully final mess. What would make his son think that he could get away with sneaking off and marrying one of the young servant girls??  This was unheard of and would not be tolerated!!  Regardless of who she was, she was still a servant!!

     It was autumn of 1905 when he convinced the boy to go west and help establish a new Winchester Savings and Loan in Arizona.  He had heard the small choked sound coming from the girl his son had secretly married as she dusted the foyer.  Jackson had looked uncertain, but his eyes danced with the chance to “see more”, just as Franklin had known they would.

     A few days later, with Jackson safely boarded on the train, Franklin had returned home to complete the clean-up of what he hoped would be the last mess his youngest son would make in Cornish.  Franklin, being one of the most influential men in New Hampshire, had called in a favor and made the unsavory marriage of his son to the teenage servant girl disappear with the swipe of a pen.  He wasn’t totally cold-hearted as he put her into the street.  He gave her what he thought would be enough money for her to live on until she procured another job and shut the door behind her.  By the time his son finished his task in Arizona, young Martha Edgemore should be nothing but a fleeting memory.

     As Martha walked away from the house, green eyes sparkling with tears, she held her head up high, refusing to be broken.  She would keep the promise she had made to Mr. Winchester, the promise that had secured her the money she would need to live.  She would also keep the secret of the life that had begun to stir within her womb. 

     Jackson would reach Kingman, Arizona in the early winter, in his own way and in his own time.  There were things to see, and by God, he would see them.  His father had given him a substantial amount of start-up money to start the new savings and loan.  He sat comfortably in his seat on the train, remembering the look in his young wife’s eyes as she stood in the picture window of his father’s manor, trying not to cry as the carriage had pulled off.  He would send for her, he would do all the things he had promised her in the still of their last night together with her curled in his embrace.  She hadn’t made a big fuss, she was unhappy, but she knew him, knew his need to “see”, and had seemed to console herself in the fact that he was going to set them up nicely in the west and send for her.  They would be in touch, but in the meantime there was a whole world to see and he was about to see it on his father’s money.

     The newspaper would tell of another train robbery.  More bandits seeking to make their riches by robbing the money from the railway post office and anyone else that may be on board the train at the time.  The story would get back to Franklin Winchester that bandits had held up the train and had robbed everyone on board.  

     The band of bandits, truth be told, would be one very gentlemanly bandit.  One who would make off with the Winchester money and the money from the post.  One who would kill just enough people to get away with what he wanted, shocking himself.  One who would jump the train before he reached the west and would see the country as he chose to.  One, Jackson Winchester, who would pull off one of the biggest train heists on the Santa Fe line, and get away with it, alone.

     Jackson, or ‘Old Jack’ as he would come to be known in the next five years, was living the life!  As promised, he did start out by sending secret letters to his bride that unbeknownst to him were carried to her in secret by one of the cooks at the manor.  He never knew what had taken place after his departure.  He also never knew that on July 8, 1906, young master Charles Jackson Winchester had been brought into the world.  

     As fate would have it, he would never know the trials that Martha had gone through awaiting his letter to bring her and Charlie home.  For four years he wrote, more and more infrequently.  By his fifth year away from Cornish, as his father had surmised, Martha seemed too have faded from his thoughts and his heart.