These Honored Dead (A Lincoln and Speed Mystery #1) - Jonathan F. Putnam Page 0,3
the doctor told my resigned parents—who had already lost three children to illness—that it was hopeless. My father ordered our house slaves to prepare a suitable gravesite.
For reasons no earthly soul could hope to comprehend, the doctor proved wrong. I lived. And it was during the long months I spent convalescing in my childhood bedroom, at first gasping mightily for each breath and then, much later, leaving my bed and learning how to walk again, that I started working out a design for my life.
As the second son and sixth surviving child of the great Judge John Speed of Louisville, my destiny was in my blood. I would not inherit any part of Farmington, where my father and our sixty slaves raised hemp and corn from a land of such splendid virgin fertility that the same fields could be planted, without interruption, year after year.
Accordingly, once the old schoolmaster Smith declared in my fourteenth year that I had learned as much as he and his birch rod had to teach, my father directed me to follow the path worn by my older brother, James, to St. Joseph’s College in Bardstown, Kentucky. The two years I spent there under the unimaginative hand of Bishop Reynolds seemed to confirm my fitness for my charted future: a clerkship with a local scrivener and then reading law myself one day. Had the disease not disrupted my studies, I have no doubt the law would have remained my calling, and my millstone.
As it was, as I regained my strength at Farmington, I began to realize I was not actually bound to a future where drafting a fine pleading in chancery by candlelight was the highest possible achievement. One day, my brother James came to visit and found me out of bed and gazing through the window.
“You almost ready to return to Reynolds’s dungeon?” James asked with a good-natured shout as he entered my bedroom. “You know how cross the Bishop gets when his boys tarry in their studies.” James was nineteen years of age at the time, with a great mop of sandy hair and a perpetual grin. His future had never been in doubt.
“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Perhaps I won’t return to Bardstown—not right away, at least. I think the merchant’s life suits me better.”
“What could possibly be stimulating about that?” asked James with genuine wonder.
“Tell me, what have you done in the past week that held your interest?”
“Old Jenkins has let me organize the papers for an ejectment action all by myself,” my brother began excitedly. “An elderly miller has lost his lease, but he’s refusing to leave, as he must. And, let’s see, I attend daily a class that’s reading the whole of Chitty’s Work on Pleading, and—”
I stared out the window again. Acres of sage-green hemp stalks swayed in the afternoon breeze. I could make out in the distance the moss-covered rock enclosure marking the fountainhead of a small, clear stream. I had spent many afternoons in my youth scrambling down and up the stream’s steep banks, amid the aromatic mint and tender, pungent cress. But I realized I had never explored where the stream led when it left our land.
Early one morning the following month, finally freed from my sickroom, I walked along the stream’s banks and found it flowed into the mighty Ohio River and from there westward into our bountiful Nation. I broke the news to my father that instead of returning to St. Joseph’s, I had secured a clerkship in the large wholesale store of William H. Pope in central Louisville. I learned the business from Pope, finding more pleasure in the hurly-burly of commerce than I ever could have hoped to secure from even the most elegantly crafted pleading.
After several years with Pope, I seized the idea to follow the stream still further west. The Red Man was receding, making increasing room for the inevitable spread of white civilization and enterprise. With the defeat of Black Hawk in the war of 1833, a wide new swath of central Illinois—long the preferred destination of impatient, adventurous young men from Kentucky—suddenly became habitable. Late one evening at a large family gathering at Farmington, an obscure second uncle mentioned that my cousin James Bell was in need of a junior partner for his mercantile business in Springfield, Sangamon County, Illinois.
Thus it was that on an auspiciously warm day in September 1834, I climbed aboard my loyal horse, Hickory, to set off for Springfield. Slung over the horse’s back