These Honored Dead (A Lincoln and Speed Mystery #1) - Jonathan F. Putnam Page 0,9
and staring intently into the fire. I noticed tiny red streaks in the corners of her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
She gave a shake of her head. “I can’t find the words.”
“To say what?”
“To say our stolen season has reached its end,” she said, turning to me with a sad smile.
I realized I had known from the first this day would arrive. My only hope had been to delay it for as long as possible. Perhaps we had.
“Why?” I asked.
“A few women from the settlement have started to make remarks,” she said, her voice restored to its usual firmness. “To ask questions I cannot answer. In fact, they started a few months back, but I didn’t want to hear it and so I ignored them. But I can’t any longer, not if I want to maintain my position.”
Later that morning, the storm abated. I stood at Rebecca’s door and held her tight one last time, inhaling deeply the scent of the nape of her neck. Then I walked out to saddle up Hickory for the cold ride home. The door closed behind me with a sharp retort.
It was only two months later that Logan walked into my store, seeking a berth for the newly minted lawyer named Lincoln.
CHAPTER 5
Lincoln commenced his law practice with another protégé of Logan’s, John Todd Stuart. From what I could glean, their practice consisted of routine matters: stolen livestock, land disputes, a divorce petition or two. My circle of unmarried fellows, long used to accommodating new arrivals, gladly opened to admit the voluble newcomer. If anything, our evenings were even more filled with great good humor than they had been.
But there was unease beneath the surface. The business of A. Y. Ellis & Co. was unexpectedly lower in the spring season—typically our busiest—and off by a third by the time summer arrived. All around the square, my fellow merchants were reporting similar declines.
To make tempers even shorter, the summer of 1837 dawned dry and hot and stayed that way. We hadn’t felt a drop of rain in weeks. The owner of every wooden structure in town—which was to say virtually every structure in town—worried his building might fire any day. Preoccupied by my immediate concerns, I thought of Rebecca less and less.
Everything changed one day in late July. Lincoln and I were crowded together on a row of rickety chairs in the front room of a two-room shack. The little hovel was owned by a free Negro with the grand given name of William de Fleurville but known to all as Billy the Barber.
In addition to myself and Lincoln, David Prickett, the state’s attorney, was there, as was Lincoln’s patron Logan and the rotund newspaperman Simeon Francis, publisher of the Sangamo Journal. Young Hay sat hunched over in the dim far corner, knobby knees hugged close to his chest.
Prickett, raw-boned and supremely self-confident, had been sprawled in the reclined barbering chair that stood alone in the center of the room. When Prickett’s turn was done, Lincoln rose, stretched, and switched places with him.
“The usual, Billy,” Lincoln said, slapping the Negro good-naturedly on the back. “And make sure you take off all this fuzz that’s suddenly sprouted on my jaw.”
“Yes sir, Mr. Lincoln,” he replied. His singsong voice still contained an echo of the native island where he’d been raised. Billy dipped his hand, the color of burnt copper, into the tin pot sitting on a table beside the barbering chair, and it came up dripping with a greasy, soapy mixture. The barber proceeded to spread the froth over Lincoln’s prominent chin and cheekbones. Then he unfolded a long, curved razor, wiped it on his apron, and set to scraping Lincoln’s face. While he worked, Billy whistled softly to himself.
Beside me, Logan turned to Francis and said, “Did I read in your pages this week another bank in Philadelphia has failed?”
“Two more,” Francis replied in a low growl. “Makes five from that city alone—five we know about. I told you all back in May, when the New York banks first stopped redeeming paper money for gold and silver, that the Panic would be heading our way.”
“Surely we’re insulated here in the West,” I said, thinking of my own soft sales figures and hoping they would not suffer further. “It’s land that gives people wealth out on the frontier, not gold and silver coins.”
Francis gave a derogatory “Hrrumph!” and hoisted himself to his feet. The publisher was an immense man, shaped like an egg, bulging in the middle and with