These Honored Dead (A Lincoln and Speed Mystery #1) - Jonathan F. Putnam Page 0,4

were several saddlebags my mother had stuffed full of fine clothes, though I doubted these would be of much use on the frontier. I was just shy of twenty years of age and six feet of height, with long, curly black locks resting on my shoulders. As she gave me a parting kiss on the cheek, my older sister Lucy teased me that I looked like the poet Byron, heading off to exile.

My younger sister and confidante Martha, at fourteen as gangly as a newborn colt, loped alongside as we trotted toward the main road. “Why must you leave, Joshua?” she called up at me.

“There’s a whole continent to discover,” I called back.

“Take me with you, won’t you?”

Martha threw up her hands toward me, but I merely shook my head and laughed. “You can come visit,” I said, “once I’ve found whatever there is to find.” With that, I spurred Hickory on and we left Farmington behind.

Springfield stood on the edge of a vast prairie whose wild grasses rose as high as the late summer wheat in Kentucky. As I rode through the prairie, the grass waved back and forth in the breeze like the billows of the ocean while the shadows of fleeting overhead clouds raced ahead of us. In the distance, a prairie fire burned, and the ribbons of fire along the horizon made it appear as if the clouds themselves were aflame.

My first years in Springfield confirmed the wisdom of my momentous decision to follow that little stream away from my birthplace. My cousin Bell soon tired of the day-to-day affairs of the store and became an absentee owner, and I reveled in the autonomy produced by his long absences.

Better still, Springfield brimmed with unmarried young men, and my nights never lacked for company. There was Billy Herndon, who’d grown up in Springfield and, after a brief and unsuccessful term at Illinois College, had returned to work as a part-time clerk for me at my store; ambitious Matheny, the son of the court clerk and from age fifteen the deputy clerk himself; young, pale Hay, hoping to latch on to an attorney as an office boy for hire; stolid Hurst, a clerk in a rival dry goods store; and many other choice spirits too. It was a sort of social club without organization. We spent our evenings milling about the storeroom fireplace or dangling from the rafters of the stables behind the Globe Tavern, bottles in hand and vying to top one another with callow good humor. Lincoln, I assured him, would fit in famously.

***

Despite my boldness in questioning him, I withheld from Lincoln that night one important aspect of my biography. She’d sworn me to silence. Besides, the chapter had so recently closed that I was unwilling yet to reopen it to examination.

CHAPTER 3

It had sparked one sultry summer afternoon two years previous, when I’d walked across the Springfield green to the storefront of the Post Office Department, cater-cornered from my store, to see if the Department’s thrice-weekly delivery stagecoach had yet arrived.

The postmaster Clark handed me a thin envelope, covered in the distinctive scrawl of my old employer Pope. I pulled out a single sheet of paper and began reading. As I walked out the door, head down and mind engaged, I nearly collided with someone coming from the opposite direction.

“Excuse me,” I mumbled, as I inhaled a fleeting scent of wildflowers in August.

A minute later, while I stood on the green and continued to read Pope’s exceptionally smutty and no doubt fictional tale, the scent returned. This time I looked up and met a pair of beautiful blue-gray eyes. My breath caught.

The woman standing before me appeared to be a few years past thirty. She was wearing a fitted calico dress that accented her figure, while a small black lace bonnet rested on her tightly bound hair.

“Good afternoon,” I managed. “Sorry for nearly knocking you over.”

“It takes more than a little bump to knock me over,” she returned in a clear feminine voice. Her face lighted with a small smile, and I saw soft lines radiating from the outside of each of her sparkling eyes. They only enhanced the beauty of her face.

“I’m glad of it. Did your letter arrive?”

She held out her empty hands, palms up.

“Perhaps on the next stage,” I said.

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. I’ve about given up checking. Perhaps it was never written in the first place.”

“I can’t believe someone would have failed to write you,” I said before I could think