The Lincoln Hunters

by Wilson Tucker

  “Wonder how Warner is making out in Times Square?” Steward mused.

  The theater had the usual garish front common to places of entertainment in many centuries, and was liberally plastered with placards and threesheets. It was a wide, squat building with much fancy but quite useless ornamentation on its frontside. The box office was set flush with the planked sidewalk, while just around a corner on a narrow alley, a flight of steps led upward to the gallery. The cart of a peanut vendor, now doing a brisk business, was nearby.

  “I know none of them,” Bloch announced disdainfully after a scrutiny of the current playbill. “We have here Brutus, or The Fall of Tarquin.” Reading on, his eyes flickered over the smaller type. “I am in grave error, gentlemen. Tarquin fell last night. A pity. This evening, the townspeople will be treated to the first successful social satire by an American playwright (if we accept this at face value, which is hazardous) entitled, Fashion, or Life in New York.”

  “I saw The Beggar’s Opera in London,” Dobbs volunteered.

  “I was privileged to play in a revival of that, sir,” Bloch informed him. “The audience received it rather coldly, which was not surprising; the censors had butchered the heart of it to remove the message.”

  “What message?” Dobbs asked bluntly.

  Bloch shrugged eloquently. “The censors found one.”

  “The gelded nincompoops.”

  “I hate them!” Bloch cried. “Those misbegotten knaves of Kendal green.”

  “You’re misquoting again,” Bonner called. “Look over here-just like old times!” He was pointing out the posters on the far wall beyond the box office.

  The colorful three-sheets proclaimed the gala attractions coming next week.

  The Booth-Willoughby Traveling Players, now engaged on their fourth triumphant tour of the western frontier, and coming direct from a stupendous season in Boston and New York, would arrive in town the following week to present to sophisticated theatergoers a splendid, diversified program of comedy and tragedy. From their vast, sparkling repertoire they would be pleased to offer four evenings of delightful entertainment, representing the best of the international stage. The first evening, Julius Caesar; the second evening, Love’s Labour’s Lost; the third evening, Macbeth; and the closing evening, for a grand and never-to-be-forgotten finale, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Come one, come all!

  Karl Dobbs read the closing title a second time.

  “Did Shakespeare write that?”

  Bloch lost his temper, and even Bonner glanced around to see if the older man was joking.

  Later, in midafternoon, they gathered for lunch at one of the many cook tents dotting the swollen town. This tent was pitched in an open lot next to a blacksmith shop and was manned by two elderly Chinese attendants, backed by an Indian woman washing dishes. The two cooks reminded Steward of the girl he had left waiting in the chamber. She would still be waiting several hours from now when he returned, but he wondered if she would wait for him any more?

  Despite misgivings—for these primitive places had a fearfully high disease and mortality rate-the crew had been given the choice of eating at one of the tents or going hungry. It had been impossible to get into a hotel dining room for a meal. But the food was not as bad as they had expected, and the considerate hosts insisted upon serving a shot of whiskey with each plate. Perhaps it was a local custom. The whiskey was a raw, powerful liquor, and perhaps that was the custom, too.

  “Any questions?” Benjamin Steward asked.

  “Yes, dad.” Bonner held his shot glass up to the sunlight. “Why don’t they make it like this at home?”

  “The censors,” Dobbs informed him sourly.

  “Firewater. Gad!”

  “Questions?” Steward asked once more.

  There were none.

  “All copasetic, then. Shoot for the crown.” He lowered his voice. “Check your pockets; make sure the spool is in place and ready to operate.”

  Bonner regarded him curiously. “How come you’re harping on that subject, how come?”

  “What happens to the Character who loses his?” Steward countered.

  Bonner drew a fast, snaky finger across his throat.

  “You guessed it. Now check them—we’re on the ball.” He thought a moment. “I never did find out what that meant.”

  “And remember our motto,” Bonner said lightly. “Sift like hell and devil take the hindermost. Don’t let dear old Whittle down.” He studied the empty shot glass. “Onward, for the glory of T-R and the satisfaction of the client. What does our client want with an old speech, anyway?”

  “One more treasure to tuck away in a dusty museum,” Bloch answered. “Come, let us seek out some desolate shade, and there weep our sad bosoms empty.”

  9

  LINCOLN SPOKE HERE

  THE CHARACTER riveted his gaze on Abraham Lincoln’s mouth, on the powerful and persuasive lips.

  He was enthralled, and all but lost in the spell.

  The evening’s program had flowed along smoothly, all according to schedule and thus far without a hitch. He had it all on the spool of wire.

  An elderly, frail and pompous gentleman named John Palmer had opened the convention. Palmer identified himself and welcomed all the delegates present, whatever their political affiliations; he called the gathering by its proper name, the AntiNebraska State Convention, and reminded the assembly that these were perilous times, therefore blah, blah, blah. After several minutes of blathering, Palmer got around to introducing the notables present and then read the brief agenda. He closed by exhorting his listeners to do their sacred duty to their country, to banish sin and wickedness.

  The perfunctory applause which followed was done more in relief at his going than in approbation.

  A tall, ruddy and wind-burned man who identified himself as an appointed delegate from Macon County gained the floor and asked for a statement from Mr. Lincoln. The presiding officer ruled him out of order. The delegate sat down, amid a handful of boos for the chairman’s ruling.

  The second speaker was a David Davis, who suggested a coalition of the several political faiths into one; he pointed out that men of at least five individual political faiths were present in the convention and that except in the matter of slavery, those men pulled in five individual ways. He spoke at length on the future of the nation, on the many territories other than Nebraska which one day would seek admittance to the Union, and on the need for one undivided political party to lead those territories and that nation to greatness.

  Davis proposed an amalgamation of all those present, plus any others who felt as strongly as they did, into the new and growing movement known chiefly in the Eastern states as the Republican Party. He proposed the founding of the Republican Party of Illinois, here and now. And as the standard bearer of that great new party, he proposed the nomination of the Honorable William H. Bissell as Governor.

  Reaction was mixed. The number of delegates who were willing to bolt their respective parties and become Republicans were decidedly in the minority.

  From the rear of the auditorium someone sent up a cry for Lincoln. The demand was taken up by two or three other voices, but in vain. The chairman rapped for order.

  He solemnly recognized and introduced for the second time that evening the Honorable William Herndon, Mayor of Springfield. The recognition was greeted with wild applause.

  Mr. Herndon wished, with modesty and yet with brimming enthusiasm, to second the motion for the nomination of the good Mr. Bissell. Whereupon he launched into a long lusty, gusty speech in which praise for the nominee and laudation for the great state of Illinois became somewhat confused and hopelessly intertwined. At times his listeners found it difficult to judge who or which he was praising at the moment. Herndon possessed one weakness. He cultivated a forceful if unusual syntax; he was a man who loved words and who loved to listen to his vocal chords pronounce them. That he was a colorful speaker there was little doubt; a speaker capable of mesmerizing his
audience and himself. Herndon was eloquent, bombastic, telling, dynamic and sonorous. His vocabulary was unbounded.

  William Bissell was nominated for the governorship.

  Riding the enthusiastic bandwagon, the adherents of James Miller quickly boomed his nomination to the post of State Treasurer, and won. A sprinkling of nominations for other offices followed suit.

  Again a plea was made for a united, unanimous party, under the Republican flag, and this time it almost carried. After the loquacious Herndon, a change of mood was becoming evident.

  The Character checked the operation of his pocket recorder and waited. He stole glances at the target.

  Other speakers stepped to the lectern, had their say and vanished again into the restless sea of faces. The speakers expounded on a variety of causes and subjects dear to their hearts and to the voters at home. Benjamin Steward could scarcely remember their names, but he listened to what they were saying because he was enjoying himself and because this was ancient history in the making. The history would not affect him but it would change the lives of untold millions of the world’s population, and that interested him.

  Some of his colleagues viewed the field trips with a detachment verging on boredom; they tended to regard ancient peoples as dead and buried even when standing in their presence-as if they were witnessing a carefully rehearsed reconstruction rather than the personage or the event. He was never able to see history and historical people in so distant a manner, nor did he want to. The men around him were living, breathing entities—as fully alive as himself. That they were born and died seven hundred years before his own existence prejudiced him not at all. They were living now and he was among them.

  He always felt stimulated in the presence of the ancients: man or woman, famous or infamous, they excited him and he was pleased to be living among them for however brief a span. He had known a small pleasure in helping to establish Marcus Antonius’s exact birthdate; had, with precise and loving care, stolen into the studio of Correggio to photograph certain of his paintings; and had, without understanding a word, recorded the sonorous voice of Sophocles reading aloud from his own dramas. To some of his colleagues it was only grist for the mill; to him, it was spirited adventure.

  Again the urgent cry, “We want Lincoln!” resounded in the hall, and again the presiding officer put it down, but with difficulty.

  In the comparative hush, the chairman introduced Owen Lovejoy.

  Steward muttered, “Hot damn!” under his breath and glanced at Dobbs. Dobbs was slipping a hand into his coat pocket, preparing to activate the recorder. He was too good a field man to miss a cue.

  Steward craned his neck to examine the crowd. He could not see Bloch. Doc Bonner nodded at him from a position near the door and patted his pocket in signal.

  Owen Lovejoy exploded like a skyrocket.

  When he spoke he yelled, screamed, cried out in mock agony, twisted his face into nightmarish grimaces, beat on the lectern with two clenched fists, raised his hands to heaven to call on his God, and in general made an emotional spectacle of himself. Lovejoy was a master rabble-rouser and the delegates swallowed every fiery word of it.

  The undersized but loudmouthed man berated the slavery-loving devils, the Negro killers, the inhuman landowners of the greedy South, the sinful masters who toyed with the bodies of helpless female slaves, the insufferable cotton monarchs, the foul ships’ masters who accumulated fortunes by running in black men from Africa, the scabby whites who would extend this unspeakable crime into the pure Northern states, the heartless scoundrels who were ripping open the bloody seams of Kansas and Missouri, and finally, the filthy sympathizers of a wicked cause who had pillaged a newspaper plant and murdered his decent, God-fearing brother Elijah in cold blood.

  Lovejoy cried and cajoled for more than thirty minutes, riding roughshod over common logic, ignoring all qualifying principles and circumstances, and confusing cause and effect with deliberate abandon.

  When he was done, the adolescent and impressionable segments of the audience-apparently about ninety percent-were howling for blood, rich red Southern blood. A cotton monarch sufficiently unwise to enter the hall at that moment would be hung from a rafter before he could shout Dred Scott.

  A tumult broke out even before Lovejoy had ended, a noisy, thumping disturbance which would not be hushed. The cry for Lincoln became universal as hundreds took up his name. Chairman Palmer dropped the gavel and spread his hands helplessly, looking to Lincoln for assistance.

  Those men nearest the tall, gaunt figure were already pushing him forward. Lincoln’s face was solemn.

  The silence, when he began to speak, was comparable to the thick silence of a long forgotten tomb.

  Steward found himself enthralled.

  Abraham Lincoln’s eyes and spellbinding lips were alive in an otherwise worn and homely face. The eyes were feverish reflections of an inner turmoil, an immense unrest; and the mouth was not a part of his mundane body but instead a detached, verbal reproducer of some mighty battle being fought in a corner of his mind. Lincoln did not speak with the brilliant, rangy syntax of Herndon, nor did he rely on the rabble-rousing tactics of Lovejoy. His style, manner and delivery were indisputably his own; his words and thoughts were simple ones, forcefully delivered.

  Watching, listening and recording, Steward could not decide if Lincoln was caught up in the widespread Lovejoy hysteria, or was subtly using it to his own ends. Whatever the truth, the speaker was magnificent. He held his audience in the proverbial hollow.

  Again and again, as he listened, Steward recalled the words Herndon would later write.

  “Full of fire and energy and force; it was logic; it was pathos; it was enthusiasm; it was justice, equity, truth and right, the good set ablaze by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong; it was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarled, edged and heated, backed with wrath.”

  It was all of that to Herndon and this assembly. (He stole a glance at Herndon, to find the man had put down his writing implements.)

  But from his relatively alien viewpoint, subjected to seven centuries interjacence, Steward wasn’t too sure of the logic. He was too far removed from this turbulent age to accept the proffered logic blindly. The basic reasoning was understandable but the sometimes-wild hypothesis was open to question. These people did not think to question it because they were caught up in it, they were living with it and hence were not cognizant of the blind spots, but Steward was forced to reserve judgment. And in the light of another day he could question the justice. He was much too familiar with the peculiar justice of a number of peculiar worlds to accept any one as pure justice.

  There was the lopsided justice of his own age, for example. Not for nothing did his government keep an eye on the political beliefs of the wandering Characters. Not without cause did Whittle secretly fret over the question of rebels on his payroll.

  But to Herndon and the hushed humanity packed into the hail, this magic evening was everything it would later be described as being. This night, in truth, Mr. Lincoln was taller than his normal six and four—he was that inspired, stimulated seven feet or more.

  Musingly, Steward let his gaze roam the hall. The phrase captive audience came to mind.

  He had managed a front row seat by coming early and using his elbows. Lincoln was standing not three yards distant and swaying with the cadence of his nasal voice, standing very near the spot where the workman’s hammer had been lying. Dobbs was seated in the second row and several chairs away, as thoroughly engrossed as the others around him. Bloch had not been located.

  Swiftly now, Benjamin Steward swept his eyes over the assemblage, studying them, weighing their tensed expectancy, watching the reactions to what they were hearing. Bonner briefly met his eyes and shrugged. He had correctly guessed the object of the search, but did not know where Bloch was.

  The speaker slapped a great fist into an open palm to emphasize a point, and the sudden impact of flesh on flesh was like a gunshot in the rapt silence.


  Startled, Steward swung his attention around.

  He found Lincoln’s eyes locked with his.

  Steward nodded gravely and sought to appear in agreement with whatever had been said, but inwardly he was alarmed. A phrase or two, or perhaps a complete sentence slipped by unheard as he struggled to remain calm and not fall from character. Very casually, as though to scratch the skin about his collar, he lifted his hand to his neck to determine if the microphone had somehow slipped from concealment. It had not. The tiny recorder rested in his pocket, noiselessly absorbing the speech.

  Steward decided that his movement, his turning to scan the audience had caught Lincoln’s attention, and that it was only a momentary diversion. He held himself rigid, striving to imitate the attitudes and expressions of men on either side of him.

  After an apprehensive moment of eternity, Lincoln’s stare lifted to another part of the room and the smooth flow of elocution continued without break.

  Steward relaxed, but did not again risk turning around. He was beginning to worry about Bobby Bloch.

  Fire, energy and brimstone, the address rolled on. Hard, heavy, gnarled and knotty, it touched every man and woman in the room. Owen Lovejoy, the master spieler, sat entranced. Karl Dobbs, the professional auditor, was engrossed.

  An hour and thirty minutes after he had begun speaking, Abraham Lincoln mopped his face with a handkerchief and thanked the presiding officer for his courtesy. Steward peeked at his watch and was astounded at the swift passage of time.

  The crowd sprang to their feet and found voice. The din was deafening and seemingly unending.

  The custodian had adequate reason to be concerned for the flooring—he should also have given some thought to the walls. They reverberated. The delegates cheered and sang, banged chairs on the floor in disorderly tattoo, and stomped their feet the better to express overwhelming enthusiasm. Dred Scott’s owner, had he been present, would have been speedily strung up alongside the poor cotton monarch.

  Steward knew a little shock when he glanced again at Dobbs and found that Character briskly applauding, caught up in the general spell. It was so unlike Dobbs.