Two large bottles for only one dollar!
For a moment-for no more than a fraction of a moment—Steward wished he could tip the good doctor to a remarkably cheap and remarkably efficient true wonder-drug to pour into those bottles. But if he did that he would upset Mr. Lincoln’s world, and his own as well.
He drifted on.
He rounded a corner and walked into a noisy scene of bustling activity. Men and teams were clustered in the street before a half-finished brick building; while other men carried building materials from the wagons into the structure. A foreman moved among them, shouting orders in a loud and vulgar voice. Steward leaped aside to avoid being run down by a burdened hod carrier.
“Ah,” he mused aloud, “that sweet city with her dreaming spires.”
“The new library,” a bystander answered casually, believing that Steward had addressed him. “The town’s pride and joy. A dash of culture is always welcome.”
Steward nodded his agreement. The bystander glanced at his face, and then turned with a mild surprise.
“Well, Mr. Steward, you are still among us.”
Aware of an inner clangor of alarm, of a sudden alertness to possible danger, Steward slid into character. The bystander was a stranger to him.
“Beg your pardon?” he asked cautiously.
“Oh, come now, did I make no impression last evening?”
“Well, sir, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. But last evening was pretty full, you know.”
“Humph! Pretty full! Mr. Steward, your quick tongue excites my curiosity. Just what are you up to? What are you hoping to discover here? Are you with us?”
“I’m proud to be with you, mister.” Steward eyed the man, seeking some swift clue to guide his conversation. Evelyn had warned him to be antislavery if he must commit himself, and now he guessed that last question concerned the slavery issue. “The blot must be erased!”
“Humph. We agree on that, I say. But your prying concerns me. No—no, I apologize. Not prying. Shall we say your observations? Your studies? I confess to being a trifle suspicious of you, Mr. Steward.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that. I was just looking.”
“Ah—yes, looking, and thinking. You’ve admitted that. A little thinking can be a dangerous business, Mr. Steward. And may I say, sir, entirely without rancor, that the flattery was quite transparent to some of us. We are a provincial people, and likely to be suspicious of you men from the outside.”
A coiled spring nestled in the pit of Steward’s stomach, awaiting the moment when he would be unmasked. His nervous system tingled with an awareness of unknown danger, feeding adrenalin into the bloodstream. Despite the pressure, Steward maintained an outward calm and held to character.
“I hope it ain’t that bad!”
“Perhaps, and perhaps not. Time will tell, Mr. Steward, time will tell. I shall be interested in you. Good day, sir.” And the man stalked away.
Steward looked after him, scratching his head. Now what in the hell had he done? What deed had he performed on the previous evening to call forth that outburst?
The bull voice of the foreman roaring in his ear brought him around. The volume of raw sound nearly deafened him but the words were sweetly welcome.
“That there Lovejoy sure is a tartar, ain’t he?”
Steward grinned with relief and thankfulness. “He is that. Man, how he talks!”
And with that rejoinder he beat a hasty retreat before the foreman could trap him into a new situation. The name of his mysterious adversary was Lovejoy, and that was enough for the moment. Steward left the vicinity of the library and began an anxious search for Major’s Hall, newly conscious of the fact that he wasn’t altogether welcome in this wilderness town.
The hall was found much sooner, and more easily, than could be found a man who would admit to being something other than a Republican. It was found with a clatter and a bang.
Steward was passing the mouth of an alley when someone threw open an upstairs window and began shoveling debris into space, heedless of who might be standing in the alley below. Several shovelsful of trash sailed down from the heights to be scattered on the ground. Steward’s eye caught a flickering, silvery sheen among the debris.
Major’s Hall was a three-tiered structure standing at the southwest corner of a street intersection; only the third and top floor used the name attributed to it. Broad wooden sidewalks lined the two street sides of the building. Two stores, selling hardware, and clothing, occupied the ground floor; between the stores a wide flight of stairs led upward. Steward climbed the steps.
A custodian was cleaning out the auditorium.
As Steward entered the great room and looked around, the man finished shoveling the last of the trash out the open window.
“Morning,” the fellow said amiably, and promptly stopped working to lean on the shovel. “You with the show?”
“What?”
“Are the girls here yet?” And the custodian stared hopefully over the Character’s shoulder, seeking chorus girls.
“Sorry, old-timer,” Steward told him. “Wrong man; I’m not with the show. But maybe the girls will be along shortly.” He advanced into the auditorium and inspected it. Flags and bunting hung from the open rafters. “I wanted to look around and refresh my memory. Setting out on a trip pretty soon and I wanted a last look. I want to remember this place a long time—I want to tell the folks at home.”
“Aw, I know just what you mean, mister! A real stem-winder, that’s what it was. I was standing right there.” The custodian indicated the door of a broom closet. “And Mr. Lincoln was right up yonder.” He moved nearer Steward, dragging the shovel and pointing. His face was illuminated with remembered excitement. “You know, mister, I kinda worried about the braces when they took to stamping and shouting so. This old floor warn’t made for that. It was a real rouser of a crowd, you bet, and they raised an awful ruckus. Remember?”
“I expected a lot of excitement,” Steward said.
“It was that Mr. Lovejoy what started it,” the custodian declared.
“Lovejoy always starts it,” Steward agreed heartily.
“Yup. Not that I blame him, at all. Talking about his dead brother and all, and it ain’t been more’n a week since that bloody business out Kansas way. That Mr. Lovejoy gets real excited.” The old fellow shook his head once more and pondered the boarding beneath his feet. “I was sure worried about this old floor.”
“Full of fire and damnation,” Steward prodded.
“By jingo, yes! Now, those other fellas, Mr. Davis and Mr. Herndon, they had a lot of good talk but they couldn’t cut a hide when it come to Mr. Lovejoy and Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Lovejoy, he roused them up good and proper like, and Mr. Lincoln just had to up and talk after that.”
“He was the man I wanted to hear.”
“Well, sir, I reckon you heard him, all right.” The old fellow scratched his chin whiskers reflectively. “Don’t recollect seeing you, but that ain’t nothing. There must have been four-five hundred people packed in here.”
“To tell the truth,” Steward said carefully, “I don’t remember where I was. Too much crowd. Right here now, I can’t tell you where Lincoln was standing.”
“Haw—I can tell you right enough. I ain’t forgot. It was right there-right there on that spot.”
Steward inspected the spot.
“Yes,” he agreed after a moment, “you’re right.”
“Durn tootin. A real stem-winder.”
After another several minutes of chatter, the friendly custodian returned to his work and Steward strolled about the auditorium, noting the position of the furniture, the platforms, the doors and windows. He contemplated the spot on which Lincoln had stood (according to the old man) and fixed it in his mind. The briefing had placed about five hundred people in the room, bearing out the custodian’s guess, and now it was readily apparent that he and his crew would have to be near the speaker or risk losing him. The wire recorders were sensitive
instruments but they could not separate spoken word from mob noise.
While he studied the room, he was acutely conscious of an alarming gap in the history briefing. He had easily recognized the old man’s reference to the bloody business in Kansas, and he knew the various other hostile events pertinent to it; he knew, too, that in the week prior to the Lincoln speech, two angry lawmakers representing the two sides of the conflict had met and battled in something called the Senate Chamber. The melee was sensational news and one of the men had suffered serious injury.
These incidents, and others, contributed to the inflammatory speechmaking in this Hall. But who was Mr. Lovejoy? What was the significance of the deceased brother? The files had furnished him nothing on that, and yet the mysterious Lovejoy was already breathing down his neck for some fool thing he had said or done.
Still glum, still troubled and wondering how he had so far fallen from character as to arouse suspicion, he thanked the custodian and prepared to leave.
“I sure thought you was the advance man, mister.”
Steward could only stare and keep silent.
“I was expecting the girls. I thought you was the front agent for the show coming in. The house is sold out for all three nights. Golly—girls!”
“Hate to disappoint you, old-timer. I’d stay and see the girls myself, if I could.”
He lost no time descending the stairs. Coming out into the brilliant sunlight, he berated himself for permitting anxiety to stifle his mind. Perhaps he was going soft-an old man’s innocent statement had thrown him into a momentary tizzy. A neophyte might freeze up at an unexpected comment of that nature, but an old hand was supposed to stay in character. Steward struck off for the main street, taking a small pleasure in the thud of his boots on the board walk.
He had progressed only as far as the alley mouth when he stopped again, suddenly cold and apprehensive. A fleeting memory returned to mind.
He glanced into the alley and then upward at the open window of the third floor. Something silvery and shiny had come from that window a little while ago, shoveled out with the debris of last night’s meeting. Something shockingly familiar.
Steward ran into the alley and rummaged through the scattered trash. He found the wire at once.
The single strand was as thin and as fine as silk thread. Many dozens of feet of it lay on the ground, hopelessly entangled with debris. It glittered in the sun.
He knew what it was, and now he wondered wildly whose it was.
The wire was from a pocket recorder, the kind of recorder he and his crew would carry into the hall to capture Lincoln’s speech. The trash pile did not give up a recorder, nor was there a spool which had contained the wire.
Something had gone (and still would go) ominously wrong.
Steward purchased a newspaper and sat down on the courthouse steps to read it, seeking to ease his mind by deliberate concentration on another subject. The reading was not an easy task. Old Nation English was a tortuous thing to follow, and frequently seemed impossible whenever he encountered a sentence or paragraph which demanded a lucid translation in order to understand the whole.
The paper, called The Weekly Pantagraph, dedicated most of a page to the all-important convention and the birth of local Republicanism, with only secondary consideration given to Mr. Lincoln’s speech. None of the columns actually reproduced the speech.
Instead, the journalist devoted his space to paraphrasing what he had heard and remembered, and what he imagined the speaker had said. Lacking precise detail, the accounts relied on glowing praise, colorful adjectives and rhetorical assertions of strength, power and threats. If words were weapons, slavery was at an end that night; but nonetheless it was slipshod reportage. Mr. Herndon, described as Lincoln’s law partner, was most eloquent in his commendation, and either he or the newspaper editor—inserting words into the mouth—boasted that the deathless oratory would ring down the corridors of time. It was full of fire, Mr. Herndon declared.
The remainder of the paper was given over to news of visiting dignitaries; local happenings including illnesses, persons in the town lockup, and new merchandise received by merchants; and information of national scope. There were daring raids in Kansas, open warfare in Missouri, an account of fur trading in Oregon Territory, a brief recapitulation of the Senate Chamber battle, an unintelligible article concerning something called an underground railway, and a flare-up of a minor boundary dispute involving Nevada, California and Mexico. There was an obituary.
Steward read everything, including the obit.
It gave him a glimpse of a surprisingly harsh world.
The respected citizen who had passed away, said the newspaper, was a doughty survivor of the great freeze of 1836. The deceased, then only a schoolboy, had been helping his father tend the stock when “. . . there occurred a very great change in the weather, as many will remember. From a mild, thawy condition of the atmosphere, with the thermometer standing about forty degrees above, the change was almost instantaneous to twenty degrees below zero. The wind came from the northwest with a howl and a roar, a perfect moving wall of cold, with its edges apparently square and perpendicular. It traveled at the rate of about thirty miles an hour. Cattle, hogs and even wild animals were frozen to death where they waited. People were caught on the open prairie but a short distance from home, and a number of them perished before reaching shelter. School children were lost from sight.
“The numbed boy was carried into the house by his father and revived.”
The numbed boy lived through that frozen winter, to die a few days ago of acute indigestion—the doctor said. The deceased was thirty years old.
Steward folded the newspaper musingly. The columns were quaintly written and poorly edited; he had done better in both departments during his own brief news career in his earlier years. These small-town sheets always needed improvement. “The deceased was thirty years old.” Steward knew, if these people did not, that “acute indigestion” was heart failure—but he couldn’t tell them that for the term would be meaningless. He left the paper on the courthouse steps. It couldn’t be taken back with him, any more than the strand of wire abandoned in the alley could be carried back.
An unpleasant voice said, “Well, Mr. Steward?”
He recognized the voice. “Yes, Mr. Lovejoy?”
Lovejoy stood on the courthouse veranda, eying him. “There is no point in waiting, sir. Not today.”
“Waiting for what, Mr. Lovejoy?”
“For whatever secret purpose you have in mind, sir. For him.”
Steward got to his feet and wondered what would happen to history if he pasted the man on the nose.
“I’m just leaving, Mr. Lovejoy.”
“A pleasant journey, sir.”
Steward strode away, beginning to resent the man. He was painfully aware that Lovejoy resented him.
The Character returned to the machine concealed in the roots of the sentinel tree. A strong, heady wind was blowing off the prairie and it smelled invigorating. He saw a herd of cattle browsing in the distance, while a column of billowing smoke on the horizon betrayed a chugging locomotive. Absently, Steward consulted the pocket watch that wasn’t working.
The irritating noise of the barking dog plucked at his attention, and he wondered why the owner didn’t muzzle it; that, or remove the cause of the dog’s excitement.
Steward slid down the bank and entered the projectile. Mr. Lincoln’s burly-burly world vanished.
5
RECALL
THE CHARACTER rolled out of the projectile and sat up on the cushioned dais. People were awaiting him across the safety barrier.
Whittle was there, of course; he would stay with the shoot until it was completed. Evelyn was standing beside him with notebook in hand. Whittle’s smile of greeting was meant to be ignored, but Evelyn’s homecoming expression was genuine.
His crew, Dobbs, Bonner and Bloch, were spread around the chamber in poses of indolent waiting. Karl Dobbs and Doc Bonner
were eying him with a professional interest; and Dobbs had caught the look he flashed Evelyn. Bobby Bloch sat in a characteristic fashion with his head in his hands, either sleeping or studying the floor.
Steward scowled at Bloch, wondering if he were drunk or suffering from a hangover. Covertly, he shot an inquisitive glance at Karl Dobbs. Dobbs correctly guessed the question and made a negative sign.
The barrier encircling the dais had dropped.
One of the two engineers was across the chamber entering notations in a log; the time-traveling bullet-and Benjamin Steward—had remained in the past precisely four hours and nineteen minutes. An identical number of hours and minutes had elapsed in the chamber. Thus far, the project was running ahead of schedule.
The second engineer was hovering over the machine and inspecting it for damage. He seemed dismayed to find mud clinging to the undersides. That violated not only the esthetic senses but economic fundamentals. The added weight of the mud made the machine that much more expensive to pull back. Steward’s newspaper, as lightweight as it was, would have earned him a stern lecture. And his heavy meal, since it had been eaten but not excreted, would have caused a verbal explosion if it were known.
The young man deemed it prudent just then to say nothing of the mud. Steward had read his face and knew the man had received the translation from the files.
But the best was still to come. The running feud between engineers and Characters was a tradition.
Steward pointed a dramatic and accusatory finger.
“You goofed.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said you goofed. You overshot. I came out on May thirtieth.”
“You did what?”
The Lincoln Hunters Page 5
