HENRY TODD GENTRY TOSSED IN his sweaty bed. He was having the dream again. He knew it was a dream but it was also not a dream. It was a wild mixture of history and memory. The Mississippi swept past the raft, tied up to a huge cottonwood tree on the Tennessee shore above Memphis. The river made a gushing, throaty sound as it began its race to the Gulf of Mexico.
On a series of rafts and steamboats, American heroes and cowards, geniuses and fools, acted out their personal stories. Aaron Burr, the personification of the corrupt East, was there pouring coins into the gaping mouths of gullible western volunteers in his doomed foray to seize the gold and silver mines of Mexico. Willard Gentry, Henry’s father, was one of the true believers. Did the failure of that fabulous dream rip something out of his heart, reducing him to a mere merchant, making him easy prey for Millicent Todd?
Then came the idol of Gentry’s youth, Henry Clay, dueling at ten paces with his nemesis, Andrew Jackson. The gaunt spectral face of the Tennessee demagogue cast a weird glow on Clay’s handsome features, revealing his bafflement and fear. Clay pulled the trigger of his pistol but the hammer clicked fecklessly. The gun was empty. A sneering Jackson fired and with a sad cry Clay toppled from the raft to disappear in the Mississippi’s silted darkness.
Next came a magnificent white steamboat. On the top deck Amelia Conway stood in her wedding dress, gazing mournfully at Henry Todd Gentry. Beside her stood
Rogers Jameson, triumph on his porcine face. He began undressing her, carefully at first, then impatiently ripping the white gown from her trembling shoulders.
While the pageant sailed past them, Abe Lincoln lay with his head on a burlap bag of wheat, sleeping peacefully. Innocence, nobility, contentment suffused his young face. The veins of thought and furrows of disappointment were in the distant future. This face was the image of his unspoiled questing soul. For a moment Henry Gentry yearned to kiss that supple mouth, to rest his head on that broad chest and confess the love he felt for this unique human being.
A scraping sound swung Gentry’s eyes to the shore. Shapes moved there. Someone was hauling the raft closer to the riverbank! The dream was becoming memory—the most vivid memory of Henry Gentry’s life. Looming at the far end of the raft were a dozen figures, dark against the moonless darkness of the landscape.
“Abe!” Gentry cried as the intruders rushed toward them.
They were Negroes. Runaways, perhaps, living by their wits in the woods. Or slaves on the prowl for loot. They intended to kill these two white men and appropriate their six hundred pounds of wheat and corn. Henry Gentry seized the pole he used to fend off floating trees and other large debris and swung it at the leader of the pack. He brushed it aside and struck Gentry on the shoulder with a club, paralyzing his right arm. Another club thudded against his head.
“Abe!” he cried one more time as he toppled to the deck.
Lincoln was on his feet, wielding a thick chunk of the driftwood they had collected to cook their dinners. He smashed the face of the first man to come at him. Gentry heard the crunching sound of the wood against bone. With a muffled cry, the attacker hurtled sideways off the raft into the river. The power of that blow drained
courage from the rest of the gang. For a split second they recoiled and gave Lincoln the momentum he needed.
With a snarl he waded into them, smashing them left and right, breaking arms and jaws and knees with every ferocious swing. They fought back but there was no defense against the strength in Abe’s long arms, toughened by a thousand hours of axwork. Lincoln could make more money in two hours chopping wood than any other man in Indiana could earn in a day. Now he was chopping men with the same devastating results.
Gentry was back on his feet, clubbing them from the flank in spite of his half-paralyzed arm. “Nigger bastards!” he shouted. But Lincoln never made a sound. He just kept swinging that murderous club until there was only one attacker still on his feet.
He was as tall as Lincoln, with a heavier frame. As Lincoln advanced on him, his club ready, Abe lost his footing on the wet deck and fell on his back. The black leaped forward, a knife gleaming in his right hand. Gentry stepped into his rush and swung with all the strength he could muster in his sixteen-year-old arms. He struck the man in the face and he floundered to the left, screaming with pain. Lincoln leaped to his feet and knocked him into the river.
With a collective howl the surviving attackers fled. Several fell off the end of the raft as they tried to get ashore and were swept downstream uttering frantic cries for help. Lincoln stood in the center of the raft, his club hefted for another blow. “Thanks, Henry,” he said. “You’re a good man in a fight.”
Henry Gentry awoke as the dream faded into the dull light of a clouded moon. For a long moment he savored the memory of that compliment, which forever bound him to Abraham Lincoln in the mysterious fellowship of manhood.
Ting a ling. Ting a ling. The alarm system Gentry had
constructed beside his bed to enable his agents to contact him during the night banished sleep. He pulled on his pants and hurried down to the cellar through the dark still house. Over to the storm cellar door he lumbered, calling softly, “I’m coming!”
At the door he held up his candle and was startled to find the light flickering on the gleaming black face of Janet Todd’s Lucy. “How did you get here?” he asked.
“I paddled Miz Janet’s canoe, Colonel,” she said. “I got some real important information for you. I’ll tell it fast because I got to get back before sunup. Colonel Adam Jameson come to Hopemont tonight. He met his father and four rebel colonels and Major Stapleton and Miz Janet and her father. He kiss Miz Janet and made the major real mad. I guess he come to plan the risin’. I couldn’t get close enough to de dinin’ room to hear dem talk, but I don’ got no doubt they goin’ to come after you and your nigger soldiers first thing—”
“Is Colonel Jameson staying at Rose Hill?”
“I thinks so. He lef’ with his daddy.”
“I’m going to find Maybelle if it’s the last thing I do on earth. Get back to your canoe. I’ve got work to do.”
Within five minutes, Gentry was in his uniform, writing a telegram to Major General Stephen Burbridge, the commander of the Union forces in Kentucky
I HAVE SOLID INFORMATION THAT COLONEL ADAM JAMESON IS AT HIS FAMILY’S HOME ROSE HILL IN DAVIESS COUNTY PLOTTING A RAID WITH THE HELP OF INSURGENT DEMOCRATS. SUGGEST IMMEDIATE ACTION TO SEIZE HIM.
Rushing out to the barn, Gentry hitched his fastest trotting horse to his sulky and rode into Keyport. There he roused Western Union telegrapher Clem Mahoney from his bed above his shop on Main Street and ordered him to send the message to Union Army headquarters in
Louisville immediately. There was a troop of cavalry stationed in Owensboro, only ten miles from Rose Hill. He ordered a duplicate sent there.
Back in his cellar office, Gentry poured himself a glass of bourbon and held it up to the picture of Lincoln on the wall. “Maybe this one is good enough, Abe,” the colonel said and drank it down as the clock in the upstairs hall struck midnight.