“Come!” said Florence. “Let’s go and sit by the fireplace and dream.”
“Yes, do!” The mountain girl’s voice rang with hospitality. “I have some corn bread, the sort we make in the mountains, baked in an oven under the coals. I’ll make some tea very soon, and we shall have a bite to eat.”
To sit in the Rutledge Tavern, beside the fireplace where Abe Lincoln and Ann Rutledge had made love long ago! Could anything be more romantic?
A moment more and they were there, Florence and Jeanne, staring dreamily at the fire. But try as she might, Jeanne could not quite drive from her mind the image of that ancient hearse standing out there in the moonlight.
“It seems a sign,” she told herself. A sign of what? She could not tell.
The mountain girl’s corn bread baked in a Dutch oven beneath the coals was delicious. Buried in strained honey which, Jensie Crider assured them, came from a bee tree away up on the side of Big Black Mountain, it was a dish to set before a king.
“Those other buildings there,” Jensie explained in a quiet voice, “one is the home of Abe Lincoln in Indiana and the other, that one built of boards, is where Lincoln and Berry kept store, or tried to and failed.
“I—I’m sort of glad they failed.” Her voice trailed into silence. On the broad hearth the coals glowed. Behind them, down the long room, all was shrouded in darkness. And still in the golden moonlight the dilapidated hearse stood. Jeanne thought of this, and shuddered.
“Why?” It was Florence who spoke at last. “Why are you glad that Lincoln failed.”
“Because he is my hero,” Jensie’s tone was deeply serious. “And if my hero never failed, how could I hope to be like him? We all fail sometimes.