A chill ran over her body now as she remembered the furious, insulting letters that had been written, the General’s cold terrible rage, the town and county taking sides, eventually the irrevocable challenge. Her hands shook as she opened a drawer in the chest. Well hidden there under lavender-scented linen lay the browning copy of a paper that Andrew Jackson would have destroyed instantly, had he known that she still hoarded it. It was dated on the 23rd of May, 1806, and the lines that were hastily scrawled upon it were burned on Rachel Jackson’s heart. _On Friday, the 30th. Inst, we agree to meet at Harrison’s Mills, in Red River County, State of Kentucky for the Purpose of settling an Affair of Honor, between Andrew Jackson and_ _Charles Dickinson, Esq. Further arrangements to be made. It is understood that the Meeting will be held at seven o’clock in the morning._ It was signed with the General’s familiar scrawl and the neater hand of young Dickinson. Charles Dickinson had been so young! Rachel ached now with remembering the anguish of dread for her own beloved and for the young wife and baby of the youth Andrew Jackson had set out across the Kentucky line that May morning to kill, if he could—if he were not himself slain by a youth known to be one of the most famous shots in Tennessee. Duels were illegal in Tennessee so Jackson had started the day before with his friend, John Overton, for the long ride into Kentucky. He had tried to slip away without Rachel’s knowledge, tried to belittle the danger. And he had come home with a bullet close to his heart, too near to be safely removed by the surgeons, and that bullet he carried yet. But Charles Dickinson had been brought home dead and for a year the town had seethed with furious criticism of the man who had survived that duel, Andrew Jackson. The affair had almost ended his public career. Rachel had known some moments when she wished that the tragedy had made it impossible for Andrew Jackson ever to be chosen for any high emprise again. It had weighed heavily on her heart for years that the affair had been on her account, and there had been a long, unspoken family pact that the duel was never to be mentioned. She had nursed her husband for weeks through that hot summer, and he had hated the inactivity while Rachel was grateful that the spring ran cool and deep and the great trees gave comforting shade, and that she had her husband, wounded and restless as he was, by her side. He had not desired that tragic engagement, she knew. Faced with no honorable means of evading it, he had fought fairly according to the rules and borne his wound without capitalizing upon it.