A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan Read Free Book Online Page A

with him to Texas?”
    “I’m content here.”
    “Content? I don’t know anybody who’s content. Why would you be an exception?”
    “Because you and your colleagues have promised to bring the capital to Springfield.”
    “Ah,” Lincoln replied, “you’re a speculator, like everybody else.”
    True enough. The scheme for moving the seat of government from Vandalia was much in the air. A boom was coming to Springfield, and Cage had scraped to get in on it, eager to set himself up as a man of business so that he could have the resources to become a man of letters.
    “I’m a speculator of a very low order. I have a city lot or two.”
    “Which is it? A city lot—or two?”
    “One in possession, my eye on another.”
    Lincoln bent one of his long legs and shoved his foot gently at a hog that was blocking his way. The hog squealed in annoyance, then trotted off on its spindly legs to root a few yards away. The hog had not taken the insult personally, but Lincoln stopped and contemplated the beast with a sad cast to his face, as if he had regretted discommoding it.
    “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” he said to Cage, his eyes still on the hog.
    “Shot a starving Indian out of a tree. You?”
    “We were trying to get some pigs onto a flatboat. They didn’t like what they saw and wouldn’t agree to the proposition, so some of the boys sewed their eyelids together. I wouldn’t take part in it myself, but I didn’t stop it either. I reckon if the Creator exists, those poor pigs are in my accounting book.”
    Cage noted the “if,” was quietly heartened by it. He had heard Lincoln was an infidel, and he liked the thought of having someone to talk to whose mind, like his own, actively wrestled with the idea that there was either no God at all or perhaps a very indifferent one.
    “I might have a better investment for you than a city lot,” Lincoln abruptly said. They were standing in front of a brand-new two-story brick row that had replaced the log buildings that had been torn down after Cage moved to Springfield. Hoffman’s Row was the latest encouraging sign that the town was destined to grow into something more thriving than the prairie settlements that surrounded it. “You might want to go over there to the land office and buy along the river over by Huron. Don’t buy in Huron itself—the price is already too high—but just find you something nearby that you can get at the government rate. Then you can sell it for four times that.”
    “How do you know?”
    “Because I’m the one who surveyed Huron with my own eyes and between there and Beardstown is where the canal’s going to be dug. I just entered forty-seven acres myself at a dollar and twenty-five apiece. Between us, a lot of these internal improvements might not amount to anything. To get the capital moved to Springfield we had to trade a few votes here and there and say yes to some things we might better have said no to. But I think the Beardstown canal is a good prospect.”
    Cage thanked him and said he would consider it, wondering at the same time if Lincoln was any different than all the other speculators wandering around Illinois, urging everyone to buy now before it was too late and the canals and railroads were already built and the rivers already opened up to navigation and the capital moved here or moved there.
    But he
was
different, different in ways Cage couldn’t disregard. Most of the men who were going around promoting themselves and their schemes were smoother than Lincoln, not as raw, not as striking in appearance, not as obviously self-invented. During the war, when everyone had been clothed in rags and shriven by scant rations, he had not seemed so remarkable. Now that he was more or less respectably dressed, something in his appearance betrayed him. He looked like a man who did not quite fit in, whom nature had made too tall and loose-jointed, with an unpleasant squeaky voice and some taint of deep, lingering