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

poverty. He seemed to Cage like a man who desperately wanted to be better than the world would ever possibly let him be. But in Lincoln’s case that hunger did not seem underlaid with anger, as with other men it might, but with a strange seeping kindness.
    “I once met Byron’s gondolier,” Cage declared without thinking.
    “What!”
    “I remember you quoting Byron at Kellogg’s Grove. I once met the man who paddled him through the canals of Venice.”
    “But where? How can that be? By jings, you haven’t been to—Venice?”
    When Cage nodded, he thought he saw tears forming in Lincoln’s eyes—but tears of what? Astonishment? Jealousy? Possibility?
    “What are you doing now?” Lincoln asked.
    “I’ve already thrown away half the day. I have to go back to work.”
    “Throw it all away, and tomorrow with it. Do you have a horse?”
    When Cage nodded, Lincoln pointed to one of the upper windows of Hoffman’s Row.
    “I’ve got to go meet John Stuart. You remember him—he was with us that day. It won’t take a minute. I’m going to borrow some law books from him and go back to New Salem. Come with me and we’ll talk about Byron on the way. And Burns too. You must like Burns!”
    “New Salem is twenty miles from here.”
    “Yes, you couldn’t get back by dark, of course. You’d spend the night with me. We can talk about politics if you want but I’d much rather hear about Byron’s gondolier.”
    Cage had been at his writing desk, forcing his hexameters onto a long poem that did not seem to want them, when the news about the Alamo arrived. Since all the ensuing gossip was so distracting, since his concentration was thoroughly broken, he knew the rest of the day would be idle. Why not put the time to use by riding to New Salem with Abraham Lincoln?
    He went home and saddled the six-year-old mare he had acquired from the estate of a circuit-riding Methodist preacher who had lodged for a month while laid up with gout in the rooming house that Cage owned, and then abruptly died before paying his bill. The preacher had never really liked or trusted the horse and had named her Potiphar’s Wife, after the Egyptian queen who had tried to seduce Joseph. Cage had no problem with her and just called her Mrs. P.
    Lincoln was waiting for him in front of the stable on Jefferson Street, mounted on a sizable bay gelding with a star in his forehead. He had lengthened the stirrups as far as they would go, but his long legs were still considerably bent, and in his city clothes he looked less comfortable on horseback than he had when Cage had met him in the field four years earlier. He was holding two big law books in his left hand and cradled them as preciously as if they were infants. Though he had commodious-looking saddlebags, he held on tight to the books all the long way to New Salem.
    They rode west on Jefferson and in only a few minutes had left the town behind them and followed a branch that turned into a brook that led them into a picturesque grove of ancient trees on the fringe of the heaving prairie. They veered onto the road following the Sangamon, catching sight of the river every now and then through the wintry trees lining its steep banks. The air was still and the afternoon was warming, but it was cold enough for them to button the collars of their coats around their necks and for Lincoln to note the vapor belching from their horses’ nostrils and to remark that the eruption of steam from locomotives might soon be as common a sight on these prairies as horses’ breath if he and his colleagues in the statehouse managed to find a way to pay for all the internal improvements.
    But he did not really want to talk about internal improvements, not this afternoon. He pressed Cage for details about Byron’s gondolier, and how he had met him, and how he had managed it to travel as far away as Europe, and how having once reached that interesting land he had decided to remove himself to the forsaken wilderness of