A Friend of Mr. Lincoln Read Online Free PDF Page A

of holes. It was only an hour past daybreak, though it was already hot enough for sweat to be running into his eyes. His black hair was thick but shorn close to his head, no doubt by some messmate with no claim to the barbering arts. He put his hat back on and balanced his musket across his knees as he tied the neckerchief back in place with a square knot.
    Then he nosed his horse ahead and they all moved forward again. Cage decided he must be the leader after all, if not by formal designation then by practical effect. The still-rising sun cast a glowing light on the field before them. The grass barely stirred. New Fred jerked his head up and down, arguing with his rider’s control of the reins. The muscles in the horse’s neck were still taut and his mane was sodden with sweat. They were getting closer. Cage could feel it as well, the memory of their horrible, humiliating flight across this ground infesting him like a poison. And Black Hawk’s warriors might still be hiding in the trees as Reed said, or they might be concealed in some slight draw or dip in the land ahead. His hands were trembling; he worked to keep his breathing steady.
    “I see something,” Stuart said, though almost in a whisper. He was pointing to the west at what seemed to be a tiny red disk, blazing with the brightness of a mirror in the light of the sun. When they got to where Bob Zanger was lying, they saw that the red disk was a half-dollar-sized hole in his severed head where the Indians had taken his scalp. The better portion of his body lay about twenty feet away, and the grass there had a coppery sheen of blood. They had taken away Bob’s clothes and chopped off his arms and opened him up and pulled out all the soft parts and strewn them across the prairie.
    Cage stared without comprehension at this heap of glistening human rubbish throbbing with green-headed flies. The world around him shone and shimmered with unreal precision. What was left of his working mind told him to dismount before he fainted and fell to the ground.
    He watched Lincoln walk around Bob’s dismembered and disemboweled body, staring at all the pieces as if wondering where they were all supposed to go.
    “That’s a hell of a mess,” Reed said. “Maybe we should just bury him where he lies.”
    “No,” Lincoln said. “I expect we better not. Him and his fellows ought to be gathered up and buried together. That’s the proper way to do it.”
    He turned to Cage. “You know him?”
    Cage responded with a vacuous nod and got down on his hands and knees and vomited. There was nothing much in his stomach to purge but it seemed there would be no end to his retching anyway.
    “You don’t have to help us with this part,” Lincoln said as Cage cast up a final string of bile and spittle. Stuart had untied a moldy piece of canvas from one of the mules and spread it out on the ground. Lincoln reached down and gently picked up Bob Zanger’s head with his big hands, holding its staring face away from him as he carried it over and set it down on the canvas. Stuart and Reed each took hold of a foot and dragged the torso and its mass of trailing guts over to join the other oddments of the body.
    Bob had been a schoolteacher from Danville who tired of the classroom and sold his collected works of Cicero for a Kentucky rifle. Like most of the other young men who had enlisted in the volunteer army, he had been eager to join in the frolic, to earn the gratitude and good faith of their fellow citizens, which would be the capital they would use to advance themselves in Illinois.
    “Got your needle and thread?” Lincoln asked Reed. “We need to sew him up in there pretty good so none of his pieces come tumbling out on us.”
    As Reed sewed what was left of Bob Zanger into his stiff canvas shroud, Lincoln squatted down next to Cage in the grass. With his long legs bent that way, he looked like a giant insect about to spring into the sky.
    “Not the first time we had this job,”