A Friend of Mr. Lincoln Read Online Free PDF

Lincoln said. He had a creaky voice but there was a gentle tone to it. “That’s why we might seem practical-minded about it. We haven’t seen any real fighting like you have, but we sure have learned to do this kind of work.”
    Cage nodded in a distant way. He wanted to appear more grateful to this angular stranger, who had more than once gone out of his way to express his sympathy. But the idea that his schoolteacher friend was dead and butchered while he himself was more vibrantly alive than ever had not just seized his thoughts but seized them up. The experiences of this day were too vast, his mind too small an instrument to capture and make sense of them.
    After they hoisted the shroud with its shifting, bulging contents onto the back of one of the mules and tied it down, they set off reconnoitering again, and after a few minutes spotted four more bodies lying in the grass, all of them with the same bright bloody circle on their heads where the British Band had taken their scalps.
    “ ‘That host on the morrow lay withered and strown,’ ” Lincoln said in an awe-filled murmur. Cage had not expected to hear a gangly backwoodsman reciting Byron, but it was only a small detail to be added to the ledger of this searingly unreal day. Cage knew these dead men also, though not as well as he had known Bob Zanger, and the cauterizing shock of seeing that first defiled body made the horror of encountering the others less acute. He made a point of taking a hand in the work and pretended to himself that he was as accustomed to it as Lincoln and the other men of the spy company were.
    They worked hurriedly, eager for the gruesome job to be over and still anxious about being alone and exposed so close to the concealing timber and to still-uncontrolled trails along which Black Hawk’s warriors might be gathering for another attack. It was a relief finally to have the bodies in their blood-soaked blankets tied across the backs of the mules, and to be mounted and riding away again toward the safety of Kellogg’s Grove.
    —
    The dead volunteers were buried later that afternoon. The men of Dement’s battalion and of the spy company that had ridden all night to relieve them stood over the graves as Dement praised the sacrifice of the fallen, committed their souls to God’s keeping, and stepped aside as the ceremonial volleys were fired. After the funeral, Cage was light-headed, so lacking in sleep and so weak with hunger that he felt the air trembling with the eerie atmospheric foretaste of a tornado.
    He opened his wallet and gnawed on a piece of hardtack as the men of his mess began to build their cooking fires. He walked away from them to be alone for a while and sat with his back against a hickory trunk and looked down from the height of the broad ridgeline to the open grassland and distant groves and wooded ravines, a landscape that in the fading light of a summer afternoon would have lifted his heart a day or two previous. Now he saw it almost as an enemy in itself, a staging ground and hiding place for the Indians who had nearly succeeded in killing him.
    From an oilskin pouch he took out his notebook and pencil and resolved to write, though he was so tired he could barely hold his head up or hold a thought in it. He had bought the notebook at a stationer’s in Beardstown just before he took the militia oath. He had filled all the pages once and now he was halfway through again, holding the book horizontally and writing against the grain of his previous entries. It had been a rainy campaign and the pouch had not always been effective in keeping the notebook dry, so its cover was half-disintegrated and its pages swollen and stiff.
    The grand and naive words he had written on the first leaf stared back at him now: “Sketches of the War Against Black Hawk and the British Band.” He had envisioned—two months ago, two lifetimes ago—that these would be poetical sketches, but there had been time only for prose