Free A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan

satisfaction, her mood uplifted as was his by the birdsong breaking through the stillness, and by the silent suspirating rhythms of a prairie morning.
    His mind was fastened on the new friendship he had forged with Abraham Lincoln. Cage’s life up until now had been a mostly solitary one. He had not sought out this solitude, though in his youthful confusion he had formed the idea somewhere that to commit oneself to the written arts required forsaking common varieties of human fellowship.
    It was his fault, he knew. He held himself apart, perhaps held himself too high. He was twenty-seven, no longer such a young man, already two years older than Keats had been when he died. If Cage were to die now he would leave only his privately printed
Sketches of the Black Hawk War
and a scattering of poems published in the
Sangamo Journal
and a few other Illinois newspapers. There were also prose fragments and extensive notes, their context now largely forgotten, written during his travels in Europe. Whatever dreams he had once had to make a book of those travels had been cauterized by the shock of his father’s suicide. There were as yet only the beginnings of a body of work. His book had impressed the few people who had bought and read it, but he shared Lincoln’s nervousness—his terror almost—that he might live out his life without making any case that it had been a life worthy of remembering.
    He had been successful so far, in a minor way, as a man of business. After the war, the pay that was due the volunteers had been held up for months until the federal paymasters arrived to give cash for their claims. Cage had managed to resist the temptation to sell out beforehand to speculators, as so many of the volunteers had. So he was paid in full for his service, and by living thriftily was able to invest in some land near Jacksonville, paying as little as $1.25 an acre near the center of one of the many Illinois towns that had been laid out but did not yet exist. Thanks to all the talk of the internal improvements that were on the way, the town took root, the bet paid off, and he was able to sell the land for five times what he had paid for it, enough to buy the Palatine, a failing boardinghouse of six rooms just off the square on Adams Street, betting that as more and more of the state’s business became centered in Springfield he would have a reliable clientele of legislators and influence peddlers.
    He lived at his own establishment but took most of his meals in taverns, feeling conspicuous in the company of his lodgers and not inclined to play the gregarious host. He left the running of the place to Mrs. Hopper, the formidable cook and housekeeper he had had the good fortune to engage after her husband, a lawyer on the circuit, had drowned near Metamora while crossing a ford of the Mackinaw River in high water.
    The income from the house was steady, his tastes were far from extravagant, and he lacked the drive for financial aggrandizement. He was not caught up in the frenzy of speculation that went on all around him. It was enough to be in funds, to seize opportunities as they came along but not to spend his days plotting and searching them out. Cage preferred to suffer at his desk in his room, a bust of Shakespeare gloating at him as he worked himself deeper and deeper into thickets of verbiage from which there was, as often as not, no release. After his work he would take long walks through Springfield, stopping inevitably in its one bookshop, going to the theater at night if there was a company in town, or to a lecture on colonization, or on Napoleon, or on the natural history of volcanoes.
    As often as not he went out on his own, unless in the company of Joshua Speed or Ashbel Merritt or one of the other restless single young men of Springfield. He was on the outside ring of their buzzing circle, good for recruiting at a game of town ball, a listener and not an arguer, thoughtful, steady, helping to soothe tempers when