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

their house. The house stood in a part of Springfield known—proudly to Edwards, cheekily to most everyone else—as Aristocracy Hill.
    Edwards was tall and elegant, but unfortunately his sour superiority was on full display and quickly turned the day against him. He started out at the rostrum attacking his Democratic opponent, who was none other than Jacob Early, the captain of the spy company that had ridden to the rescue of the men at Kellogg’s Grove. As far as Cage knew, Lincoln and Early were still on good terms, even though they were opposite each other politically.
    Edwards, however, appeared to quiver with outrage at Early’s very existence. He promised his fellow citizens that once they understood the full extent of his opponent’s greed and mendacity they could not but be appalled and would determine to drive the reptile from his shell. But Edwards had no sense of rhythm or timing, no understanding that you had to gather the audience slowly along with you if you were going to call an opponent a reptile. As it was, the way he blurted it out without preamble created a chorus of gasps and boos and only a few thin cheers. It had taken no more than a minute or two for Ninian Edwards to rally most of the listeners to the defense of the man he meant to pillory.
    Cage noticed Lincoln in the crowded room as Edwards’s screed continued. He was standing behind the other Whig candidates, his long neck protruding from his collar like a cork in a bottle, his dark hair fuller than when Cage had seen him last and combed forward in the manner of the times but without much devotion to the effort, so that it ended up in a haphazard tangle. The rest of the Whigs were doing their best to huzzah Edwards on, but Lincoln was clearly having trouble pretending that his speech was anything but a disaster.
    When Early stood up to reply, he had the sentiment of the room behind him. He looked much the same as he had in the war, though his face looked blank as a baby’s without its stubble, and the hair he had worn close-shorn on the campaign against Black Hawk was now swept up into a pomaded crest. What right, he demanded, did a toad such as Edwards have to call another man a reptile? No, upon reflection a toad ranked too high on the chain of being to bear comparison to Ninian Wirt Edwards. And so did a slug, and so did a worm. Ninian “Wart” Edwards stood alone among all creation, a veritable carbuncle of a man, a pustule, nothing but a fur-collared human abscess.
    Early searched for a lower epithet, but before he could come up with one Edwards had leapt up on a table, frothing with invective as the crowd surged forward, eager to see some sort of fight. Edwards was on the verge of challenging Early to a duel, which was illegal and would have disqualified him from office, when Lincoln reached up to grab him gently by his wrists and slowly pry him off the tabletop and back onto the floor. Edwards’s face was red and swollen with anger, though still handsome in its princely way, and it was interesting to see him slowly and silently deferring to Lincoln. In his dress and deportment Lincoln was clearly Edwards’s social inferior, but none of that mattered, and everyone could see it: his self-possessed bearing placed him in his own category.
    Lincoln was next to speak, and as he took the rostrum the room was still agitated. The Whig and Democrat partisans crowded together in the courthouse sweatbox were jeering at and jostling each other.
    Lincoln’s reedy, twangy voice was a poor instrument, or at least it seemed to be when he first opened his mouth and said “My friends,” and one of the Democrats on the other side of the room shot back that he’d just as soon have a rattlesnake for a friend as a goddam Whig who looked like a goddam ape.
    “A rattlesnake and an ape!” Lincoln said. “That makes two more creatures we can include alongside our familiar toads and reptiles and slugs. If we were electing animals to put in a menagerie,