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here reminds me of another story.”
    It should not have been a particularly funny story: an old farmer, his fussy educated son, a piece of cheese full of wrigglers. But the look on Lincoln’s face as he impersonated the unconcerned farmer pondering an imaginary cheese teeming with worms, or the haughty and embarrassed son pleading with him not to eat it, had the men around the fire wiping tears of hilarity out of their eyes even before he had finished.
    “Let ’em wriggle. I can stand it if they can!”
    Lincoln himself was so amused that he could scarcely get these concluding words out before doubling over in a laughing cramp. It was as if he had never heard the story himself, as if he were encountering it for the first time even though he was the one telling it.
    “Let ’em wriggle. I can stand it if they can,” he repeated, in a softer key. It was fully dark now, a soft July night, dead friends buried nearby, dead horses settling down to bone and ash, a growing suspicion in Cage’s mind that the conflict they were engaged in was a sordid and pathetic thing.
    The conversation around the fire switched from storytelling to political talk: the problems besetting Illinois that would have to be taken up again once this war was over, the urgent need for internal improvements—canals, navigable rivers, and railroads. He did not know then that both Lincoln and Stuart were already public men, both impatient for the war to be over so they could get back to the canvass, but both needing the war, since service in it would be the foundation of their political capital.
    Cage himself was a private man by nature; he had become more private today, driven inward by all he had seen and felt and feared. But as the other men drifted away from the fire when the storytelling ended, he stayed. His interest in Lincoln only grew as the raucous attention receded.
    Stuart was speaking now—the perfidy of the Democrats, the disaster that would come to pass if Jackson vetoed the bank charter. Captain Early, the leader of the spy company, was apparently a Democrat, because he took exception to everything Stuart said, saying the National Bank was and always would be a pestilence against the common man. Lincoln listened, nodded his head in agreement with Stuart, patiently absorbing Early’s angry rebuttals. But he had somehow removed himself. A moment earlier he had been the consummate outward man, now he had sunk so deep into his own private musings that it seemed he might never come out again.
    He shifted his weight, leaned back on a bony elbow and stared into the fire. For a moment he looked, with his long narrow head and with his looming brows casting dark shadows over his sunken cheeks, like a skeletal old man. The others were laughing at something Jim Reed had just said, but Lincoln remained silent. The absence of his good humor was so acute it seemed as if he had removed himself not just from the conversation but from the earth. In an instant he had gone from being the soul of this society to its self-banished exile.
    Stuart and Early and the others argued above his brooding silence—ignoring it, no doubt used to it. But Cage had only just met Abraham Lincoln, and he did not seem like a man you could pretend was no longer there.

1836

THREE

    S OMETHING CALLED THE ALAMO had fallen. David Crockett, the frontier wit and former Tennessee congressman, had improbably been inside the Texas fort and killed by the Mexican army along with the rest of the insurgents. There was a great stir in Springfield about the news, men gathered in the muddy streets gossiping and throwing out opinions as hogs grunted and foraged indifferently alongside them. It was winter still, but the sun was bright, melting yesterday’s icicles that clung to eaves and business signs. The bell announcing a stage arrival rang out from the Globe Tavern around the corner.
    Jim Reed was holding forth on the courthouse lawn in a state of righteous agitation, leaning against the