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whipping post and reading aloud from the pages of the
Sangamo Journal.
He announced that a Jonathan Lindley from Illinois was among the dead, though neither Cage nor the half dozen other men on the lawn recognized the name.
    “ ‘The countenance of Crockett was unchanged,’ ” he read, shaking his head impatiently at the newspaper writer’s maudlin prose. “ ‘He had in death that freshness of hue, which his exercise of pursuing the beasts of the forests and the prairie had imparted to him.’ ”
    Reed turned to Cage with a pained grin. “Yes, of course,” he said, laughing bitterly, “we all well remember the freshness of hue that death imparts.”
    Clean-shaven, wearing good clothes, his hair barbered close to his oversized ears, Reed nevertheless still had more than a trace of the feral intensity Cage remembered from that day at Kellogg’s Grove. He liked Reed well enough and was friendly with him in a cautious way. A fearless, impulsive, go-ahead sort of man like Reed was a beacon in war, but in the four years since Black Hawk’s defeat he had not adjusted well to the torpor of peace, and had thrown himself into one ill-considered business after another out of sheer restlessness.
    “Santa Anna didn’t even bury the bodies,” he announced when he returned to the newspaper. “They just burned them like dogs.”
    The men on the courthouse lawn seethed in outrage. Reed proposed forming a company of old Black Hawk War comrades to march south and represent Illinois in avenging the martyrs of the Alamo and in securing the liberation of Texas from the Mexican tyrant. If the enterprise went well, he said, they could all be wealthy and important men in a boundless new empire.
    “I’ll put my name to that list,” Ashbel Merritt said. “I’ll go to Texas right now without another thought.” Ash was a doctor, though he took such a public and pugnacious role in Whig political battles that it was sometimes hard to associate him with the art of healing. He was slight, and had thinning blond hair, pale skin, and silken side-whiskers: bland-looking, except for the animating ferocity in his eyes.
    Billy Herndon’s father, Archie, always eager to be whipped up, also spoke well of the idea. But before the talk of riding to the rescue of Texas went any further one of the men pointed to a figure walking out of the land office. “Lincoln’s in town!”
    The group in front of the whipping post adjourned without comment and reconstituted itself in front of Abraham Lincoln.
    “Yes, I just heard the news myself,” he told them. “Crockett dead. That’s a hard one to believe, especially since he’s always promoted the opinion that he was sort of immortal.” He was shaking hands as he spoke—“Hello Jim, hello Ash, hello Archie”—and when he shook hands with Cage he gripped hard and leaned in a bit. Cage stood at five feet and ten inches. Lincoln was even taller than he remembered, and was smiling down upon him just now with what felt like a lordly benevolence.
    “Well, it’s been a while,” Lincoln said. “But I remember you and I hope you remember me.”
    “Of course I do,” he answered. If Lincoln hadn’t been a memorable personality in the first place, Cage would still have been aware of him and curious about him, since he was a rising member of the state’s General Assembly now and was always being written about in the newspapers. But they hadn’t seen each other for almost four years, since that day at Kellogg’s Grove. Lincoln didn’t live in Springfield, but in New Salem, which was twenty miles away, and most of his legislative activity took place in Vandalia, which at that time was still the Illinois capital.
    “I’m glad I finally ran across you,” Lincoln said, “because I read your—”
    “Let’s all go over to Speed’s store,” Reed interrupted, literally herding the men down the street. “When there are great questions to be settled we ought to be standing around a stove