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and not quacking on the street like ducks.”
    Cage joined the group as they walked down to Joshua Speed’s store. More people followed and drifted in, until the open space at the back of the store was filled and the onlookers crowded against the shelves of hardware and medicine and the mattresses that were lined up vertically against the wall. Arguments rippled back and forth about the Texas adventure. Some of the men thought it ought to be none of their business because it had happened in a foreign country and the Americans in the Alamo had known—or should have known—exactly what they were getting into. Others decreed that any place where American blood had been spilled by a tyrant ought to by God be considered henceforth American soil.
    “Mexico is unstable and corrupt,” Reed said. “As a matter of principle, Texas should be salvaged from it.”
    He spoke in a tone of sonorous finality that suggested his should be the last word on the subject, but opinions kept blasting forth anyway. Joshua Speed, who owned the store and who was long used to his hospitality being taken for granted, mostly contented himself with opening the door of the stove and stirring the fire with a poker. He had dark wavy hair, a straight nose, a lean face. He had grown up in comfortable circumstances in Kentucky and, perhaps as a result, was in possession of one of the town’s calmer spirits.
    Cage stood at the back of the group, listening and not offering much in the way of opinions, though the memory of those dead men strewn on the prairie prejudiced him against enrolling in another war, this one not against a fraying Indian confederacy but the nation of Mexico and its professional army. The air was soon oppressed with cigar smoke, none of it emitted by Lincoln, who stood off to the side with one elbow resting on a windowsill and his opposite arm hanging by his side. In civil society, or as civil a society as this raucous, opinionated crowd represented, he appeared more singular than he had the day Cage had met him after the panic at Kellogg’s Grove. He had gained some weight since that hungry summer, but he did not seem capable of gaining much, and his proper suit of dark jeans only accentuated his height. But he was still powerful-looking, his skin burnished and his frame taut from the surveying work he did to help piece together a living while he served in the legislature.
    He was listening mostly, nodding his head reflectively every now and then in the manner of an actor waiting backstage for his cue, until there was a lull in the conversation and everyone automatically looked in his direction. “What do you think, Lincoln?” Speed finally asked him.
    “Well, I think I ought to detach myself from these learned speculations pretty soon so I can get back to New Salem before dark. But if you’re pressing me for an opinion on this Alamo business I’d say it’s a terrible tragedy for those fellas and their families but they were Mexican citizens, or at least were supposed to be according to the colonization laws as I understand them. We could all head down there and get ourselves into the business of overthrowing a foreign government, as Jim and some of the rest of you think we ought to do, but I believe I’ll stay here in Illinois unless Santa Anna takes a notion to invade the United States.”
    Lincoln’s remarks didn’t end the squabbling about what honorable men must do as a result of the events in Texas, but they had a mysterious clarifying effect, shifting the course of the argument away from the need for instant and aggrieved action to leisurely philosophizing about national interests. By and by the talk swerved to the inevitable topic: the presidential election six months away, the Democrats and their goddam convention ploy, Van Buren’s high-handed scheme to give the vote to free Negroes.
    “Van Buren lubs de niggers,” one of the men said. “He lubs to see dey kinky heads at de ballot box.”
    This bit of minstrel