A Friend of Mr. Lincoln by Stephen Harrigan Page A

just not likeable,” Stuart agreed.
    “I know it,” Ash said. “I try to be agreeable, but the problem is I value common sense so much I’m offended by anybody who hasn’t already made up their mind to vote for me.”
    Lincoln nodded appreciatively at Merritt’s self-diagnosis and confirmed that it presented a problem. “But we’ll triumph over your deficient personality somehow, Ash. Don’t forget we have the power of the press at our disposal. A lot of people already agree that Adams is a bloodsucking tick, and we’ll make sure that everybody who reads the
Sangamo Journal
has the benefit of that opinion.”
    He turned to Cage with a lightning-fast change of topic.
    “What did you think of that poem I left off for you? Isn’t it the best poem in the world?”
    “Did you write it?”
    “What!” Lincoln looked around the room in astonishment. He stood up on Speed’s bed, his head bent against the ceiling. Then he proceeded to recite the poem from memory.
    “ ‘O why should the spirit of mortal be proud!’ ” he declaimed. “ ‘Like a fast flitting meteor, a fast flying cloud…’ ”
    He made his way through the whole thing—kings and herdsmen and saints all alike doomed to the grave, human emotions and thoughts fleeting and meaningless—as he bounced up and down on the mattress, the poem making him exuberant with its solemnity.
    “He thinks I
wrote
that!” he said to Speed when he was finally finished. Then he turned to Cage.
    “How could somebody as ordinary as me write something as profound as that?”
    “Who wrote it, then?”
    “I have no idea. I’ve known the poem for years. It struck me to my heart the first time I read it, but there was no name given in the anthology where I found it. Some anonymous soul—‘hidden and lost in the depths of the grave.’ When you think about it, what could be more fitting?”
    “We’ll all be anonymous souls someday,” Stuart mumbled to himself. “We may think we won’t but we will.”
    “Stuart has the thing exactly,” Lincoln said. He collapsed back onto the bed with all the finesse of a stork that had been shot out of the sky. “When an elegant summation is wanted, look no further than Stuart.”
    Stuart smiled and saluted Lincoln with the smudged glass Speed had given him. He was only a few years older than his new junior law partner but in his bearing and his dress and his overall polish he seemed a decade or more removed. His status was more apparent now than it had been that day at Kellogg’s Grove, when they had all been winnowed down and made equal by hardship. He was a cousin of Ninian Edwards’s wife, yet another member of the famous Todd family of Kentucky who had been steadily infiltrating Illinois and assuming positions of influence. Yes, he was indeed glaringly handsome, with his serious black eyebrows and thin authoritative mouth. He carried himself with the ease of someone who had known from birth that somewhere in the future a place was being held ready for him. But Cage knew that beneath the surface he was boiling with ambition and frustration like all the rest of them. He had just been beaten in a run for U.S. Congress by Big Red May and was furiously plotting the next chapter in his political career, no doubt planning to load Lincoln up with all the distracting legal work in the meantime.
    They talked and connived for another hour, until Speed declared he had to go to bed or he wouldn’t be able to get up in time to open his store. Ash Merritt was drunk enough by then to hesitate at the top of the stairway and ponder the steep descent like a boatman trying to chart a course through a treacherous rapids. Stuart grabbed him by the arm before he could take a first fatal step and led him down the stairs, calling good night as he went and warning Lincoln to show up at the office on time for his first day of work.
    Cage was about to leave as well, but Lincoln declared that he was too excited by the idea of living in