A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (3 page)

T
HE DAY BEFORE HE MET
Abraham Lincoln was the most harrowing day of Cage Weatherby's life.

He was part of a thirty-man scouting party that rode out at daybreak onto the prairie from the battalion's camp on a swelling ridge known as Kellogg's Grove. They were looking for Black Hawk's war trail. They halted about a mile from the ridge and Major Dement sent a half dozen men to scout a tree line in the distance. No one spoke as the scouts rode out and disappeared into the trees. They were not expecting a fight. Weeks of marching and counter-marching all across Illinois to no apparent purpose had almost drained the possibility of real action from their minds. But everyone was aware of the terrible rout that had befallen Major Stillman and his men several months ago, and though their militia training had been haphazard, their survival instincts were sharp enough. It seemed wrong to be standing still on an open prairie with no cover anywhere close by. Cage's horse, New Fred, was nervous and disapproving. He and Cage were still getting used to each other and the relationship was not going well. Old Fred, the horse he had ridden since he enlisted in May, had foundered two weeks earlier outside Dixon's Ferry.

Cage watched Major Dement raise himself up and down in his stirrups, flexing the muscles in his legs, impatient for the return of his scouts. Then they heard gunfire from the grove on the far side of the prairie—urgent, uncoordinated discharges. Bob Zanger, on his horse next to Cage, looked up and said, “What in hell…,” but in that instant it was already clear what was happening. The six men Dement had sent ahead were galloping back to them out of the trees, pursued by what looked like hundreds of mounted Indians. Cage saw two of the Illinois men shot out of the saddle almost at the same moment, one of them protesting with a hideous cry of pain, blood showering out from his rib cage, the other slipping off his horse without complaint, his life simply, magically over in an instant.

“Charge, goddammit!” Dement shouted. “Now!” He spurred his horse forward and Cage and the rest of the men followed, riding to the support of the fleeing scouts. But none of the men were trained or equipped for a cavalry charge, and though they had practiced dismounting and fighting on foot, with every fourth man holding the reins of the horses so that the rest could aim steadily and fire in concentration, they had not drilled often enough for the lesson to take hold in the chaos of real warfare. All they could do was rein to a ragged stop and discharge their weapons at the advancing Indians. The volley threw up an obscuring fog of gunpowder smoke and there was a moment of unexpected silence in which they thought they might have turned the Indians' advance. But then rifle balls began to punch through the smoke and they heard the enemy's high-pitched yelling and saw them erupt into view. The hooves of their horses broke up the ground beneath them, sending up a cycling churn of dirt clods that advanced along with the mounted Indians like the spray of a breaking wave. The faces of the British Band were painted for war, their arms tattooed and their heads shaven except for waving scalplock crests. They were thin and hungry and many of them were wearing ragged white man's clothes. Cage was startled by the hatred in their eyes, hatred from which he absurdly thought he should be excepted or excused.

Dement called out for the men to retreat in the face of this renewed charge and head back across the prairie to the safety of Kellogg's Grove. Half of them already had. The rest galloped frantically toward the distant swell of land, some of the men taking the ramrods out of their muskets and beating the flanks of their horses to speed them on.

Cage heard—above all the screaming and shooting and hoof pounding—the sound of a bone cracking. It was Bob Zanger's horse, shot in one of its front legs. The animal collapsed and cartwheeled on the ground, but Bob was back on his feet in an instant, barely missing a stride, sprinting and panting, an expression on his face that was no expression at all—just a blank mask of survival.

Cage knew he ought to turn around and try to save his comrade, but the thought was too late the moment it was formed. Over his shoulder, he saw two of the Indians dismount at a run and grab Bob's arms and wrestle him to the ground. He saw them swinging their tomahawks as Bob cried out, “Don't! Don't!”

Cage faced furiously forward so he wouldn't have to see what happened next. Then he had the feeling somebody was looking at him. He turned to his right where a moment before Bob Zanger had been, and there was an Indian riding right alongside him, staring at him as if he were measuring him for a shirt. Cage would never forget what the Indian looked like. His face was sharpened by hunger and his eyes were shining. He wore a calico shirt whose collar had been cut away to show off his eagle claw necklace. He had smallpox scars on his grimacing face and a feather tied into the strip of hair that rose from his otherwise shaven head like the bristles on an angry dog.

The Indian swiped at him with a war club. Cage awkwardly parried the blow with his heavy antique musket. By that time his assailant's underfed horse was panting and stumbling and falling behind, and there was fire now from the ridge at Kellogg's Grove, where the rest of the battalion was covering their retreat from the Indians.

They made it to the top of the ridge. The Indians had stopped their pursuit but there was still heavy fire that seemed to come from everywhere at once and Dement screamed for the men to ground-picket their mounts and get into the goddam house. Ground-picket meant to dismount, drop the reins, and trust in the horse's judgment. As New Fred galloped off into the trees, Cage sprinted for the door of the rotting three-room cabin that some settler had long ago abandoned and that now served the men of Dement's battalion as a fort. There were over a hundred men crowded into that log house, fighting for space to punch out shooting holes in the chinking with their knives, breathing air that was immediately rank and grainy with gunpowder. They could see Black Hawk's warriors as they dismounted and filed into a ravine at the edge of the grove.

They were forted up all the rest of that day and through the night. Cage was sure the Indians would fire the cabin. He jostled his way to a shooting place near the door so that he would have a chance to escape the inferno and die in the open air. But instead of attacking the cabin, the Indians turned their attention to the horses that were still tied to the picket ropes fifty yards away. All night Cage and the rest of the besieged men listened to the hysterical, guttural pleading of the horses trying to get free. They heard the balls slapping into their flesh and their broken legs scrabbling on the ground. In general, the animals had been poorly cared for during the campaign, but now the sound of their suffering filled the men with an intolerable burden of sympathy. Some wept aloud and others got down on their knees on the dirt floor of the cabin and prayed for God to deliver them from the fate of their horses.

But before dawn the firing stopped and the Indians slipped away in the remaining darkness, perhaps too low on gunpowder to press the siege any further. Dement threw open the door and the men staggered cautiously outside. They stared at the horses the Indians had shot, some of them still miserably alive, the others lying there unmoving with the dead weight of their bodies still attached to the picket line. The horses that had been ground-picketed and able to run away came nervously back, New Fred among them.

Somebody yelled that there were horsemen coming and there was a moment of renewed panic as some of the men raced back toward the cabin. But it turned out the riders approaching were white men, a spy company from Fort Dixon that had ridden all night to their rescue. The men of Dement's battalion cheered their arrival as the newcomers rode up the ridge with the rising sun behind them and stared down with horror at the dead and dying horses.

The leader of the spy company dismounted and conferred with Major Dement, and then the major looked around and saw Cage holding the reins of New Fred.

“You,” he said, forgetting Cage's name, or more likely unaware of it to begin with. “You've still got a horse. Ride out there onto the prairie with Captain Early's men and show them where they're likely to find our boys.”

Cage led his still-saddled horse over to the group of three mounted men that Captain Early had detached to find and gather up the dead. One of the men nodded at him as he approached and leaned down from the saddle to shake his hand.

“I'm Abraham Lincoln.”

He was young—or so Cage would remember him. He did not seem young at the time. No one did in that summer of 1832, during the hard and mostly meandering campaign of the Black Hawk War. Lincoln would have been his own age—twenty-two or twenty-three. He had ridden all night. He was gaunt and unshaven and hard-used, his feet caked in dry mud, the buttons gone from the placket of his shirt and his narrow sunburned wrists protruding from its tattered sleeves. He was a head taller than the five men who were with him, too tall for the little mare he was riding, too tall for even his own clothes, since the frayed bottoms of his jean pants were a good five inches from the tops of his brogans.

He was not as freakishly remarkable in his appearance as it would later become fashionable to recall. Lincoln was exquisitely self-conscious, thought he was ugly, and later reckoned he had no choice but to promote himself as such. But it was his height and strength that marked him in Cage's mind that day, his height and strength and something else—the fact that he introduced himself to Cage when none of the other men he was with bothered to do so, and the plaintive note of human comradeship in his eyes when Cage returned the handshake.

Lincoln must have recognized something in his face that Cage himself did not realize was there. The horror he had lived through during the last day and night must have still been visible.

“I expect some of these boys we're looking for are friends of yours,” Lincoln said as Cage mounted his horse for an unwelcome return to yesterday's battlefield. Cage nodded in reply, grateful for the implied note of sympathy.

“Well, we'll do our best for the poor devils,” Lincoln said.

While the rest of the spy company were starting breakfast fires and contemplating the work of gathering the dead horses together and burning them, Cage led the party out of Kellogg's Grove and down to the open Illinois prairie. They trailed three mules bearing packsaddles heaped with blankets and old tent canvases. New Fred had no interest in revisiting the site of yesterday's terror, and he let Cage know by contesting every forward step. After fifty yards New Fred gave up actively resisting, though the muscles in his neck were still taut and his head warily upright. As he fought his horse forward, Cage was aware that he had to goad his own unwilling self as well. The open land was ominous in a way it had not seemed yesterday when they had ridden out to scout. Riding back across the landscape this morning, the sun illuminating it with such clarity as it crested the ridgeline of Kellogg's Grove behind them, Cage remembered how impossible it had been to see after that first hectic volley, the whole field and Black Hawk's mounted warriors immediately obscured behind a gray shroud of gunpowder smoke.

“I don't see anybody yet,” one of the men said to Lincoln. “We sure this is where they ended up?”

“Ask him
,
John,” Lincoln said, indicating Cage.

“All right, I'll ask him,” the man said. His name was John Stuart. He was round-faced and somehow clean-shaven, mild-looking in comparison to Lincoln, his voice crisper and stronger. Was he the leader of this group? Was there any leader?

“I don't know where exactly they would be,” Cage told him. “I only saw one man fall. Bob Zanger. That happened about a couple hundred yards over there to the south. At least that's where I think it was.”

“It could be the Indians dragged them into those trees,” the third man said, pointing to a tree-lined ravine ahead. He was Jim Reed, someone Cage would grow to know very well over the years, almost as well as he would know Lincoln. Reed was older, in his thirties, rash where Lincoln and Stuart were intuitively cautious. “We should probe beyond the tree line and see if we can find signs of their camp.”