"So there's not room for them here," said Verily.

"Or any other town along the Mizzippy. And I reckon if they're being carried on boats up the river, you'll want a place for them that's near a landing."

"Not on boats," said Verily.

"Walking? If they can make their way to Noisy River, with the militia of every slave-owning county roused against them, they don't need any help from me."

"They're not walking up the east bank of the river."

Lincoln grinned. "Oh, now, you're telling me that Alvin got them reds to let his people pass through."

"Pass through, but not linger."

"No, I reckon not," said Lincoln. "You let in five thousand one day, you'll have to let in ten thousand the next."

"Mr. Lincoln," said Verily, "I know you don't think you can do the job, but Margaret Larner thinks you can, and from what I've seen of you, I think you can, and all that is lacking at the moment is your agreement to try."

"Knowing that I'm likely to fail," said Lincoln.

"I can't fail worse with your help than I'm bound to fail without it," said Verily.

"You know that Coz will want to help, and he's even more of a blockhead than I am."

"I'd be happy to have the help of Coz, whoever that might be, as long as I can rely on you."

"I'll tell you what," said Lincoln.

"There's something you want in return?"

"Oh, I'll do it anyway," said Lincoln, "or try my best, I should say. But since you and I will be together for a while, and likely to have many an hour on the road together, what would you think of using your time to start teaching me the principles of law?"

"You don't talk law," said Verily Cooper, "you read law."

"You read law after you've decided that a lawyer's what you want to be," said Lincoln. "But before you decide, then you talk law so you find out just what it is you're getting yourself in for, and whether you want to spend your life doing it."

"I don't think you'll spend your whole life doing any one thing," said Verily. "I don't think that's in you, if I know anything about a man. But I think if you set your mind to lawyering, you'd be a good one. And not least because there's no chance under heaven that you will ever, for a single moment, look like a lawyer."

"You don't think that's a drawback?"

"I think that for a long while, every lawyer who comes up against you in court will think you're a country bumpkin and he won't have to work at all to beat you."

"But I am a country bumpkin."

"And I'm a kegmaker. A kegmaker who wins most of his cases in court."

Lincoln laughed. "So you're saying that by simply being myself, as I am, not pretending to be anything else, I'll fool those highfalutin lawyers better than if I tried to lie to them."

"You can't help what other people choose to believe about you, before they have all the evidence in hand."

Lincoln reached out his hand. "I'm with you, then, till we find a place for this tribe that Alvin's recruited. Though I have to say, he ain't gonna need some camp on the outskirts of a town. Lessen he's figuring to split those folks up among twenty towns or more, nobody's going to want them."

"Splitting them up might be necessary," said Verily. "But it might also be dangerous. You know there'll be slave catchers here as soon as it becomes known where they are."

"So you need them all to be in a place where slave catchers won't be able to cart them all back south one at a time."

"A place that will afford protection, yes," said Verily.

"A completely abolitionist county, then, is what you need. With its own judge, not a circuit rider, so you know how he's going to rule on every slavery issue."

"A strong enthusiasm for habeus corpus would be an advantage, yes."

"A county where every justice of the peace can be relied on not to cooperate with the catchers."

"Is there such a county?" asked Verily.

"Not yet," said Lincoln, and he grinned.

13

Mission

It was all as well planned as a church party, and Arthur Stuart plain admired how they done it. All the stories about reds that folks told these days was about savages living a natural life picking fruit off the trees and calling to deer and they'd come right up and the red man would clunk them on the head. Or else stories about savages murdering and raping and scalping and capturing white folks and keeping them as slaves till they got away or till some soldiers find them and they refuse to go home. Or about how if you give a red man likker he'll get as drunk as a skunk in five minutes flat and spend the rest of his life devoted to getting more.

Of course, Arthur Stuart knew in the back of his mind that this sort of thing couldn't be the complete story. Alvin's time with the reds had been back before Arthur Stuart was born, but he knew Alvin was friends with the mystical Red Prophet, and he knew Alvin had known and traveled with Ta-Kumsaw, and had even got himself known as a renegado because of the time he spent with the reds during the war.

And Arthur had seen plenty of red men, from time to time-but they were Irrakwa or Cherriky and they wore business suits just like everybody else and stood for Congress and supervised railroad construction and ran banks and did all kinds of other jobs so there wasn't no difference between them and white folks except the color of their skin and how fat they got when they grew up, because some of them reds could get huge.

Alvin got kind of sad sometimes, after meeting one of them. "A good man, as men go," he said to Arthur Stuart once. "Prosperous and clever. But what he gave up to get rich."

Arthur Stuart figured what Alvin was talking about was the greensong. He sort of had the idea that maybe red men were supposed to live inside the greensong all the livelong day, and that's what that Irrakwa railroad man had give up.

But when you thought about the red men living out beyond the Mizzippy, you sort of thought they'd be living the old way, hunting and fishing and living in wigwams. So it plain irritated Arthur Stuart at first to find out that they built log cabins and laid out their towns in streets, and that they planted acre after acre in maize and beans.

"This don't feel like no greensong to me," Arthur Stuart said to Dead Mary. "This just feels like a town."

Dead Mary laughed at him for that. "Why shouldn't red folk have towns? Big cities, too? You think only white people know what a city is?"

And when it came to feeding all these six thousand runaways, why, the red men was as organized as a church picnic. There was fifty tables set up, and each colonel and major would bring their fifty households and they'd pass along the tables and pile up food on baskets and carry them off to the pastures that had been designated as their campsites and it was so smooth that everybody got their breakfast before the sun even got hot. And all the while, there was red women hauling more food to the tables-corn bread and flat bread and bean mash and cider and apples and pawpaws and big bunches of grapes.

The grapes he just had to ask about. "Iffen red folks got grapes, how come they didn't invent wine?"

"They didn't have grapes," Alvin told him, "till they learned how to grow them from white folks."

"So what are they doing, making wine now?"

"Their cider and their wine have so little alcohol that you'd have to pee it all out long before you got drunk," said Alvin. "Tenskwa-Tawa sees to that. But it's the safest way to store water that got no disease in it, and besides, he wants to build up the reds' tolerance for it, so his people don't get enslaved by alcohol the way he was and so many others were."

"Hard to think of that man being slave to anything," said Arthur Stuart.