Mary stared incredulously. “Good Heavens—you can’t give Christmas presents to a whole company of soldiers! There must be a hundred of them.”
“I wish there were,” he said heavily. “I wish every company in our army was full strength but unfortunately they’re far short in numbers. There are less than forty of those boys and they’re far from home and Christmas is a bad time to be homesick.”
“They could be worse off,” she snapped. “They could be out there along the Rappahannock or down in those marshes of Mississippi. Pennsylvania’s not so far. Lord knows you’re always fixing up furloughs for them so they can go home. Why, it would cost a fortune to give gifts to all that company—and anyway, what can you give a soldier?”
“Some warm socks might come in good. That ground’s frozen out there and it’s likely to snow hard any day now.”
“The commissary should keep them in socks.” She was testy as always in the face of criticism. “Don’t I do enough—going out to those horrid hospitals twice a week—carrying things—this house is practically stripped of bed linen, all torn up for bandages.” She fluttered about her purchases, flushed and breathless, her hands making little snatching gestures, picking up things, putting them down again, twisting string around her fingers.
“Very noble of you, indeed,” he approved. “I’m proud of what you do but I’m still thinking about Joe and Nate and those other boys. They curry horses and clean harness and saddles; they look after Tad and his goat—and of course they’re always on guard for fear I’ll get shot, though I can’t figure any place where I could be where nobody could get at me, unless they buried me.”
“That man, that one-eyed man, you’re crazy to let him come here!” Mary cried. “Mr. Nicolay says so.”
“Gurowski? I know.” He smiled patiently. “If anybody does the Democrats a favor by putting a bullet in my head it might very well be Gurowski. He croaks that the country is marching to it’s tomb and that Seward and McClellan and I are the gravediggers.”
“They’ll be digging your grave if you don’t have a care for yourself!” Her volatile mood had shifted; she was almost in tears. “That horrible creature with those old green goggles, that silly red vest and that big hat and cape—he looks like Satan himself, yet you listen to him!”
“I’m his hired man, Mary,” Lincoln repeated. “The bald-headed old buzzard is smart enough. He had a good job working under Horace Greeley on the Tribune, but they had to let him go because he couldn’t distinguish truth from slander. Then Seward put him in the State Department as a translator but he published so many slurs about Seward and me that they dismissed him from that job. He started as a revolutionary in Europe; now he thinks he can save this nation. Maybe by eliminating me. He’s written down now as a dangerous character. He won’t be allowed in here again, so don’t worry.”