“Sit here, Mrs. Lincoln,” Brooks offered his chair.
“No—no, you have business here. Happy to have met you, Ma’am. You must stay and have dinner with us.” Mary bowed again and hoped she had made a graceful exit as became a queen.
She wondered, as she went down the hall, why women with brains always looked a little frumpy. That dress—homemade, probably, and it didn’t fit anywhere! It was, she decided, safe to leave a woman of as few charms as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe in the office, especially chaperoned by Noah Brooks. But Mary Lincoln knew well that if Mrs. Stowe had been young and pretty she herself would never have walked out of that office.
5
The boy who jumped out of the dark shadow of the bushes slapped his rifle hard, brought it to port sharply.
“Mr. President,” he gasped, “if I had been an assassin you’d be dead by now!”
Abraham Lincoln stopped, shifted his high hat. A few thin flakes of snow lay white against the silk.
“And what would you have been doing, Joe, while an assassin was making a corpse out of me?” he asked amiably.
“I’d have done the best I could to protect you, Mr. President, but it’s powerful dark out here,” stammered the flustered soldier.
“I knew you were here, Joe, or I wouldn’t be out here,” Lincoln said. “Cold out here. Have you got some warm gloves?”