Lincoln’s bony shoulders twitched upward, sagged with resignation. “Son, if all the lies that have been printed about the Lincolns were piled up in a heap, they’d reach near to the top of that monument out yonder.” Tad came to stand beside him and looked out of the half-finished shaft that would some day honor Washington. Now it was only a beginning, lost in a spidery web of scaffolding. “Be plenty tall,” he observed. “If Bob had all that money, would it reach to the top, Papa? He could buy everything he wanted, couldn’t he? Horses and carriages and gold watches and everything. Can’t you put people in jail for telling such lies? You’re the president.” Lincoln stood still, looking down on the trampled mall where a herd of cattle pastured, beef animals gathered to feed the Army of the Potomac. His eyes took on the faraway inscrutable look that so often baffled his intimates and infuriated his enemies; the look that lost itself on the horizon of a great land torn by hate and drenched in an anguish of blood and fire. Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, had deepened that hurt in his eyes and cut new lines about his mouth and brooding brows. Three years of war, and in the nation there seethed a dozen angry factions. Copperheads, only by a miracle defeated in Ohio; furious mobs resisting conscription in the cities; even in the Congress, oppositionists, critics, outright enemies. Only a few weeks since, he had stood facing that raw November wind on the Gettysburg hill, speaking that little piece that now he was embarrassed to remember, the speech that the papers had dismissed as insignificant, dedicating the ground where slept more than sixty thousand Union and Confederate dead. The dull ache in Abraham Lincoln’s heart turned bitter as he thought of his own son, who should be in uniform and who was growing restless and unhappy at being the one young man of army age who was not permitted to fight for his country. Yet he dared not let Robert enlist. The President’s son would be a prime hostage should he be captured, and used no doubt to wring concessions from his father. “Let’s go show Mama the watch.” He shook off his dismal musings and scrubbed Tad’s brown head with the flat of his palm, straightening the collar of the uniform that was Tad’s pride and glory. Tad looked up confidingly. “You know what Mama is worrying about, Papa? She owes an awful lot of money in New York. She’s afraid you’ll find it out. She said on the train when we came home that I mustn’t tell you all the things she bought because you had troubles enough to kill three men.” Lincoln hunched a shoulder, stretching his lips into a dry smile. “See how my back is breaking down, Tad? That’s General Rosecrans. And this side is General McClellan and General Meade made it worse when he let Lee get away across the river.” “You cried then, I remember. Men don’t cry.”