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Title: A Man for the Ages
       A Story of the Builders of Democracy

Author: Irving Bacheller

Illustrator: John Wolcott Adams

Release Date: December 5, 2005 [EBook #17237]

Language: English

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                          A MAN FOR THE AGES

                         By IRVING BACHELLER

                 A STORY OF THE BUILDERS OF DEMOCRACY

   AUTHOR OF THE LIGHT IN THE CLEARING, KEEPING UP WITH LIZZIE, ETC.

                                 1919




TO MY DEAR FRIEND AND COMRADE
ALEXANDER GROSSET

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK IN
TOKEN OF MY ESTEEM




_Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; it is a positive
good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become
rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not
him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work
diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his
own shall be safe from violence when built._

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.
_March 21, 1864._




A Letter

TO THE AGED AND HONORABLE JOSIAH TRAYLOR FROM HIS GRANDSON, A SOLDIER IN
FRANCE, WHEREIN THE MOTIVE AND INSPIRATION OF THIS NARRATIVE ARE BRIEFLY
PRESENTED.


_In France, September 10, 1915._

Dear Grandfather:

At last I have got mine. I had been scampering towards the stars, like a
jack-rabbit chased by barking greyhounds, when a shrapnel shell caught up
with me. It sneezed all over my poor bus, and threw some junk into me as
if it thought me nothing better than a kind of waste basket. Seems as if
it had got tired of carrying its load and wanted to put it on me. It
succeeded famously but I got home with the bus. Since then they have been
taking sinkers and fish hooks out me fit only for deep water. Don't
worry, I'm getting better fast. I shall play no more football and you
will not see me pitching curves and running bases again. No, I shall sit
in the grandstand myself hereafter and there will not be so much of me
but I shall have quite a shuck on my soul for all that. I've done a lot
of thinking since I have been lying on my back with nothing else to do.
When your body gets kind of turned over in the ditch it's wonderful how
your mind begins to hustle around the place. Until this thing happened my
intellect was nothing more than a vague rumor. I had heard of it, now and
then, in college, and I had hoped that it would look me up some time and
ask what it could do for me, but it didn't. These days I would scarcely
believe that I have a body, the poor thing being upon the jacks in this
big machine shop, but my small intellect is hopping all over the earth
and back again and watching every move of these high-toned mechanics with
their shiny tools and white aprons. My mind and I have kind of got
acquainted with each other and I'm getting attached to it. It is quite an
energetic, promising young mind and I don't know but I'll try to make a
permanent place for it in my business.

I've been thinking of our Democracy and of my coming over here to be
chucked into this big jack pot as if my life were a small coin; of all
the dear old days of the past I have thought and chiefly how the
wonderful story of your life has been woven into mine--threads of wisdom
and adventure and humor and romance. I like to unravel it and look at the
colors. Lincoln is the strongest, longest thread in the fabric. Often I
think of your description of the great, tender hands that lifted you to
his shoulder when you were a boy, of the droll and kindly things that he
said to you. I have laughed and cried recalling those hours of yours with
Jack Kelso and Dr. John Allen and the rude young giant Abe, of which I
have heard you tell so often as we sat in the firelight of a winter
evening. Best of all I remember the light of your own wisdom as it glowed
upon the story; how you found in Lincoln's words a prophecy of the great
struggle that has come. Since I have been steering my imagination on its
swift, long flights into the past I have been able to recall the very
words you used: "Lincoln said that a house divided against itself must
fall--that our nation could not endure part slave and part free, and it
was true. Since then the world has grown incredibly small. The peoples of
the earth have been drawn into one house and the affairs of each are the
concern of all. With a vain, boastful and unscrupulous degenerate on the
throne of Germany, it is likely to be a house divided against itself and
I fear a greater struggle than the world has ever seen between the bond
and the free. It will be a bloody contest but of its issue there can be
no doubt because the friends of freedom are the children of light and are
many. They will lay all they have upon its altars. They will be
unprepared and roughly handled for a time but their reserves of material
and moral strength which shall express themselves in ready sacrifice, are
beyond all calculation. Only one whose life spans the wide area from
Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson and who has stood with Lincoln in his
lonely tower and watched the flowing of the tides for three score years
and ten, as I have, can be quite aware of the perils and resources of
Democracy."

All these and many other things which you have said to me, dear
grandfather, have helped me to understand this great thunderous drama in
which I have had a part. They have helped me to endure its perils and
bitter defeats. It was you who saw clearly from the first that this was
the final clash between the bond and the free--an effort of the great
house of God to purge itself, and you urged me to go to Canada and enlist
in the struggle. For this, too, I thank you. My wounds are dear to me,
knowing, as you have made me know, that I have come well by them fighting
not in the interest of Great Britain or France or Russia, but in the
cause of humanity. It is strange that among these men who are fighting
with me I have found only one or two who seem to have a vision of the
whole truth of this business.

Now I come to the point of my letter. I have an enlistment to urge upon
you in the cause of humanity and there are no wounds to go with it. When
I come home, as I shall be doing as soon as I am sufficiently mended, we
must go to work on the story of your life so that all who wish to do so
may know it as I know it. Let us go to it with all the diaries that you
and your father kept, aided by your memory, and give to the world its
first full view of the heart and soul of Lincoln. I have read all the
biographies and anecdotes of him and yet without the story as you tell it
he would have been a stranger to me. After this war, if I mistake not,
Democracy will command the interest of all men. It will be the theme of
themes. You tell me that we shall soon get into the struggle and turn
the scale. Well, if we do, we shall have to demonstrate a swiftness of
preparation and a power in the field which will astonish the world, and
when it is all over the world will want to know how this potent Democracy
of ours came about. The one name--Lincoln--with the background of your
story, especially the background, for the trouble with all the
biographies is a lack of background--will be the best answer we could
give I think. Of course there are other answers, but, as there are few
who dare to doubt, these days, that Lincoln is the greatest democrat
since Jesus Christ, if we can only present your knowledge to the world we
should do well. Again the great crowd, whom you and I desire to enlighten
if we can, do not read biography or history save under the compulsion of
the schools, so let us try only to tell the moving story as you have told
it to me, with Lincoln striding across the scene or taking the center of
the stage just as he was wont to do in your recollection of him. So we
will make them to know the giant of Democracy without trying.

Duty calls. What is your answer? Please let me know by cable. Meanwhile
I shall be thinking more about it. With love to all the family, from your
affectionate grandson, R.L.




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

BOOK ONE

    I  Which Describes the Journey of Samson Henry Traylor and His Wife
       and Their Two Children and Their Dog Sambo through the Adirondack
       Wilderness in 1831 on Their Way to the Land of Plenty, and
       Especially Their Adventures in Bear Valley and No Santa Claus
       Land. Furthermore, It Describes the Soaping of the Brimsteads and
       the Capture of the Veiled Bear

   II  Wherein Is Recorded the Vivid Impression Made upon the Travelers
       by Their View of a Steam Engine and of the Famous Erie Canal.
       Wherein, Also, Is a Brief Account of Sundry Curious Characters Met
       on the Road and at a Celebration of the Fourth of July on the Big
       Waterway

  III  Wherein the Reader Is Introduced to Offut's Store and His Clerk
       Abe, and the Scholar Jack Kelso and His Cabin and His Daughter
       Bim, and Gets a First Look at Lincoln

   IV  Which Presents Other Log Cabin Folk and the First Steps in the
       Making of a New Home and Certain Incapacities of Abe

    V  In Which the Character of Bim Kelso Flashes Out in a Strange
       Adventure that Begins the Weaving of a Long Thread of Romance

   VI  Which Describes the Lonely Life in a Prairie Cabin and a Stirring
       Adventure on the Underground Railroad about the Time It Began
       Operations

  VII  In Which Mr. Eliphalet Biggs Gets Acquainted with Bim Kelso and
       Her Father

 VIII  Wherein Abe Makes Sundry Wise Remarks to the Boy Harry and
       Announces His Purpose to Be a Candidate for the Legislature at
       Kelso's Dinner Party

   IX  In Which Bim Kelso Makes History, While Abe and Harry and Other
       Good Citizens of New Salem Are Making an Effort to that End in the
       Indian War


BOOK TWO


    X  In Which Abe and Samson Wrestle and Some Raiders Come to Burn and
       Stay to Repent

   XI  In Which Abe, Elected to the Legislature, Gives What Comfort He
       Can to Ann Rutledge in the Beginning of Her Sorrows. Also He Goes
       to Springfield for New Clothes and Is Astonished by Its Pomp and
       the Change in Eli

  XII  Which Continues the Romance of Abe and Ann until the Former Leaves
       New Salem to Begin His Work in the Legislature. Also It Describes
       the Coloneling of Peter Lukins

 XIII  Wherein the Route of the Underground Railroad Is Surveyed and
       Samson and Harry Spend a Night in the Home of Henry Brimstead and
       Hear Surprising Revelations, Confidentially Disclosed, and Are
       Charmed by the Personality of His Daughter Annabel

  XIV  In Which Abe Returns from Vandalia and Is Engaged to Ann, and
       Three Interesting Slaves Arrive at the Home of Samson Traylor,
       Who, with Harry Needles, Has an Adventure of Much Importance on
       the Underground Road

   XV  Wherein Harry and Abe Ride Up to Springdale and Visit Kelso's and
       Learn of the Curious Lonesomeness of Eliphalet Biggs

  XVI  Wherein Young Mr. Lincoln Safely Passes Two Great Danger Points
       and Turns into the Highway of His Manhood


BOOK THREE


 XVII  Wherein Young Mr. Lincoln Betrays Ignorance of Two Highly
       Important Subjects, in Consequence of Which He Begins to Suffer
       Serious Embarrassment

XVIII  In Which Mr. Lincoln, Samson and Harry Take a Long Ride Together
       and the Latter Visit the Flourishing Little City of Chicago

  XIX  Wherein Is One of the Many Private Panics Which Followed the
       Bursting of the Bubble of Speculation

   XX  Which Tells of the Settling of Abe Lincoln and the Traylors in the
       Village of Springfield and of Samson's Second Visit to Chicago

  XXI  Wherein a Remarkable School of Political Science Begins Its
       Sessions in the Rear of Joshua Speed's Store. Also at Samson's
       Fireside Honest Abe Talks of the Authority of the Law and the
       Right of Revolution, and Later Brings a Suit against Lionel Davis

 XXII  Wherein Abe Lincoln Reveals His Method of Conducting a Lawsuit in
       the Case of Henry Brimstead et al. vs. Lionel Davis

XXIII  Which Presents the Pleasant Comedy of Individualism in the New
       Capital, and the Courtship of Lincoln and Mary Todd

 XXIV  Which Describes a Pleasant Holiday and a Pretty Stratagem

  XXV  Being a Brief Memoir by the Honorable and Venerable Man Known in
       These Pages as Josiah Traylor, Who Saw the Great Procession of
       Events between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson and Especially
       the Making and the End of Lincoln




A MAN FOR THE AGES




BOOK ONE




CHAPTER I

WHICH DESCRIBES THE JOURNEY OF SAMSON HENRY TRAYLOR AND HIS WIFE AND
THEIR TWO CHILDREN AND THEIR DOG SAMBO THROUGH THE ADIRONDACK WILDERNESS
IN 1831 ON THEIR WAY TO THE LAND OF PLENTY, AND ESPECIALLY THEIR
ADVENTURES IN BEAR VALLEY AND NO SANTA CLAUS LAND. FURTHERMORE, IT
DESCRIBES THE SOAPING OF THE BRIMSTEADS AND THE CAPTURE OF THE VEILED
BEAR.


In the early summer of 1831 Samson Traylor and his wife, Sarah, and two
children left their old home near the village of Vergennes, Vermont, and
began their travels toward the setting sun with four chairs, a bread
board and rolling-pin, a feather bed and blankets, a small looking-glass,
a skillet, an axe, a pack basket with a pad of sole leather on the same,
a water pail, a box of dishes, a tub of salt pork, a rifle, a teapot, a
sack of meal, sundry small provisions and a violin, in a double wagon
drawn by oxen. It is a pleasure to note that they had a violin and were
not disposed to part with it. The reader must not overlook its full
historic significance. The stern, uncompromising spirit of the Puritan
had left the house of the Yankee before a violin could enter it. Humor
and the love of play had preceded and cleared a way for it. Where there
was a fiddle there were cheerful hearts. A young black shepherd dog with
tawny points and the name of Sambo followed the wagon or explored the
fields and woods it passed.

If we had been at the Congregational Church on Sunday we might have heard
the minister saying to Samson, after the service, that it was hard to
understand why the happiest family in the parish and the most beloved
should be leaving its ancestral home to go to a far, new country of which
little was known. We might also have heard Samson answer:

"It's awful easy to be happy here. We slide along in the same old groove,
that our fathers traveled, from Vergennes to Paradise. We work and play
and go to meetin' and put a shin plaster in the box and grow old and
narrow and stingy and mean and go up to glory and are turned into saints
and angels. Maybe that's the best thing that could happen to us, but
Sarah and I kind o' thought we'd try a new starting place and another
route to Heaven."

Then we might have seen the countenance of the minister assume a grave
and troubled look. "Samson, you must not pull down the pillars of this
temple," he said.

"No, it has done too much for me. I love its faults even. But we have
been called and must go. A great empire is growing up in the West. We
want to see it; we want to help build it."

The minister had acquired a sense of humor among those Yankees. Years
later in his autobiography he tells how deeply the words of Samson had
impressed him. He had answered:

"Think of us. I don't know what we shall do without your fun and the
music of your laugh at the pleasure parties. In addition to being the
best wrestler in the parish you are also its most able and sonorous
laugher."

"Yes, Sarah and I have got the laughing habit. I guess we need a touch
of misery to hold us down. But you will have other laughers. The seed has
been planted here and the soil is favorable."

Samson knew many funny stories and could tell them well. His heart was as
merry as _The Fisher's Hornpipe_. He used to say that he got the violin
to help him laugh, as he found his voice failing under the strain.

Sarah and Samson had been raised on adjoining farms just out of the
village. He had had little schooling, but his mind was active and well
inclined. Sarah had prosperous relatives in Boston and had had the
advantage of a year's schooling in that city. She was a comely girl of
a taste and refinement unusual in the place and time of her birth. Many
well favored youths had sought her hand, but, better than others, she
liked the big, masterful, good-natured, humorous Samson, crude as he was.
Naturally in her hands his timber had undergone some planing and
smoothing and his thought had been gently led into new and pleasant
ways. Sarah's Uncle Rogers in Boston had kept them supplied with some of
the best books and magazines of the time. These they had read aloud with
keen enjoyment. Moreover, they remembered what they read and cherished
and thought about it.

Let us take a look at them as they slowly leave the village of their
birth. The wagon is covered with tent cloth drawn over hickory arches.
They are sitting on a seat overlooking the oxen in the wagon front. Tears
are streaming down the face of the woman. The man's head is bent. His
elbows are resting on his knees; the hickory handle of his ox whip lies
across his lap, the lash at his feet. He seems to be looking down at his
boots, into the tops of which his trousers have been folded. He is a
rugged, blond, bearded man with kindly blue eyes and a rather prominent
nose. There is a striking expression of power in the head and shoulders
of Samson Traylor. The breadth of his back, the size of his wrists and
hands, the color of his face betoken a man of great strength. This
thoughtful, sorrowful attitude is the only evidence of emotion which he
betrays. In a few minutes he begins to whistle a lively tune.

The boy Josiah--familiarly called Joe--sits beside his mother. He is a
slender, sweet-faced lad. He is looking up wistfully at his mother. The
little girl Betsey sits between him and her father. That evening they
stopped at the house of an old friend some miles up the dusty road to
the north. "Here we are--goin' west," Samson shouted to the man at the
door-step.

He alighted and helped his family out of the wagon. "You go right
in--I'll take care o' the oxen," said the man.

Samson started for the house with the girl under one arm and the boy
under the other. A pleasant-faced woman greeted them with a hearty
welcome at the door.

"You poor man! Come right in," she said.

"Poor! I'm the richest man in the world," said he. "Look at the gold on
that girl's head--curly, fine gold, too--the best there is. She's
Betsey--my little toy woman--half past seven years old--blue eyes--helps
her mother get tired every day. Here's my toy man Josiah--yes, brown hair
and brown eyes like Sarah--heart o' gold--helps his mother, too--six
times one year old."

"What pretty faces!" said the woman as she stooped and kissed them.

"Yes, ma'am. Got 'em from the fairies," Samson went on. "They have all
kinds o' heads for little folks, an' I guess they color 'em up with the
blood o' roses an' the gold o' buttercups an' the blue o' violets. Here's
this wife o' mine. She's richer'n I am. She owns all of us. We're her
slaves."

"Looks as young as she did the day she was married--nine years ago," said
the woman.

"Exactly!" Samson exclaimed. "Straight as an arrow and proud! I don't
blame her. She's got enough to make her proud I say. I fall in love again
every time I look into her big, brown eyes."

The talk and laughter brought the dog into the house.

"There's Sambo, our camp follower," said Samson. "He likes us, one and
all, but he often feels sorry for us because we can not feel the joy that
lies in buried bones and the smell of a liberty pole or a gate post."

They had a joyous evening and a restful night with these old friends and
resumed their journey soon after daylight. They ferried across the lake
at Burlington and fared away over the mountains and through the deep
forest on the Chateaugay trail.

Since the Pilgrims landed between the measureless waters and the pathless
wilderness they and their descendants had been surrounded by the lure of
mysteries. It filled the imagination of the young with gleams of golden
promise. The love of adventure, the desire to explore the dark, infested
and beautiful forest, the dream of fruitful sunny lands cut with water
courses, shored with silver and strewn with gold beyond it--these were
the only heritage of their sons and daughters save the strength and
courage of the pioneer. How true was this dream of theirs gathering
detail and allurement as it passed from sire to son! On distant plains to
the west were lands more lovely and fruitful than any of their vision; in
mountains far beyond was gold enough to gild the dome of the heavens, as
the sun was wont to do at eventide, and silver enough to put a fairly
respectable moon in it. Yet for generations their eyes were not to see,
their hands were not to touch these things. They were only to push their
frontier a little farther to the west and hold the dream and pass it on
to their children.

Those early years of the nineteenth century held the first days of
fulfillment. Samson and Sarah Traylor had the old dream in their hearts
when they first turned their faces to the West. For years Sarah had
resisted it, thinking of the hardships and perils in the way of the
mover. Samson, a man of twenty-nine when he set out from his old home,
was said to be "always chasing the bird in the bush." He was never
content with the thing in hand. There were certain of their friends who
promised to come and join them when, at last, they should have found the
land of plenty. But most of the group that bade them good-by thought it
a foolish enterprise and spoke lightly of Samson when they were gone.
America has undervalued the brave souls who went west in wagons, without
whose sublime courage and endurance the plains would still be an unplowed
wilderness. Often we hear them set down as seedy, shiftless dreamers who
could not make a living at home. They were mostly the best blood of the
world and the noblest of God's missionaries. Who does not honor them
above the thrifty, comfort loving men and women who preferred to stay at
home, where risks were few, the supply of food sure and sufficient and
the consolations of friendship and religion always at hand. Samson and
Sarah preferred to enlist and take their places in the front battle line
of Civilization. They had read a little book called _The Country of the
Sangamon_. The latter was a word of the Pottawatomies meaning land of
plenty. It was the name of a river in Illinois draining "boundless,
flowery meadows of unexampled beauty and fertility, belted with timber,
blessed with shady groves, covered with game and mostly level, without a
stick or a stone to vex the plowman." Thither they were bound to take up
a section of government land.

They stopped for a visit with Elisha Howard and his wife, old friends
of theirs, who lived in the village of Malone, which was in Franklin
County, New York. There they traded their oxen for a team of horses. They
were large gray horses named Pete and Colonel. The latter was fat and
good-natured. His chief interest in life was food. Pete was always
looking for food and perils. Colonel was the near horse. Now and then
Samson threw a sheepskin over his back and put the boy on it and tramped
along within arm's reach of Joe's left leg. This was a great delight to
the little lad.

They proceeded at a better pace to the Black River country, toward which,
in the village of Canton, they tarried again for a visit with Captain
Moody and Silas Wright, both of whom had taught school in the town of
Vergennes.

They proceeded through DeKalb, Richville and Gouverneur and Antwerp and
on to the Sand Plains. They had gone far out of their way for a look at
these old friends of theirs.

Every day the children would ask many questions, as they rode along,
mainly about the beasts and birds in the dark shadows of the forest
through which they passed. These were answered patiently by their father
and mother and every answer led to other queries.

"You're a funny pair," said their father one day. "You have to turn over
every word we say to see what's under it. I used to be just like ye, used
to go out in the lot and tip over every stick and stone I could lift to
see the bugs and crickets run. You're always hopin' to see a bear or a
panther or a fairy run out from under my remarks."

"Wonder why we don't see no bears?" Joe asked. "'Cause they always see us
first or hear us comin'," said his father. "If you're goin' to see ol'
Uncle Bear ye got to pay the price of admission."

"What's that?" Joe asked.

"Got to go still and careful so you'll see him first. If this old wagon
didn't talk so loud and would kind o' go on its tiptoes maybe we'd see
him. He don't like to be seen. Seems so he was kind o' shamed of himself,
an' I wouldn't wonder if be was. He's done a lot o' things to be 'shamed
of."

"What's he done?" Joe asked.

"Ketched sheep and pigs and fawns and run off with 'em."

"What does he do with 'em?"

"Eats 'em up. Now you quit. Here's a lot o' rocks and mud and I got to
'tend to business. You tackle yer mother and chase her up and down the
hills a while and let me get my breath."

Samson's diary tells how, at the top of the long, steep hills he used to
cut a small tree by the roadside and tie its butt to the rear axle and
hang on to its branches while his wife drove the team. This held their
load, making an effective brake.

Traveling through the forest, as they had been doing for weeks, while the
day waned, they looked for a brookside on which they could pass the night
with water handy. Samson tethered, fed and watered their horses, and
while Sarah and the children built a fire and made tea and biscuits, he
was getting bait and catching fish in the stream.

"In a few minutes from the time I wet my hook a mess of trout would be
dressed and sizzling, with a piece of salt pork, in the pan, or it was a
bad day for fishing," he writes.

After supper the wagon was partly unloaded, the feather bed laid upon the
planks under the wagon roof and spread with blankets. Then Samson sang
songs and told stories or played upon the violin to amuse the family. The
violin invariably woke the birds in the tree-tops, and some, probably
thrushes or warblers or white throated sparrows, began twittering. Now
and then one would express his view of the disturbance with a little
phrase of song. Often the player paused to hear these musical whispers
"up in the gallery," as he was wont to call it.

Often if the others were weary and depressed he would dance merrily
around the fire, playing a lively tune, with Sambo glad to lend a helping
foot and much noise to the program. If mosquitos and flies were
troublesome Samson built smudges, filling their camp with the smoky
incense of dead leaves, in which often the flavor of pine and balsam was
mingled. By and by the violin was put away and all knelt by the fire
while Sarah prayed aloud for protection through the night. So it will be
seen that they carried with them their own little theater, church and
hotel.

Soon after darkness fell, Sarah and the children lay down for the night,
while Samson stretched out with his blankets by the fire in good weather,
the loaded musket and the dog Sambo lying beside him. Often the howling
of wolves in the distant forest kept them awake, and the dog muttering
and barking for hours.

Samson woke the camp at daylight and a merry song was his reveille while
he led the horses to their drink.

"Have a good night?" Sarah would ask.

"Perfect!" he was wont to answer. "But when the smudges went out the
mosquiters got to peckin' my face."

"Mine feels like a pincushion," Sarah would often answer. "Will you heat
up a little water for us to wash with?"

"You better believe I will. Two more hedge hogs last night, but Samba let
'em alone."

Sambo had got his mouth sored by hedge hogs some time before and had
learned better than to have any fuss with them.

When they set out in the morning Samson was wont to say to the little
lad, who generally sat beside him: "Well, my boy, what's the good word
this morning?" Whereupon Joe would say, parrot like:

"God help us all and make His face to shine upon us."

"Well said!" his father would answer, and so the day's journey began.

Often, near its end, they came to some lonely farmhouse. Always Samson
would stop and go to the door to ask about the roads, followed by little
Joe and Betsey with secret hopes. One of these hopes was related to
cookies and maple sugar and buttered bread and had been cherished since
an hour of good fortune early in the trip and encouraged by sundry
good-hearted women along the road. Another was the hope of seeing a
baby--mainly, it should be said, the hope of Betsey. Joe's interest was
merely an echo of hers. He regarded babies with an open mind, as it were,
for the opinions of his sister still had some weight with him, she being
a year and a half older than he, but babies invariably disappointed him,
their capabilities being so restricted. To be sure, they could make quite
a noise, and the painter was said to imitate it, but since Joe had
learned that they couldn't bite he had begun to lose respect for them.
Still, not knowing what might happen, he always took a look at every
baby.

The children were lifted out of the wagon to stretch their legs at
sloughs and houses. They were sure to be close behind the legs of their
father when he stood at a stranger's door. Then, the night being near,
they were always invited to put their horses in the barn and tarry until
next morning. This was due in part to the kindly look and voice of
Samson, but mostly to the wistful faces of the little children--a fact
unsuspected by their parents. What motherly heart could resist the silent
appeal of children's faces or fail to understand it? Those were memorable
nights for Sarah and Joe and Betsey. In a letter to her brother the woman
said:

"You don't know how good it seemed to see a woman and talk to her, and we
talked and talked until midnight, after all the rest were asleep. She let
me hold the baby in my lap until it was put to bed. How good it felt to
have a little warm body in my arms again and feel it breathing! In all my
life I never saw a prettier baby. It felt good to be in a real house and
sleep in a soft, warm bed and to eat jelly and cookies and fresh meat and
potatoes and bread and butter. Samson played for them and kept them
laughing with his stories until bedtime. They wouldn't take a cent and
gave us a dozen eggs in a basket and a piece of venison when we went
away. Their name is Sanford and I have promised to write to them. They
are good Christian folks and they say that maybe they will join us in the
land of plenty if we find it all we expect."

They had two rainy, cold days, with a northeast wind blowing and deep mud
in the roads. The children complained of the cold. After a few miles'
travel they stopped at an old hunter's camp facing a great mossy rock
near the road.

"Guess we'll stop here for a visit," said Samson.

"Who we goin' to visit?" Joe asked.

"The trees and the fairies," said his father. "Don't ye hear 'em askin'
us to stop? They say the wind is blowin' bad an' that we'd better stop
an' make some good weather. They offer us a house and a roof to cover it
and some wood to burn. I guess we'll be able to make our own sunshine in
a few minutes."

Samson peeled some bark and repaired the roof and, with his flint and
tinder and some fat pine, built a roaring fire against the rock and soon
had his family sitting, in its warm glow, under shelter. Near by was
another rude framework of poles set in crotches partly covered with bark
which, with a little repairing, made a sufficient shelter for Pete and
Colonel. Down by a little brook a few rods away he cut some balsams and
returned presently with his arms full of the fragrant boughs. These he
dried in the heat of the fire and spread in a thick mat on the ground
under the lean-to. It was now warm with heat, reflected from the side of
the great rock it faced. The light of the leaping flames fell upon the
travelers.

"Ye see ye can make yer own weather and fill it with sunshine if ye only
know how," said Samson, as he sat down and brushed a coal out of the
ashes and swiftly picked it up with his fingers and put it into the bowl
of his clay pipe. "Mother and I read in a book that the wood was full o'
sunlight all stored up and ready for us to use. Ye just set it afire and
out comes the warm sunlight for days like this. God takes pretty good
care of us--don't He?"

The heat of other fires had eaten away a few inches of the base of the
rock. Under its overhang some one had written with a black coal the words
"Bear Valley Camp." On this suggestion the children called for a bear
story, and lying back on the green mat of boughs, Samson told them of the
great bear of Camel's Hump which his father had slain, and many other
tales of the wilderness.

They lived two days in this fragrant, delightful shelter until the storm
had passed and the last of their corn meal had been fed to the horses.
They were never to forget the comfort and the grateful odors of their
camp in Bear Valley.

On a warm, bright day in the sand country after the storm they came to a
crude, half finished, frame house at the edge of a wide clearing. The
sand lay in drifts on one side of the road. It had evidently moved in the
last wind. A sickly vegetation covered the field. A ragged, barefooted
man and three scrawny, ill clad children stood in the dooryard. It was
noon-time. A mongrel dog, with a bit of the hound in him, came bounding
and barking toward the wagon and pitched upon Sambo and quickly got the
worst of it. Sambo, after much experience in self-defense, had learned
that the best way out of such trouble was to seize a leg and hang on.
This he did. The mongrel began to yelp. Samson lifted both dogs by the
backs of their necks, broke the hold of Sambo and tossed aside the
mongrel, who ran away whining.

"That reminds me of a bull that tackled a man over in Vermont," said he.
"The man had a club in his hand. He dodged and grabbed the bull's tail
and beat him all over the lot. As the bull roared, the man hollered:
'I'd like to know who began this fuss anyway.'"

The stranger laughed.

"Is that your house?" Samson asked.

The man stepped nearer and answered in a low, confidential tone:

"Say, mister, this is a combination poorhouse and idiot asylum. I am the
idiot. These are the poor."

He pointed to the children.

"You don't talk like an idiot," said Samson.

The man looked around and leaned over the wheel as if about to impart a
secret.

"Say, I'll tell ye," he said in a low tone. "A real, first-class idiot
never does. You ought to see my actions."

"This land is an indication that you're right," Samson laughed.

"It proves it," the stranger whispered.

"Have you any water here?" Samson asked.

The stranger leaned nearer and said in his most confidential tone: "Say,
mister, it's about the best in the United States. Right over yonder in
the edge o' the woods--a spring-cold as ice--Simon-pure water. 'Bout the
only thing this land'll raise is water."

"This land looks to me about as valuable as so much sheet lightnin' and
I guess it can move just about as quick," said Samson.

The stranger answered in a low tone: "Say, I'll tell ye, it's a wild
cow--don't stand still long 'nough to give ye time to git anything out of
it. I've toiled and prayed, but it's hard to get much out of it."

"Praying won't do this land any good," Samson answered. "What it needs
is manure and plenty of it. You can't raise anything here but fleas. It
isn't decent to expect God to help run a flea farm. He knows too much for
that, and if you keep it up He'll lose all respect for ye. If you were to
buy another farm and bring it here and put it down on top o' this one,
you could probably make a living. I wouldn't like to live where the wind
could dig my potatoes."

Again the stranger leaned toward Samson and said in a half-whisper: "Say,
mister, I wouldn't want you to mention it, but talkin' o' fleas, I'm like
a dog with so many of 'em that he don't have time to eat. Somebody has
got to soap him or he'll die. You see, I traded my farm over in Vermont
for five hundred acres o' this sheet lightnin', unsight an' unseen. We
was all crazy to go West an' here we are. If it wasn't for the deer an'
the fish I guess we'd 'a' starved to death long ago."

"Where did ye come from?"

"Orwell, Vermont."

"What's yer name?"

"Henry Brimstead," the stranger whispered.

"Son of Elijah Brimstead?"

"Yes, sir."

Samson took his hand and shook it warmly. "Well, I declare!" he
exclaimed. "Elijah Brimstead was a friend o' my father."

"Who are you?" Brimstead asked.

"I'm one o' the Traylors o' Vergennes."

"My father used to buy cattle of Henry Traylor."

"Henry was my father. Haven't you let 'em know about your bad luck?"

The man resumed his tone of confidence. "Say, I'll tell ye," he answered.
"A man that's as big a fool as I am ought not to advertise it. A brain
that has treated its owner as shameful as mine has treated me should be
compelled to do its own thinkin' er die. I've invented some things that
may sell. I've been hopin' my luck would turn."

"It'll turn when you turn it," Samson assured him.

Brimstead thoughtfully scuffed the sand with his bare foot. In half a
moment he stepped to the wheel and imparted this secret: "Say, mister, if
you've any more doubt o' my mental condition, I'm goin' to tell ye that
they've discovered valuable ore in my land two miles back o' this road,
an' I'm hopin' to make a fortune. Don't that prove my case?"

"Any man that puts his faith in the bowels of the earth can have my
vote," said Samson.

Brimstead leaned close to Samson's ear and said in a tone scarcely
audible:

"My brother Robert has his own idiot asylum. It's a real handsome one an'
he has made it pay, but I wouldn't swap with him."

Samson smiled, remembering that Robert had a liquor store. "Look here,
Henry Brimstead, we're hungry," he said. "If ye furnish the water, we'll
skirmish around for bread and give ye as good a dinner as ye ever had in
yer life."

Henry took the horses to his barn and watered and fed them. Then he
brought two pails of water from the spring. Meanwhile Samson started
a fire in a grove of small poplars by the roadside and began broiling
venison, and Sarah got out the bread board and the flour and the
rolling-pin and the teapot. As she waited for the water she called the
three strange children to her side. The oldest was a girl of thirteen,
with a face uncommonly refined and attractive. In spite of her threadbare
clothes, she had a neat and cleanly look and gentle manners. The youngest
was a boy of four. They were a pathetic trio.

Joe had been telling them about Santa Claus and showing them a jack-knife
which had come down the chimney in his pack at Christmas time and
describing a dress of his mother's that had gold and silver buttons
on it. The little six-year-old girl had asked him many questions about
his mother and had stood for some moments looking up into Sarah's face.
The girl timidly felt the dress and hair of the woman and touched her
wedding ring.

"Come and wash your faces and hands," Joe demanded as soon as the water
came.

This they did while he poured from a dipper.

"Nice people always wash before they eat," he reminded them.

Then he showed them his bear stick, with the assurance that it had killed
a hedge hog, omitting the unimportant fact that his father had wielded
it. The ferocity of hedge hogs was a subject on which he had large
information. He told how one of their party had come near getting his
skin sewed on a barn door. A hedge hog had come and asked Sambo if he
would have some needles. Sambo had never seen a hedge hog, so he said
that he guessed he would.

Then the hedge hog said: "Help yourself."

Sambo went to take some and just got his face full of 'em so it looked
like a head o' barley. They had to be took out with a pinchers or they'd
'a' sewed his skin on to a barn door. That was their game. They tried to
sew everybody's skin on a barn door.

Every night the hedge hog came around and said: "Needles, needles,
anybody want some needles."

Now Sambo always answered: "No thank you, I've had enough."

"Where's your mother?" Sarah asked of the ten-year-old girl.

"Dead. Died when my little brother was born."

"Who takes care of you?"

"Father and--God. Father says God does most of it."

"Oh dear!" Sarah exclaimed, with a look of pity.

They had a good dinner of fresh biscuit and honey and venison and eggs
and tea. While they were eating Samson told Brimstead of the land of
plenty.

After dinner, while Brimstead was bringing the team, one of his children,
the blonde, pale, tattered little girl of six, climbed into the wagon
seat and sat holding a small rag doll, which Sarah had given her. When
they were ready to go she stubbornly refused to get down.

"I'm goin' away," she said. "I'm goin' aw-a-ay off to find my mother. I
don't like this place. There ain't no Santa Claus here. I'm goin' away."

She clung to the wagon seat and cried loudly when her father took her
down.

"Ain't that enough to break a man's heart?" he said with a sorrowful
look.

Then Samson turned to Brimstead and asked:

"Look here, Henry Brimstead, are you a drinking man? Honor bright now."

"Never drink a thing but water and tea."

"Do you know of anybody who'll give ye anything for what you own here?"

"There's a man in the next town who offered me three hundred and fifty
dollars for my interest."

"How far is it?"

"Three miles."

"Come along with us and get the money if you can. I'll help ye fit up and
go where ye can earn a living."

"I'd like to, but my horse is lame and I can't leave the children."

"Put 'em right in this wagon and come on. If there's a livery in the
place, I'll send ye home."

So the children rode in the wagon and Samson and Brimstead walked, while
Sarah drove the team to the next village. There the good woman bought new
clothes for the whole Brimstead family and Brimstead sold his interest in
the sand plains and bought a good pair of horses, with harness and some
cloth for a wagon cover, and had fifty dollars in his pocket and a new
look in his face. He put his children on the backs of the horses and led
them to his old home, with a sack of provisions on his shoulder. He was
to take the track of the Traylors next day and begin his journey to the
shores of the Sangamon.

Samson had asked about him in the village and learned that he was an
honest man who had suffered bad luck. A neighbor's wife had taken his
children for two years, but bad health had compelled her to give them up.

"God does the most of it," Sarah quoted from the young girl, as they rode
on. "I guess He's saved 'em from the poorhouse to-day. I hope they'll
ketch up with us. I'd like to look after those children a little. They
need a mother so."

"They'll ketch up all right," said Samson. "We're loaded heavier than
they'll be and goin' purty slow. They'll be leavin' No Santa Claus Land
to-morrow mornin'. Seems so God spoke to me when that girl said there
wa'n't no Santa Claus there."

"No Santa Claus Land is a good name for it," said Sarah.

They got into a bad swale that afternoon and Samson had to cut some
corduroy to make a footing for team and wagon and do much prying with the
end of a heavy pole under the front axle. By and by the horses pulled
them out.

"When ol' Colonel bends his neck things have to move, even if he is up to
his belly in the mud," said Samson.

As the day waned they came to a river in the deep woods. It was an
exquisite bit of forest with the bells of a hermit thrush ringing in one
of its towers. Their call and the low song of the river were the only
sounds in the silence. The glow of the setting sun which lighted the
western windows of the forest had a color like that of the music-golden.
Long shafts of it fell through the tree columns upon the road here and
there. Our weary travelers stopped on the rude plank bridge that crossed
the river. Odors of balsam and pine and tamarack came in a light, cool
breeze up the river valley.

"It smells like Bear Valley," said Sarah.

"What was that poetry you learned for the church party?" Samson asked.

"I guess the part of it you're thinking of is:

  'And west winds with musky wing
  Down the cedarn alleys fling
  'Nard and Cassia's balmy smells.'"

"That's it," said Samson. "I guess we'll stop at this tavern till
to-morrow."

Joe was asleep and they laid him on the blankets until supper was ready.

Soon after supper Samson shot a deer which had waded into the rapids.
Fortunately, it made the opposite shore before it fell. All hands spent
that evening dressing the deer and jerking the best of the meat. This
they did by cutting the meat into strips about the size of a man's hand
and salting and laying it on a rack, some two feet above a slow fire, and
covering it with green boughs. The heat and smoke dried the meat in the
course of two or three hours and gave it a fine flavor. Delicious beyond
any kind of meat is venison treated in this manner. If kept dry, it will
retain its flavor and its sweetness for a month or more.

Samson was busy with this process long after the others had gone to bed.
When it was nearly finished he left the meat on the rack, the fire
beneath it having burned low, crossed the river to the wagon, got his
blanket, reloaded his gun and lay down to sleep with the dog beside him.

Some hours later he was awakened by "a kind of a bull beller," as he
described it. The dog ran barking across the river. Samson seized the gun
and followed him. The first dim light of the morning showed through the
tree-tops. Some big animal was growling and roaring and rolling over and
over in a clump of bushes near the meat rack. In half a moment it rolled
out upon the open ground near Samson. The latter could now see that it
was a large black bear engaged in a desperate struggle with the pack
basket. The bear had forced his great head into the top of it and its
hoop had got a firm hold on his neck. He was sniffing and growling and
shaking his head and striking with both fore paws to free himself. Sambo
had laid hold of his stub tail and the bear was trying in vain to reach
him, with the dog dodging as he held on. The movements of both were so
lively that Samson had to step like a dancer to keep clear of them. The
bear, in sore trouble, leaped toward him and the swaying basket touched
the side of the man. Back into the bushes and out again they struggled,
Sambo keeping his hold. A more curious and ludicrous sight never
gladdened the eye of a hunter. Samson had found it hard to get a chance
to shoot at the noisy, swift torrent of fur. Suddenly the bear rose on
his hind legs and let out an angry woof and gave the basket a terrific
shaking. In this brief pause a ball from the rifle went to his heart and
he fell. Samson jumped forward, seized the dog's collar and pulled him
away while the bear struggled in his death throes. Then the man started
for camp, while his great laugh woke distant echoes in the forest.

"Bear steak for dinner!" he shouted to Sarah and the children, who stood
shivering with fright on the bridge.

Again his laughter filled the woods with sound.

"Gracious Peter! What in the world was it?" Sarah asked.

"Well, ye see, ol' Uncle Bear came to steal our bacon an' the bacon kind
o' stole him," said Samson, between peals of laughter, the infection of
which went to the heart and lips of every member of the family. "Shoved
his head into the pack basket and the pack basket wouldn't let go. It
said: 'This is the first time I ever swallered a bear, an' if you don't
mind I'll stay on the outside. I kind o' like you.' But the bear did
mind. He didn't want to be et up by a basket. He'd always done the
swallerin' himself an' he hollered an' swore at the basket an' tried to
scare it off. Oh, I tell ye he was awful sassy and impudent to that old
thing, but it hung on and the way he flounced around, with Sambo clingin'
to his tail, and the bear thinkin' that he was bein' swallered at both
ends, was awful. Come an' see him."

They went to the bear, now dead. Sambo ran ahead of them and laid hold of
the bear's stump of a tail and shook it savagely, as if inclined to take
too much credit upon himself. The hoop of the pack basket had so tight a
hold upon the bear's neck that it took a strong pull to get it back over
his head. One side of the basket had been protected from the bear's claws
by a pad of sole leather--the side which, when the basket was in use,
rested on the back of its carrier. His claws had cut nearly through it
and torn a carrying strap into shreds.

"I guess he'd 'a' tore off his veil if the dog had give him a little more
time," said Samson. "Ol' Uncle Bear had trouble at both ends and didn't
know which way to turn."

A good-sized piece of bacon still, lay in the bottom of the basket.

"I wouldn't wonder if that would taste pretty beary now," said Samson, as
he surveyed the bacon. "It's been sneezed at and growled on so much.
Betsey, you take that down to the shore o' the river there and wash the
bear out of it. I'll skin him while yer mother is gettin' breakfast.
There's plenty o' live coals under the venison rack, I guess."

They set out rather late that morning. As usual, Joe stood by the head of
Colonel while the latter lapped brown sugar from the timid palm of the
boy. Then the horse was wont to touch the face of Joe with his big, hairy
lips as a tribute to his generosity. Colonel had seemed to acquire a
singular attachment for the boy and the dog, while Pete distrusted both
of them. He had never a moment's leisure, anyhow, being always busy with
his work or the flies. A few breaks in the pack basket had been repaired
with green withes. It creaked with its load of jerked venison when put
aboard. The meat of the bear was nicely wrapped in his hide and placed
beside it. They sold meat and hide and bounty rights in the next village
they reached for thirty long shillings.

"That cheers up the ol' weasel," Samson declared, as they went on.

"He got a hard knock after we met the Brimsteads," said Sarah.

"Yes, ma'am! and I'm not sorry either. He's got to come out of his hole
once in a while. I tell ye God kind o' spoke to us back there in No Santa
Claus Land. He kind o' spoke to us."

After a little silence, Sarah said: "I guess He's apt to speak in the
voices of little children."

His weasel was a dried pig's bladder of unusual size in which he carried
his money. Samson had brought with him a fairly good quantity of money
for those days. In a smaller bladder he carried his tobacco.

Farther on the boy got a sore throat. Sarah bound a slice of pork around
it and Samson built a camp by the roadside, in which, after a good fire
was started, they gave him a hemlock sweat. This they did by steeping
hemlock in pails of hot water and, while the patient sat in a chair by
the fireside, a blanket was spread about him and pinned close to his
neck. Under the blanket they put the pails of steaming hemlock tea. After
his sweat and a day and night in bed, with a warm fire burning in front
of the shanty, Joe was able to resume his seat in the wagon. They spoke
of the Brimsteads and thought it strange that they had not come along.

On the twenty-ninth day after their journey began they came in sight of
the beautiful green valley of the Mohawk. As they looked from the hills
they saw the roof of the forest dipping down to the river shores and
stretching far to the east and west and broken, here and there, by small
clearings. Soon they could see the smoke and spires of the thriving
village of Utica.




CHAPTER II

WHEREIN IS RECORDED THE VIVID IMPRESSION MADE UPON THE TRAVELERS BY THEIR
VIEW OF A STEAM ENGINE AND OF THE FAMOUS ERIE CANAL. WHEREIN, ALSO, IS A
BRIEF ACCOUNT OF SUNDRY CURIOUS CHARACTERS MET ON THE ROAD AND AT A
CELEBRATION OF THE FOURTH OF JULY ON THE BIG WATERWAY.


At Utica they bought provisions and a tin trumpet for Joe, and a doll
with a real porcelain face for Betsey, and turned into the great main
thoroughfare of the north leading eastward to Boston and westward to
a shore of the midland seas. This road was once the great trail of the
Iroquois, by them called the Long House, because it had reached from the
Hudson to Lake Erie, and in their day had been well roofed with foliage.
Here the travelers got their first view of a steam engine. The latter
stood puffing and smoking near the village of Utica, to the horror and
amazement of the team and the great excitement of those in the wagon. The
boy clung to his father for fear of it.

Samson longed to get out of the wagon and take a close look at the noisy
monster, but his horses were rearing in their haste to get away, and even
a short stop was impossible. Sambo, with his tail between his legs, ran
ahead, in a panic, and took refuge in some bushes by the roadside.

"What was that, father?" the boy asked when the horses had ceased to
worry over this new peril.

"A steam engyne," he answered. "Sarah, did ye get a good look at it?"

"Yes; if that don't beat all the newfangled notions I ever heard of," she
exclaimed.

"It's just begun doin' business," said Samson.

"What does it do?" Joe asked.

"On a railroad track it can grab hold of a house full o' folks and run
off with it. Goes like the wind, too."

"Does it eat 'em up?" Joe asked.

"No. It eats wood and oil and keeps yellin' for more. I guess it could
eat a cord o' wood and wash it down with half a bucket o' castor oil in
about five minutes. It snatches folks away to some place and drops 'em.
I guess it must make their hair stand up and their teeth chatter."

"Does it hurt anybody?" Joe asked hopefully.

"Well, sir, if anybody wanted to be hurt and got in its way, I rather
guess he'd succeed purty well. It's powerful. Why, if a man was to ketch
hold of the tail of a locomotive, and hang on, it would jerk the toe
nails right off him."

Joe began to have great respect for locomotives.

Soon they came in view of the famous Erie Canal, hard by the road.
Through it the grain of the far West had just begun moving eastward in a
tide that was flowing from April to December. Big barges, drawn by mules
and horses on its shore, were cutting the still waters of the canal. They
stopped and looked at the barges and the long tow ropes and the tugging
animals.

"There is a real artificial river, hundreds o' miles long, hand made of
the best material, water tight, no snags or rocks or other imperfections,
durability guaranteed," said Samson. "It has made the name of DeWitt
Clinton known everywhere."

"I wonder what next!" Sarah exclaimed.

They met many teams and passed other movers going west, and some
prosperous farms on a road wider and smoother than any they had traveled.
They camped that night, close by the river, with a Connecticut family on
its way to Ohio with a great load of household furniture on one wagon and
seven children in another. There were merry hours for the young, and
pleasant visiting between the older folk that evening at the fireside.
There was much talk among the latter about the great Erie Canal.

So they fared along through Canandaigua and across the Genesee to the
village of Rochester and on through Lewiston and up the Niagara River to
the Falls, and camped where they could see the great water flood and hear
its muffled thunder. When nearing the latter they overtook a family of
poor Irish emigrants, of the name of Flanagan, who shared their camp site
at the Falls. The Flanagans were on their way to Michigan and had come
from the old country three years before and settled in Broome County, New
York. They, too, were on their way to a land of better promise. Among
them was a rugged, freckled, red-headed lad, well along in his teens, of
the name of Dennis, who wore a tall beaver hat, tilted saucily on one
side of his head, and a ragged blue coat with brass buttons, as he walked
beside the oxen, whip in hand, with trousers tucked in the tops of his
big cowhide boots. There was also a handsome young man in this party of
the name of John McNeil, who wore a ruffled shirt and swallow-tail coat,
now much soiled by the journey. He listened to Samson's account of the
Sangamon country and said that he thought he would go there. He had
traded hats on the way with Dennis, who had been deeply impressed by the
majestic look of the beaver and had given a silver breast pin and fifteen
shillings to boot.

A jolly lad was Dennis, who danced jigs, on a flat rock by the riverside,
as Samson played _The Irish Washerman_ and _The Fisher's Hornpipe_. In
the midst of the fun a puff of wind snatched the tall beaver hat from his
head and whirled it over the side of the cliff into the foliage of a
clump of cedars growing out of the steep cliff-side, ten feet or so below
its top. Before any one could stop him the brave Irish lad had scrambled
down the steep to the cedars--a place of some peril, for they hung over
a precipice more than a hundred feet deep above the river. He got his
treasure, but Samson had to help him back with a rope.

The latter told of the veiled bear, and when the story was finished he
said to the Irish lad: "It will not do you any harm to remember that it
is easier to get into trouble than to get out of it. In my opinion one
clean-hearted Irish boy is worth more than all the beaver hats in
creation."

Sarah gave the Irish family a good supply of cookies and jerked venison
before she bade them good-by.

When our travelers left, next morning, they stopped for a last look at
the great Falls.

"Children," said Samson, "I want you to take a good look at that. It's
the most wonderful thing in the world and maybe you'll never see it
again."

"The Indians used to think that the Great Spirit was in this river," said
Sarah.

"Kind o' seems to me they were right," Samson remarked thoughtfully.
"Kind o' seems as if the great spirit of America was in that water. It
moves on in the way it wills and nothing can stop it. Everything in its
current goes along with it."

"And only the strong can stand the journey," said Sarah.

These words were no doubt inspired by an ache in her bones. A hard seat
and the ceaseless jolting of the wagon through long, hot, dusty days had
wearied them. Even their hearts were getting sore as they thought of the
endless reaches of the roads ahead. Samson stuffed a sack with straw and
put it under her and the children on the seat. At a word of complaint he
was wont to say:

"I know it's awful tiresome, but we got to have patience. We're goin'
to get used to it and have a wonderful lot of fun. The time'll pass
quick--you see."

Then he would sing and get them all laughing with some curious bit of
drollery. They spent the night of July third at a tavern in Buffalo, then
a busy, crude and rapidly growing center for the shipping east and west.
Next day there was to be a great celebration of the Fourth of July in
Buffalo and our travelers had stopped there to witness it. The bells
began to ring and the cannon to bomb at sunrise. It was a day of great
excitement for the west-bound travelers. The horses trembled in their
stalls. Sambo took refuge in Colonel's manger and would not come out.

There were many emigrants on their way to the far West in the crowd--men,
women and children and babies in arms--Irish, English, Germans and
Yankees. There were also well dressed, handsome young men from the
colleges of New England going out to be missionaries "between the desert
and the sown."

Buffalo, on the edge of the midland seas, had the flavor of the rank, new
soil in it those days--and especially that day, when it was thronged with
rough coated and rougher tongued, swearing men on a holiday, stevedores
and boatmen off the lakes and rivers of the middle border--some of whom
had had their training on the Ohio and Mississippi. There was much
drunkenness and fighting in the crowded streets. Some of the carriers and
handlers of American commerce vented their enthusiasm in song.

In Samson's diary was the refrain of one of these old lake songs, which
he had set down, as best he could, after the event:

  "Then here's three cheers for the skipper an' his crew,
     Give 'er the wind an' let 'er go, for the boys'll put 'er through;
   I thought 'twould blow the whiskers right off o' you an' me,
     On our passage up from Buffalo to Milwaukee-ee."

Each of these rough men had dressed to his own fancy. Many wore fine
boots of calf skin with red tops, drawn over their trousers, and high
heels and blue and red shirts and broad brimmed straw hats. A long haired
man, in buckskin leggings and moccasins, with a knife at his belt and too
much whisky beneath it, amused a crowd by a loud proclamation of his own
reckless and redoubtable character and a louder appeal for a chance to
put it in action. It was a droll bit of bragging and merely intended, as
the chronicler informs us, to raise a laugh.

"Here I be half man an' half alligator," he shouted. "Oh, I'm one o' yer
tough kind, live forever an' then turn into a hickory post. I've just
crept out o' the ma'shes of ol' Kentuck. I'm only a yearlin', but cuss
me if I don't think I can whip anybody in this part o' the country. I'm
the chap that towed the Broadhorn up Salt River where the snags was so
thick a fish couldn't swim without rubbin' his scales off. Cock a doodle
doo! I'm the infant that refused his milk before his eyes was open an'
called for a bottle o' rum. Talk about grinnin' the bark off a tree--that
ain't nothin'. One look o' mine would raise a blister on a bull's heel.
Cock a doodle doo! (slapping his thighs). Gol darn it! Ain't there some
one that dast come up an' collar me? It would just please my vitals if
there was some man here who could split me into shoe pegs. I deserve it
if ever a man did. I'll have to go home an' have another settlement with
ol' Bill Sims. He's purty well gouged up, an' ain't but one ear, but he's
willin' to do his best. That's somethin'. It kind o' stays yer appetite,
an' I suppose that's all a man like me can expect in this world o'
sorrow."

At this point a tall, raw-boned woman in "a brindle dress" (to quote the
phrase of Samson), wearing a large gilt pin just below her collar, with
an orthographic design which spelled the name Minnie, approached the hero
and boldly boxed his ears.

"Licked at last," he shouted as he picked up his hat, dislodged by the
violence he had suffered, and retired from the scene with a good-natured
laugh.

Sarah was a bit dismayed by the behavior of these rough forerunners of
civilization.

"Don't worry," said Samson, as they were driving away on the Lake Road
next morning. "The lake and river boatmen are the roughest fellers in the
West, and they're not half as bad as they look an' talk. Their deviltry
is all on the outside. They tell me that there isn't one o' those boys
who wouldn't give his life to help a woman, an' I guess it's so."

They had the lake view and its cool breeze on their way to Silver Creek,
Dunkirk and Erie, and a rough way it was in those days.

Enough has been written of this long and wearisome journey, but the worst
of it was ahead of them--much the worst of it--in the swamp flats of Ohio
and Indiana. In one of the former a wagon wheel broke down, and that day
Sarah began to shake with ague and burn with fever. Samson built a rude
camp by the roadside, put Sarah into bed under its cover and started for
the nearest village on Colonel's back.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I shall never forget that day spent in a lonely part of the woods," the
good woman wrote to her brother. "It endeared the children to me more
than any day I can remember. They brought water from the creek, a great
quantity of which I drank, and bathed my aching head and told me stories
and cheered me in every way they could. Joe had his bear stick handy and
his plans for bears or wolves or Indians. Samson had made some nails at a
smithy in Pennsylvania. Joe managed to drive one of them through an end
of his bear stick and made, as he thought, a formidable weapon. With his
nail he hoped to penetrate the bear's eye. He had also put some bacon in
the bottom of the pack basket, knowing the liking of the basket for
bears. My faith in God's protection was perfect and in spite of my misery
the children were a great comfort. In the middle of the afternoon Samson
returned with a doctor and some tools and a stick of seasoned timber. How
good he looked when he came and knelt by my bed and kissed me! This is a
hard journey, but a woman can bear anything with such a man. The doctor
gave me Sapington's fever pills and said I would be all right in three
days, and I was.

"Late that afternoon it began to rain. Samson was singing as he worked on
his wheel. A traveler came along on horseback and saw our plight. He was
a young missionary going west. Samson began to joke with him.

"'You're a happy man for one in so much trouble,' said the stranger.

"Then I heard Samson say: 'Well, sir, I'm in a fix where happiness is
absolutely necessary. It's like grease on the wagon wheels--we couldn't
go on without it. When we need anything we make it if we can. My wife is
sick and the wagon is broke and it's raining and night is near in a
lonesome country, and it ain't a real good time for me to be down in the
mouth--is it now? We haven't broke any bones or had an earthquake or been
scalped by Indians, so there's some room for happiness.'

"'Look here, stranger--I like you,' said the man. 'If there's anything
I can do to help ye, I'll stop a while.'"

       *       *       *       *       *

He spent the night with them and helped mend the felly and set the tire.

The fever and ague passed from one to another and all were sick before
the journey ended, although Samson kept the reins in hand through his
misery. There were many breaks to mend, but Samson's ingenuity was always
equal to the task.

One day, near nightfall, they were overtaken by a tall, handsome Yankee
lad riding a pony. His pony stopped beside the wagon and looked toward
the travelers as if appealing for help. The boy was pointing toward the
horizon and muttering. Sarah saw at once that his mind was wandering in
the delirium of fever. She got out of the wagon and took his hand. The
moment she did so he began crying like a child.

"This boy is sick," she said to Samson, who came and helped him off his
horse. They camped for the night and put the boy to bed and gave him
medicine and tender care. He was too sick to travel next day. The
Traylors stayed with him and nursed the lad until he was able to go on.
He was from Niagara County, New York, and his name was Harry Needles.
His mother had died when he was ten and his father had married again. He
had not been happy in his home after that and his father had given him
a pony and a hundred dollars and sent him away to seek his own fortune.
Homesick and lonely and ill, and just going west with a sublime faith
that the West would somehow provide for him, he might even have
perished on the way if he had not fallen in with friendly people. His
story had touched the heart of Sarah and Samson. He was a big, green,
gentle-hearted country boy who had set out filled with hope and the love
of adventure. Sarah found pleasure in mothering the poor lad, and so it
happened that he became one of their little party. He was helpful and
good-natured and had sundry arts that pleased the children. The man and
the woman liked the big, honest lad.

One day he said to Samson: "I hope you won't mind if I go along with you,
sir."

"Glad to have you with us," said Samson. "We've talked it over. If you
want to, you can come along with us and our home shall be yours and I'll
do what's right by you."

They fared along through Indiana and over the wide savannas of Illinois,
and on the ninety-seventh day of their journey they drove through
rolling, grassy, flowering prairies and up a long, hard hill to the
small log cabin settlement of New Salem, Illinois, on the shore of the
Sangamon. They halted about noon in the middle of this little prairie
village, opposite a small clapboarded house. A sign hung over its door
which bore the rudely lettered words: "Rutledge's Tavern."

A long, slim, stoop-shouldered young man sat in the shade of an oak tree
that stood near a corner of the tavern, with a number of children playing
around him. He had sat leaning against the tree trunk reading a book. He
had risen as they came near and stood looking at them, with the book
under his arm. Samson says in his diary that he looked like "an untrimmed
yearling colt about sixteen hands high. He got up slow and kept rising
till his bush of black tousled hair was six feet four above the ground.
Then he put on an old straw hat without any band on it. He reminded me of
Philemon Baker's fish rod, he was that narrer. For humliness I'd match
him against the world. His hide was kind o' yaller and leathery. I could
see he was still in the gristle--a little over twenty--but his face was
marked up by worry and weather like a man's. I never saw anybody so long
between joints. Don't hardly see how he could tell when his feet got
cold."

He wore a hickory shirt without a collar or coat or jacket. One suspender
held up his coarse, linsey trousers, the legs of which fitted closely and
came only to a blue yarn zone above his heavy cowhide shoes. Samson
writes that he "fetched a sneeze and wiped his big nose with a red
handkerchief" as he stood surveying them in silence, while Dr. John
Allen, who had sat on the door-step reading a paper--a kindly faced man
of middle age with a short white beard under his chin--greeted them
cheerfully.

The withering sunlight of a day late in August fell upon the dusty
street, now almost deserted. Faces at the doors and windows of the little
houses were looking out at them. Two ragged boys and a ginger colored dog
came running toward the wagon. The latter and Sambo surveyed each other
with raised hair and began scratching the earth, straight legged, whining
meanwhile, and in a moment began to play together. A man in blue jeans
who sat on the veranda of a store opposite, leaning against its wall,
stopped whittling and shut his jack-knife.

"Where do ye hail from?" the Doctor asked.

"Vermont," said Samson.

"All the way in that wagon?"

"Yes, sir."

"I guess you're made o' the right stuff," said the Doctor. "Where ye
bound?"

"Don't know exactly. Going to take up a claim somewhere."

"There's no better country than right here. This is the Canaan of
America. We need people like you. Unhitch your team and have some dinner
and we'll talk things over after you're rested. I'm the doctor here and I
ride all over this part o' the country. I reckon I know it pretty well."

A woman in a neat calico dress came out of the door--a strong built and
rather well favored woman with blonde hair and dark eyes.

"Mrs. Rutledge, these are travelers from the East," said the Doctor.
"Give 'em some dinner, and if they can't pay for it, I can. They've come
all the way from Vermont."

"Good land! Come right in an' rest yerselves. Abe, you show the gentleman
where to put his horses an' lend him a hand."

Abe extended his long arm toward Samson and said "Howdy" as they shook
hands.

"When his big hand got hold of mine, I kind of felt his timber," Samson
writes. "I says to myself, 'There's a man it would be hard to tip over in
a rassle.'"

"What's yer name? How long ye been travelin'? My conscience! Ain't ye
wore out?" the hospitable Mrs. Rutledge was asking as she went into the
house with Sarah and the children. "You go and mix up with the little
ones and let yer mother rest while I git dinner," she said to Joe and
Betsey, and added as she took Sarah's shawl and bonnet: "You lop down an'
rest yerself while I'm flyin' around the fire."

"Come all the way from Vermont?" Abe asked as he and Samson were
unhitching.

"Yes, sir."

"By jing!" the slim giant exclaimed. "I reckon you feel like throwin' off
yer harness an' takin' a roll in the grass."




CHAPTER III

WHEREIN THE READER IS INTRODUCED TO OFFUT'S STORE AND HIS CLERK ABE, AND
THE SCHOLAR JACK KELSO AND HIS CABIN AND HIS DAUGHTER BIM, AND GETS A
FIRST LOOK AT LINCOLN.


They had a dinner of prairie thickens and roast venison, flavored with
wild grape jelly, and creamed potatoes and cookies and doughnuts and
raisin pie. It was a well cooked dinner, served on white linen, in a
clean room, and while they were eating, the sympathetic landlady stood by
the table, eager to learn of their travels and to make them feel at home.
The good food and their kindly welcome and the beauty of the rolling,
wooded prairies softened the regret which had been growing in their
hearts, and which only the children had dared to express.

"Perhaps we haven't made a mistake after all," Sarah whispered when the
dinner was over. "I like these people and the prairies are beautiful."

"It is the land of plenty at last," said Samson, as they came
out-of-doors. "It is even better than I thought."

"As Douglas Jerrold said of Australia: 'Tickle it with a hoe and it
laughs with a harvest,'" said Dr. Allen, who still sat in the shaded
dooryard, smoking his pipe. "I have an extra horse and saddle. Suppose
you leave the family with Mrs. Rutledge and ride around with me a little
this afternoon. I can show you how the land lies off to the west of us,
and to-morrow we'll look at the other side."

"Thank you--I want to look around here a little," said Samson. "What's
the name of this place?"

"New Salem. We call it a village. It has a mill, a carding machine, a
tavern, a schoolhouse, five stores, fourteen houses, two or three men of
genius, and a noisy dam. You will hear other damns, if you stay here long
enough, but they don't amount to much. It's a crude but growing place and
soon it will have all the embellishments of civilized life."

That evening many of the inhabitants of the little village came to the
tavern to see the travelers and were introduced by Dr. Allen. Most of
them had come from Kentucky, although there were two Yankee families who
had moved on from Ohio.

"These are good folks," said the Doctor. "There are others who are not so
good. I could show you some pretty rough customers at Clary's Grove, not
far from here. We have to take things as they are and do our best to make
'em better."

"Any Indians?" Sarah asked.

"You see one now and then, but they're peaceable. Most of 'em have gone
with the buffalos--farther west. We have make-believe Indians--some
reckless white boys who come whooping into the village, half crazy with
drink, once in a while. They're not so bad as they seem to be. We'll have
to do a little missionary work with them. The Indians have left their
imitators all over the West, but they only make a loud noise. That will
pass away soon. It's a noisy land. Now and then a circuit rider gets here
and preaches to us. You'll hear the Reverend Stephen Nuckles if you
settle in these parts. He can holler louder than any man in the state."

"You bet he can holler some when he gits fixed for it," said Abe, who sat
near the open door.

"He's for them that need scarin'. The man that don't need that has to be
his own preacher here and sow and reap his own morality. He can make
himself just as much of a saint as he pleases."

"If he has the raw material to work with," Abe interposed.

"The self-made saint is the only kind I believe in," said Samson.

"We haven't any Erie Canal to Heaven, with the minister towin' us along,"
said Abe. "There's some that say it's only fifteen miles to Springfield,
but the man that walks it knows better."

The tavern was the only house in New Salem with stairs in it. Stairs so
steep, as Samson writes, that "they were first cousins to the ladder."
There were four small rooms above them. Two of these were separated by
a partition of cloth hanging from the rafters. In each was a bed and
bedstead and smaller beds on the floor. In case there were a number of
adult guests the bedstead was screened with sheets hung upon strings. In
one of these rooms the travelers had a night of refreshing sleep.

After riding two days with the Doctor, Samson bought the claim of one
Isaac Gollaher to a half section of land a little more than a mile from
the western end of the village. He chose a site for his house on the edge
of an open prairie.

"Now we'll go over and see Abe," said Dr. Allen, after the deal was made.
"He's the best man with an axe and a saw in this part of the country. He
clerks for Mr. Offut. Abe Lincoln is one of the best fellows that ever
lived--a rough diamond just out of the great mine of the West, that only
needs to be cut and polished."

Denton Offut's store was a small log structure about twenty by twenty
which stood near the brow of the hill east of Rutledge's Tavern. When
they entered it Abe lay at full length on the counter, his head resting
on a bolt of blue denim as he studied a book in his hand. He wore the
same shirt and one suspender and linsey trousers which he had worn in the
dooryard of the tavern, but his feet were covered only by his blue yarn
socks.

It was a general store full of exotic flavors, chiefly those of tea,
coffee, whisky, tobacco, muscovado sugar and molasses. There was a
counter on each side. Bolts of cloth, mostly calico, were piled on the
far end of the right counter as one entered and the near end held a show
case containing a display of cutlery, pewter spoons, jewelry and fishing
tackle. There were double windows on either side of the rough board door
with its wooden latch. The left counter held a case filled with threads,
buttons, combs, colored ribbons, and belts and jew's-harps. A balance
stood in the middle of this counter. A chest of tea, a big brown jug,
a box of candles, a keg and a large wooden pail occupied its farther end.
The shelving on its side walls was filled by straw hats, plug tobacco,
bolts of cloth, pills and patent medicines and paste-board boxes
containing shirts, handkerchiefs and underwear. A suit of blue jeans,
scythes and snaths, hoes, wooden hand rakes and a brass warming-pan hung
from the rafters. At the rear end of the store was a large fireplace.
There were two chairs near the fireplace, both of which were occupied by
a man who sat in one while his feet lay on the other. He was sleeping
peacefully, his chin resting on his breast. He wore a calico shirt with a
fanciful design of morning-glories on it printed in appropriate colors, a
collar of the same material and a red necktie.

Abe laid aside his book and rose to a sitting posture.

"Pardon me--you see the firm is busy," said Abe. "You know Eb Zane used
to say that he was never so busy in his life as when he lay on his back
with a broken leg. He said he had to work twenty-four hours a day doin'
nothin' an' could never git an hour off. But a broken leg is not so bad
as a lame intellect. That lays you out with the fever an' ague of
ignorance. Jack Kelso recommended Kirkham's pills and poultices of
poetry. I'm trying both and slowly getting the better of it. I've learned
three conjugations, between customers, this afternoon."

The man sleeping in the chair began snoring and groaning.

"Don't blame Bill," Abe went on. "Any man would have the nightmare in a
shirt like that. He went to a dance at Clary's Grove last night and they
shut him up in a barrel with a small dog and rolled 'em down hill in it.
I reckon that's how he learnt how to growl."

In the laughter that followed the sleeper awoke.

"You see there's quite an undercurrent beneath the placid surface of our
enterprise," Abe added.

The sleeper whose name was William Berry rose and stretched himself and
was introduced to the newcomer. He was a short, genial man, of some
thirty years, with blond, curly hair and mustache. On account of his
shortness and high color he was often referred to as the Billberry
shortcake. His fat cheeks had a color as definite as that of the blossoms
on his shirt, now rather soiled. His prominent nose shared their glow of
ruddy opulence. His gray eyes wore a look of apology. He walked rather
stiffly as if his legs were rheumatic.

"Mr. Traylor, this is Mr. William Berry," said Dr. Allen. "In this
beautiful shirt he resembles a bit of vine-clad sculpture from an Italian
garden, but is real flesh and blood and a good fellow."

"I don't understand your high-toned talk," said Berry. "This shirt suits
me to a dot."

"It is the pride of New Salem," said the Doctor. "Mr. Traylor has just
acquired an interest in all our institutions. He has bought the Gollaher
tract and is going to build a house and some fences. Abe, couldn't you
help get the timber out in a hurry so we can have a raising within a
week? You know the arts of the axe better than any of us."

Abe looked at Samson.

"I reckon he and I would make a good team with the axe," he said. "He
looks as if he could push a house down with one hand and build it up with
the other. You can bet I'll be glad to help in any way I can."

"We'll all turn in and help. I should think Bill or Jack Kelso could look
after the store for a few days," said the Doctor. "I promised to take Mr.
Traylor over to Jack Kelso's to-night. Couldn't you come along?"

"Good! We'll have a story-tellin' and get Jack to unlimber his guns,"
said Abe.

It was a cool evening with a promise of frost in the air. Jack Kelso's
cabin, one of two which stood close together at the western end of the
village, was lighted by the cheery blaze of dry logs in its fireplace.
There were guns on a rack over the fireplace under a buck's head; a
powder horn hanging near them on its string looped over a nail. There
were wolf and deer and bear pelts on the floor. The skins of foxes,
raccoons and wildcats adorned the log walls. Jack Kelso was a blond,
smooth faced, good-looking, merry-hearted Scot, about forty years old,
of a rather slight build, some five feet, eight inches tall. That is all
that any one knew of him save that he spent most of his time hunting and
fishing and seemed to have all the best things, which great men had said
or written, on the tip of his tongue. He was neatly dressed in a blue
flannel coat and shirt, top boots and riding breeches.

"Welcome! and here's the best seat at the fireside," he said to Samson.

Then, as he filled his pipe, he quoted the lines from Cymbeline:

  "'Think us no churls nor measure our good minds
   By this rude place we live in.'

"My wife and daughter are away for a visit and for two days I've had the
cabin to myself. Look, ye worshipers of fire, and see how fine it is now!
The homely cabin is a place of beauty. Everything has the color of the
rose, coming and going in the flickering shadows. What a heaven it is
when the flames are leaping! Here is Hogarth's line of beauty; nothing
perpendicular or horizontal."

He took Abe's hand and went on: "Here, ye lovers of romance, is one of
the story-tellers of Ispahan who has in him the wisdom of the wandering
tribes. He can tell you a tale that will draw children from their play
and old men from the chimney corner. My boy, take a chair next to Mr.
Traylor."

He took the hand of the Doctor and added: "Here, too, is a man whose wit
is more famous than his pills--one produces the shakes and the other
cures them. Doctor, you and I will take the end seats."

"My pills can be relied upon but my wit is like my dog, away from home
most of the time," said the Doctor.

"Gathering the bones with which you often astonish us," said Kelso. "How
are the lungs, Doctor?"

"They're all right. These long rides in the open are making a new man of
me. Another year in the city would have used me up."

"Mr. Traylor, you stand up as proud and firm as a big pine," Kelso
remarked. "I believe you're a Yankee."

"So do I," said Samson. "If you took all the Yankee out o' me I'd have an
empty skin."

Then Abe began to show the stranger his peculiar art in these words:

"Stephen Nuckles used to say: 'God's grace embraces the isles o' the sea
an' the uttermost parts o' the earth. It takes in the Esquimaux an' the
Hottentots. Some go so fur as to say that it takes in the Yankees but I
don't go so fur.'"

Samson joined in the good-natured laughter that followed.

"If you deal with some Yankees you take your life in your hands," he
said. "They can serve God or Mammon and I guess they have given the Devil
some of his best ideas. He seems to be getting a lot of Yankee notions
lately."

"There was a powerful prejudice in Kentucky against the Yankees," Abe
went on. "Down there they used to tell about a Yankee who sold his hogs
and was driving them to town. On the way he decided that he had sold them
too cheap. He left them with his drover in the road and went on to town
and told the buyer that he would need help to bring 'em in.

"'How's that?' the buyer asked.

"'Why they git away an' go to runnin' through the woods an' fields an' we
can't keep up with 'em.'

"'I don't think I want 'em,' says the buyer. 'A speedy hog hasn't much
pork to carry. I'll give ye twenty bits to let me off.'"

"I guess that Yankee had one more hog than he'd counted," said Samson.

"It reminds me of a man in Pope County who raised the biggest hog in
Illinois," Abe went on. "It was a famous animal and people from far and
near came to see him. One day a man came an' asked to see the hog.

"'We're chargin' two bits for the privilege now,' said the owner.

"The man paid the money and got into his wagon.

"'Don't you want to see him?' the farmer asked.

"'No,' said the stranger. 'I've seen the biggest hog in Illinois an'
I don't care to look at a smaller one.'"

"Whatever prejudice you may find here will soon vanish," said Kelso,
turning to the newcomer. "I have great respect for the sturdy sons of New
England. I believe it was Theodore Parker who said that the pine was the
symbol of their character. He was right. Its roots are deep in the soil;
it towers above the forest; it has the strength of tall masts and the
substance of the builder in its body, music in its waving branches and
turpentine in its veins. I thought of this when I saw Webster and heard
him speak at Plymouth."

"What kind of a looking man is he?" Abe asked.

"A big erect, splendid figure of a man. He walked like a ram at the head
of his flock. As he began speaking I thought of that flash of Homer's in
the _Odyssey_:

"'When his great voice went forth out of his breast and his words fell
like the winter snows--not then would any mortal contend with Ulysses.'"

Abe who since his story had sat with a sad face looking into the fire now
leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and shook his head with interest
while his gray eyes took on a look of animation. The diary speaks often
of the "veil of sadness" on his face.

"He is a very great man," Abe exclaimed.

"Have you learned that last noble flight of his in the reply to Hayne as
you promised?" Kelso asked.

"I have," said Abe, "and the other day when I was tramping back from
Bowlin Green's I came across a drove of cattle and stopped and gave it to
them. They all let go of the grass and stood looking. By an' by the bull
thought he'd stood it as long as he could an' bellered back at me."

"Good! Now stand up and let us see how you imitate the great chief of the
Whig clan," said Kelso.

The lank and awkward youth rose and began to speak the lines in a high
pitched voice that trembled with excitement. It lowered and steadied and
rang out like noble music on a well played trumpet as the channel of his
spirit filled with the mighty current of the orator's passion. Then,
indeed, the words fell from his lips "like the winter snows."

"They shook our hearts as the wind shakes the branches of a tree," Samson
writes in his diary. "The lean, bony body of the boy was transfigured and
as I looked at his face in the firelight I thought it was handsome.

"Not a word was spoken for a minute after he sat down. I had got my first
look at Lincoln. I had seen his soul. I think it was then I began to
realize that a man was being made among us 'more precious than fine gold;
even a man more precious than the golden wedge of Ophir.'"

The Doctor gazed in silence at the boy. Kelso sat with both hands in his
pockets and his chin upon his breast looking solemnly into the fire.

"Thank you, Abe," he said in a low voice. "Something unusual has happened
and I'm just a little scared."

"Why?" Abe asked.

"For fear somebody will spoil it with another hog story. I'm a little
afraid of anything I can say. I would venture this, that the man Webster
is a prophet. In his Plymouth address he hears receding into never
returning distance the clank of chains and all the horrid din of slavery.
It will come true."

"Do you think so?" Abe asked.

"Surely--there are so many of us who hate it. These Yankees hate it and
they and their children are scattering all over the midlands. Their
spirit will guide the West. The love of Liberty is the salt of their
blood and the marrow of their bones. Liberty means freedom for all. Wait
until these babies, coming out here by the wagon load, have grown to
manhood. Slavery will have to reckon with them."

"I hate it too," said Abe. "Down the Mississippi I have seen men and
women sold like oxen. If I live I'm going to hit that thing on the head
some day."

"Do you still want to be a lawyer?" Kelso asked.

"Yes, but sometimes I think I'd make a better blacksmith," said Abe.

"I believe you'd do better with the hammer of argument."

"If I had the education likely I would. I'm trying to make up my mind
what's best for me."

"No, you're trying to decide what is best for your friends and your
country and for the reign of law and justice and liberty."

"But I think every man acts from selfish motives," Abe insisted.

Dr. Allen demurred as follows:

"The other night you happened to remember that you had overcharged Mrs.
Peters for a jug of molasses and after you had closed the store you
walked three miles to return the money which belonged to her. Why did you
do it?"

"For a selfish motive," said Abe. "I believe honesty is the best policy."

"Then you took that long walk just to advertise your honesty--to induce
people to call you 'Honest Abe' as they have begun to do?"

"I wouldn't want to put it that way," said Abe.

"But that's the only way out," the Doctor insisted, "and we knowing ones
would have to call you 'Sordid Abe.'"

"There's a hidden Abe and you haven't got acquainted with him yet," Kelso
interposed. "We have all caught a glimpse of him to-night. He's the Abe
that loves honor and justice and humanity and their great temple of
freedom that is growing up here in the new world. He loves them better
than fame or fortune or life itself. I think it must have been that Abe
whose voice sounded like a trumpet just now and who sent you off to Mrs.
Peters with the money. You haven't the chance to know him that we have.
Some day you two will get acquainted."

"I don't know how to plead to that indictment," Abe answered. "It looks
so serious I shall have to take counsel."

At this moment there was a loud rap on the door. Mr. Kelso opened it and
said: "Hello, Eli! Come in."

A hairy faced, bow legged man, bent under a great pack, partly covered
with bed ticking, stood in the doorway.

"Hello, Mr. Kelso," the bearded man answered. "The poor vandering Jew has
gome back ag'in--hey? I tink I haf to take de hump off my back before I
gits in."

Staggering beneath his load he let it down to the ground.

"Bring in your Trojan horse and mind you do not let out its four and
twenty warriors until morning. I'll have some bread and milk for you in a
minute. Gentlemen, this is my friend Eli--a wandering pioneer of trade."

"I haf a vonderful line o' goods--vonderful! vonderful!" said Eli,
gesturing with both hands. "Silk an' satin! De flowers o' de prairie, de
birds o' de air could not show you colors like dem. You vill fall in
love. If I do not let you have dem you vill break your hearts. An' I have
here one instrument dot make all kinds o' music."

"First supper--then open your Trojan horse," said Kelso.

"First I must show my goods," Eli insisted, "ant I'll bet you take dem
all--everyt'ing vat I have in dot pack an' you pay my price an' you t'ank
me say 'Eli, vat you have to drink?'"

"I'll bet you four bits I don't," said Kelso.

"You are my frient; I vould not take your money like dot so easy. No! It
vould not be right. These are Scotch goods, gentlemen--so rare an'
beautiful--not'ing like dem in de world."

He began to undo his pack while the little company stood around him.

"Gentlemen, you can see but you can not buy. Only my frient can have dem
goods," he went on glibly as he removed the cover of the pack.

Suddenly there was a lively stir in it. To the amazement of all a
beautiful girl threw aside the ticking and leaped out of the large wicker
basket it had covered. With a merry laugh she threw her arms around Jack
Kelso's neck and kissed him.

The men clapped their hands in noisy merriment.

"That's like Bim, isn't it?" said the Doctor.

"Exactly!" Abe exclaimed.

"I stop at David Barney's an' dere she took de goods out o' my pack an'
fix up dis job lot fer you," said Eli with a laugh.

"A real surprise party!" the girl exclaimed.

She was a small sized girl, nearing sixteen, with red cheeks and hazel
eyes and blonde hair that fell in curls upon her shoulders.

"Mr. Traylor, this is my daughter Bim," said Kelso. "She is skilled in
the art of producing astonishment."

"She must have heard of that handsome boy at the tavern and got in a
hurry to come home," said the Doctor.

"Ann Rutledge says that he is a right purty boy," the girl laughed as she
brushed her curls aside.

She turned to Samson Traylor and asked wistfully, "Do you suppose he
would play with me?"




CHAPTER IV

WHICH PRESENTS OTHER LOG CABIN FOLK AND THE FIRST STEPS IN THE MAKING OF
A NEW HOME AND CERTAIN CAPACITIES AND INCAPACITIES OF ABE.


Next morning at daylight two parties went out in the woods to cut timber
for the home of the newcomers. In one party were Harry Needles carrying
two axes and a well filled luncheon pail; Samson with a saw in his hand
and the boy Joe on his back; Abe with saw and axe and a small jug of root
beer and a book tied in a big red handkerchief and slung around his neck.
When they reached the woods Abe cut a pole for the small boy and carried
him on his shoulder to the creek and said:

"Now you sit down here and keep order in this little frog city. If you
hear a frog say anything improper you fetch him a whack. Don't allow any
nonsense. We'll make you Mayor of Frog City."

The men fell to with axes and saws while Harry limbed the logs and looked
after the Mayor. Their huge muscles flung the sharp axes into the timber
and gnawed through it with the saw. Many big trees fell before noon time
when they stopped for luncheon. While they were eating Abe said:

"I reckon we better saw out a few boards this afternoon. Need 'em for the
doors. We'll tote a couple of logs up on the side o' that knoll, put 'em
on skids an' whip 'em up into boards with the saw."

Samson took hold of the middle of one of the logs and raised it from the
ground.

"I guess we can carry 'em," he said.

"Can ye shoulder it?" Abe asked.

"Easy," said Samson as he raised an end of the log, stepped beneath it
and, resting its weight on his back, soon got his shoulder near its
center and swung it clear of the ground and walked with it to the
knollside where he let it fall with a resounding thump that shook the
ground. Abe stopped eating and watched every move in this remarkable
performance. The ease with which the big Vermonter had so defied the
law of gravitation with that unwieldly stick amazed him.

"That thing'll weigh from seven to eight hundred pounds," said he. "I
reckon you're the stoutest man in this part o' the state an' I'm quite a
man myself. I've lifted a barrel o' whisky and put my mouth to the bung
hole. I never drink it."

"Say," he added as he sat down and began eating a doughnut. "If you ever
hit anybody take a sledge hammer or a crowbar. It wouldn't be decent to
use your fist."

"Don't talk when you've got food in your mouth," said Joe who seemed to
have acquired a sense of responsibility for the manners of Abe.

"I reckon you're right," Abe laughed. "A man's ideas ought not to be
mingled with cheese and doughnuts."

"Once in a while I like to try myself in a lift," said Samson. "It feels
good. I don't do it to show off. I know there's a good many men stouter
than I be. I guess you're one of 'em."

"No, I'm too stretched out--my neck is too far from the ground," Abe
answered. "I'm like a crowbar. If I can get my big toe or my fingers
under anything I can pry some."

After luncheon he took off his shoes and socks.

"When I'm working hard I always try to give my feet a rest and my brain
a little work at noon time," he remarked. "My brain is so far behind the
procession I have to keep putting the gad on it. Give me twenty minutes
of Kirkham and I'll be with you again."

He lay down on his back under a tree with his book in hand and his feet
resting on the tree trunk well above him. Soon he was up and at work
again.

They hewed a flat surface on opposite sides of the log which Samson had
carried and peeled it and raised its lower end on a cross timber. Then
they marked it with a chalk line and sliced it into inch boards with a
whip saw, Abe standing on top of the log and Samson beneath it. Suddenly
the saw stopped. A clear, beautiful voice flung the music of _Sweet
Nightingale_ into the timbered hollow. It halted the workers and set the
woodland ringing. The men stood silent like those hearing a benediction.
The singing ceased. Still they listened for half a moment. It was as if a
spirit had passed and touched them.

"It's Bim--the little vixen!" said Abe tenderly. "She's hiding here in
the woods somewheres."

Abe straightened up and peered through the bushes. The singing ceased.

"I can see yer curls. Come out from behind that tree--you piece o' Scotch
goods!" Abe shouted.

Only silence followed his demand.

"Come on," Abe persisted. "There's a good-looking boy here and I want to
introduce you."

"Ask him to see if he can find me," said the voice of the girl from a
distance.

Abe beckoned to Harry and pointed to the tree behind which he had seen
her hiding. Harry stealthily approached it only to find that she had
gone. He looked about for a moment but could not see her. Soon they heard
a little call, suggesting elfland trumpets, in a distant part of the
wood. It was repeated three or four times; each time fainter and farther.
They saw and heard no more of her that day.

"She's an odd child and as pretty as a spotted fawn, and about as wild,"
said Abe. "She's a kind of a first cousin to the bobolink."

When they were getting ready to go home that afternoon Joe got into a
great hurry to see his mother. It seemed to him that ages had elapsed
since he had seen her--a conviction which led to noisy tears.

Abe knelt before him and comforted the boy. Then he wrapped him in his
jacket and swung him in the air and started for home with Joe astride his
neck.

Samson says in his diary: "His tender play with the little lad gave me
another look at the man Lincoln."

"Some one proposed once that we should call that stream the Minnehaha,"
said Abe as he walked along. "After this Joe and I are going to call it
the Minneboohoo."

The women of the little village had met at a quilting party at ten
o'clock with Mrs. Martin Waddell. There Sarah had had a seat at the frame
and heard all the gossip of the countryside. The nimble fingered Ann
Rutledge--a daughter of the tavern folk--had sat beside her. Ann was a
slender, good-looking girl of seventeen with blue eyes and a rich crown
of auburn hair and a fair skin well browned by the sunlight. She was the
most dexterous needle worker in New Salem. It was Mrs. Peter Lukins, a
very lean, red haired woman with only one eye which missed no matrimonial
prospect--who put the ball in play so to speak.

"Ann, if Honest Abe gits you, you'll have to spend the first three months
makin' a pair o' breeches for him. It'll be a mile o' sewin'."

"I reckon she'd have to spend the rest o' her life keepin' the buttons on
'em," said Mrs. John Cameron.

"Abe doesn't want me and I don't want Abe so I reckon some other girl
will have to make his breeches," said Ann.

"My lord! but he's humbly," said Mrs. Alexander Ferguson.

"Han'some is that han'some does," Mrs. Martin Waddell remarked. "I don't
know anybody that does han'somer."

"Han'some is that han'some looks I say," Mrs. Lukins continued with a
dreamy look in her eye.

"I like a man that'll bear inspection--up an' a comin' an' neat an' trim
as a buck deer," Mrs. Ferguson confessed.

"An' the first ye know he's up an' a goin'," said Mrs. Samuel Hill. "An
then all ye have to look at is a family o' children an' the empty bread
box."

"Wait until Abe has shed his coat an' is filled out a little. He'll be a
good-lookin' man an' I wouldn't wonder," Mrs. Waddell maintained.

"If Abe lives he'll be a great man, I think," said Mrs. Dr. Allen. "I
forgot how he looked when I heard him talking the other night at the
debate in the schoolhouse about the flogging of sailors with the cat o'
nine tails. He has a wonderful gift. If I were Ann I should be proud of
his friendship and proud to go with him to the parties."

"I am," said Ann meekly, with her eyes upon her work. "I love to hear him
talk, too."

"Oh, land o' mercy! He's good company if you only use your ears," Mrs.
Ferguson remarked. "Mis' Traylor, where did you git your man?"

"At Vergennes. We were born in the same neighborhood and grew up
together," said Sarah.

"Now there's the kind of a man! Stout as a buffalo an' as to looks I'd
call him, as ye might say, real copasetic." Mrs. Lukins expressed this
opinion solemnly and with a slight cough. Its last word stood for nothing
more than an indefinite depth of meaning. She added by way of drawing the
curtain of history: "I'll bet _he_ didn't dilly dally long when he made
up his mind. I reckon he were plum owdacious."

"What a pretty pattern this is!" said Sarah with a sudden shift of front.

Mrs. Lukins was not to be driven from the Elysian fields so easily and
forthwith she told the story of her own courtship.

A bountiful dinner of stewed venison and chicken pie and tea and frosted
cake was served, all hands turning in to help with the table and the
cleaning up. While they were eating Sarah told of her long journey and
their trials with fever and ague.

"It's the worst part of going west but it really isn't very dangerous,"
said Mrs. Dr. Allen.

"Nine scoops o' water in the holler o' the hand from a good spring for
three mornin's before sunrise an' strong coffee with lemon juice will
break the ager every time," said Mrs. Lukins. "My gran' mammy used to say
it were better than all the doctors an' I've tried it an' know what it'll
do."

"I suppose if you got ten scoops it would be no good," said Sarah with a
laugh in which Mrs. Allen and some of the others joined.

Mrs. Lukins looked offended. "When I'm takin' medicine I always foller
directions," said she.

So the day passed with them and was interrupted by the noisy entrance of
Joe, soon after candlelight, who climbed on the back of his mother's
chair and kissed her and in breathless eagerness began to relate the
history of his own day.

That ended the quilting party and Sarah and Mrs. Rutledge and Ann joined
Samson and Abe and Harry Needles who were waiting outside and walked to
the tavern with them.

John McNeil, whom the Traylors had met on the road near Niagara Falls and
who had shared their camp with them, arrived on the stage that evening.
He was dressed in a new butternut suit and clean linen and looked very
handsome. Samson writes that he resembled the pictures of Robert Emmet.
With fine, dark eyes, a smooth skin, well moulded features and black hair
neatly brushed on a shapely head he was not at all like the rugged Abe.
In a low tone and very modestly, with a slight brogue on his tongue he
told of his adventures on the long, shore road to Michigan. Ann sat
listening and looking into his face as he talked. Abe came in, soon after
eight o'clock, and was introduced to the stranger. All noted the contrast
between the two young men as they greeted each other. Abe sat down for
a few minutes and looked sadly into the fire but said nothing. He rose
presently, excused himself and went away.

Soon Samson followed him. Over at Offut's store he did not find Abe,
but Bill Berry was drawing liquor from the spigot of a barrel set on
blocks in a shed connected with the rear end of the store and serving
it to a number of hilarious young Irishmen. His shirt was soiled. Its
morning-glories had grown dim in a kind of dusty twilight. The young men
asked Samson to join them.

"No, thank you. I never touch it," he said.

"We'll come over here an' learn ye how to enjoy yerself some day," one of
them said.

"I'm pretty well posted on that subject now," Samson answered.

It is likely that they would have begun his schooling at once but when
they came out into the store and saw the big Vermonter standing in the
candlelight their laughter ceased for a moment. Bill was among them with
a well filled bottle in his hand.

He and the others got into a wagon which had been waiting at the door and
drove away with a wild Indian whoop from the lips of one of the young
men.

Samson sat down in the candlelight and Abe in a moment arrived.

"I'm getting awful sick o' this business," said Abe.

"I kind o' guess you don't like the whisky part of it," Samson remarked,
as he felt a piece of cloth.

"I hate it," Abe went on. "It don't seem respectable any longer."

"Back in Vermont we don't like the whisky business."

"You're right, it breeds deviltry and disorder. In my youth I was
surrounded by whisky. Everybody drank it. A bottle or a jug of liquor was
thought to be as legitimate a piece of merchandise as a pound of tea or a
yard of calico. That's the way I've always thought of it. But lately I've
begun to get the Yankee notion about whisky. When it gets into bad
company it can raise the devil."

Soon after nine o'clock Abe drew a mattress filled with corn husks from
under the counter, cleared away the bolts of cloth and laid it where they
had been and covered it with a blanket.

"This is my bed," said he. "I'll be up at five in the morning. Then I'll
be making tea here by the fireplace to wash down some jerked meat and a
hunk o' bread. At six or a little after I'll be ready to go with you
again. Jack Kelso is going to look after the store to-morrow."

He began to laugh.

"Ye know when I went out of the tavern that little vixen stood peekin'
into the window--Bim, Jack's girl," said Abe. "I asked her why she didn't
go in and she said she was scared. 'Who you 'fraid of?' I asked. 'Oh, I
reckon that boy,' says she. And honestly her hand trembled when she took
hold of my arm and walked to her' father's house with me."

Abe snickered as he spread another blanket. "What a cut-up she is! Say,
we'll have some fun watching them two I reckon," he said.

The logs were ready two days after the cutting began. Martin Waddell and
Samuel Hill sent teams to haul them. John Cameron and Peter Lukins had
brought the window sash and some clapboards from Beardstown in a small
flat boat. Then came the day of the raising--a clear, warm day early in
September. All the men from the village and the near farms gathered to
help make a home for the newcomers. Samson and Jack Kelso went out for a
hunt after the cutting and brought in a fat buck and many grouse for the
bee dinner, to which every woman of the neighborhood made a contribution
of cake or pie or cookies or doughnuts.

"What will be my part?" Samson had inquired of Kelso.

"Nothing but a jug of whisky and a kind word and a house warming," Kelso
had answered.

They notched and bored the logs and made pins to bind them and cut those
that were to go around the fireplace and window spaces. Strong, willing
and well trained hands hewed and fitted the logs together. Alexander
Ferguson lined the fireplace with a curious mortar made of clay in which
he mixed grass for a binder. This mortar he rolled into layers called
"cats," each eight inches long and three inches thick. Then he laid them
against the logs and held them in place with a woven network of sticks.
The first fire--a slow one--baked the clay into a rigid stone-like sheath
inside the logs and presently the sticks were burned away. The women had
cooked the meats by an open fire and spread the dinner on a table of
rough boards resting on poles set in crotches. At noon one of them
sounded a conch shell. Then with shouts of joy the men hurried to the
fireside and for a moment there was a great spluttering over the wash
basins. Before they ate every man except Abe and Samson "took a pull at
the jug--long or short"--to quote a phrase of the time.

It was a cheerful company that sat down upon the grass around the table
with loaded plates. Their food had its extra seasoning of merry jests and
loud laughter. Sarah was a little shocked at the forthright directness of
their eating, no knives or forks or napkins being needed in that process.
Having eaten, washed and packed away their dishes the women went home at
two. Before they had gone Samson's ears caught a thunder of horses' feet
in the distance. Looking in its direction he saw a cloud of dust in the
road and a band of horsemen riding toward them at full speed. Abe came to
him and said:

"I see the boys from Clary's Grove are coming. If they get mean let me
deal with 'em. It's my responsibility. I wouldn't wonder if they had some
of Offut's whisky with them."

The boys arrived in a cloud of dust and a chorus of Indian whoops and
dismounted and hobbled their horses. They came toward the workers, led
by burly Jack Armstrong, a stalwart, hard-faced blacksmith of about
twenty-two with broad, heavy shoulders, whose name has gone into history.
They had been drinking some but no one of them was in the least degree
off his balance. They scuffled around the jug for a moment in perfect
good nature and then Abe and Mrs. Waddell provided them with the best
remnants of the dinner. They were rather noisy. Soon they went up on the
roof to help with the rafters and the clapboarding. They worked well a
few minutes and suddenly they came scrambling down for another pull
at the jug. They were out for a spree and Abe knew it and knew further
that they had reached the limit of discretion.

"Boys, there are ladies here and we've got to be careful," he said. "Did
I ever tell you what Uncle Jerry Holman said of his bull calf? He said
the calf was such a _suckcess_ that he didn't leave any milk for the
family and that while the calf was growin' fat the children was growin'
poor. In my opinion you're about fat enough for the present. Le's stick
to the job till four o'clock. Then we'll knock off for refreshments."

The young revelers gathered in a group and began to whisper together.
Samson writes that it became evident then they were going to make trouble
and says:

       *       *       *       *       *

"We had left the children at Rutledge's in the care of Ann. I went to
Sarah and told her she had better go on and see if they were all right.

"'Don't you get in any fight,' she said, which shows that the women knew
what was in the air.

"Sarah led the way and the others followed her."

       *       *       *       *       *

Those big, brawny fellows from the grove when they got merry were looking
always for a chance to get mad at some man and turn him into a plaything.
A victim had been a necessary part of their sprees. Many a poor fellow
had been fastened in a barrel and rolled down hill or nearly drowned in a
ducking for their amusement. A chance had come to get mad and they were
going to make the most of it. They began to growl with resentment. Some
were wigging their leader Jack Armstrong to fight Abe. One of them ran to
his horse and brought a bottle from his saddle-bag. It began passing from
mouth to mouth. Jack Armstrong got the bottle before it was half emptied,
drained it and flung it high in the air. Another called him a hog and
grappled him around the waist and there was a desperate struggle which
ended quickly. Armstrong got a hold on the neck of his assailant and
choked him until he let go. This was not enough for the sturdy bully of
Clary's Grove. He seized his follower and flung him so roughly on the
ground that the latter lay for a moment stunned. Armstrong had got his
blood warm and was now ready for action. With a wild whoop he threw off
his coats, unbuttoned his right shirt-sleeve and rolled it to the
shoulder and declared in a loud voice, as he swung his arm in the air,
that he could "out jump, out hop, out run, throw down, drag out an' lick
any man in New Salem."

In a letter to his father Samson writes:

       *       *       *       *       *

"Abe was working at my elbow. I saw him drop his hammer and get up and
make for the ladder. I knew something was going to happen and I followed
him. In a minute every one was off the roof and out of the building. I
guess they knew what was coming. The big lad stood there swinging his arm
and yelling like an Injun. It was a big arm and muscled and corded up
some but I guess if I'd shoved the calico off mine and held it up he'd a
pulled down his sleeve. I suppose the feller's arm had a kind of a mule's
kick in it, but, good gracious! If he'd a seen as many arms as you an' I
have that have growed up on a hickory helve he'd a known that his was
nothing to brag of. I didn't know just how good a man Abe was and I was
kind o' scairt for a minute. I never found it so hard work to do nothin'
as I did then. Honest my hands kind o' ached. I wanted to go an' cuff
that feller's ears an' grab hold o' him an' toss him over the ridge pole.
Abe went right up to him an' said:

"'Jack, you ain't half so bad or half so cordy as ye think ye are. You
say you can throw down any man here. I reckon I'll have to show ye that
you're mistaken. I'll rassle with ye. We're friends an' we won't talk
about lickin' each other. Le's have a friendly rassle.'

"In a second the two men were locked together. Armstrong had lunged at
Abe with a yell. There was no friendship in the way he took hold. He was
going to do all the damage he could in any way he could. He tried to butt
with his head and ram his knee into Abe's stomach as soon as they came
together. Half drunk Jack is a man who would bite your ear off. It was no
rassle; it was a fight. Abe moved like lightning. He acted awful limber
an' well greased. In a second he had got hold of the feller's neck with
his big right hand and hooked his left into the cloth on his hip. In that
way he held him off and shook him as you've seen our dog shake a
woodchuck. Abe's blood was hot. If the whole crowd had piled on him I
guess he would have come out all right, for when he's roused there's
something in Abe more than bones and muscles. I suppose it's what I feel
when he speaks a piece. It's a kind of lightning. I guess it's what our
minister used to call the power of the spirit. Abe said to me afterwards
that he felt as if he was fighting for the peace and honor of New Salem.

"A friend of the bully jumped in and tried to trip Abe. Harry Needles
stood beside me. Before I could move he dashed forward and hit that
feller in the middle of his forehead and knocked him flat. Harry had
hit Bap McNoll the cock fighter. I got up next to the kettle then and
took the scum off it. Fetched one of them devils a slap with the side of
my hand that took the skin off his face and rolled him over and over.
When I looked again Armstrong was going limp. His mouth was open and his
tongue out. With one hand fastened to his right leg and the other on the
nape of his neck Abe lifted him at arm's length and gave him a toss in
the air. Armstrong fell about ten feet from where Abe stood and lay there
for a minute. The fight was all out of him and he was kind of dazed and
sick. Abe stood up like a giant and his face looked awful solemn.

"'Boys, if there's any more o' you that want trouble you can have some
off the same piece,' he said.

"They hung their heads and not one of them made a move or said a word.
Abe went to Armstrong and helped him up.

"'Jack, I'm sorry that I had to hurt you.' be said. 'You get on to your
horse and go home.'

"'Abe, you're a better man than me,' said the bully, as he offer'd his
hand to Abe. 'I'll do anything you say.'"

       *       *       *       *       *

So the Clary's Grove gang was conquered. They were to make more trouble
but not again were they to imperil the foundations of law and order in
the little community of New Salem. As they were starting away Bap McNoll
turned to Harry Needles and shouted: "I'll git even with you yet--you
slab-sided son of a dog."

That is not exactly what he said but it is near enough.




CHAPTER V

IN WHICH THE CHARACTER OF BIM KELSO FLASHES OUT IN A STRANGE ADVENTURE
THAT BEGINS THE WEAVING OF A LONG THREAD OF ROMANCE.


The shell of the cabin was finished that day. Its puncheon floor was in
place but its upper floor was to be laid when the boards were ready. Its
two doors were yet to be made and hung, its five windows to be fitted and
made fast, its walls to be chinked with clay mortar. Samson and Harry
stayed that evening after the rest were gone, smoothing the puncheon
floor. They made a few nails at the forge after supper and went over to
Abe's store about nine. Two of the Clary's Grove Gang who had tarried in
the village sat in the gloom of its little veranda apparently asleep. Dr.
Allen, Jack Kelso, Alexander Ferguson and Martin Waddell were sitting by
its fireside while Abe sat on the counter with his legs hanging off.

"He's a tough oak stick of a man," Kelso was saying.

"Here he is now," said Dr. Allen. "That lad you cuffed had to stop at my
office for repairs."

"I told you once to use a crowbar if you wanted to hit anybody, but never
to use your hands," said Abe.

"Well there wasn't any time to lose and there was no crowbar handy," said
Samson.

"That reminds me of a general who made the boys of his regiment promise
to let him do all the swearin'," Abe began. "One day a sergeant got into
trouble with a mule team. It was raining hard and the off mule balked.
Wouldn't draw a pound. The sergeant got wet to the skin and swore a song
of fourteen verses that was heard by half the regiment. The general
called him up for discipline.

"'Young man, I thought it was understood that I was to do all the
swearin',' he said.

"'So it was,' said the sergeant, 'but that swearin' had to be done right
away. You couldn't 'a' got there in time to do it if I'd 'a' sent for
ye.'"

"I'm sorry we had to have trouble," Samson remarked, after the outburst
of appreciation that followed Abe's story. "It's the only spot on the
day. I'll never forget the kindness of the people of New Salem."

"The raising bee is a most significant thing," said Kelso. "Democracy
tends to universal friendship--each works for the crowd and the crowd
for each and there are no favorites. Every community is like the thousand
friends of Thebes. Most of its units stand together for the common
good--for justice, law and honor. The schools are spinning strands of
democracy out of all this European wool. Railroads are to pick them up
and weave them into one great fabric. By and by we shall see the ten
million friends of America standing together as did the thousand friends
of Thebes."

"It's a great thought," said Abe.

"No man can estimate the size of that mighty phalanx of friendship all
trained in one school," Kelso went on. "Two years ago the _Encyclopedia
Britannica_ figured that the population of the United States in 1905
would be 168,000,000 people, and in 1966, 672,000,000. Wealth, power,
science, literature, all follow in the train of light and numbers. The
causes which moved the sceptre of civilization from the Euphrates to
Western Europe will carry it from the latter to the New World."

"They say that electricity and the development of the steam engine is
going to make all men think alike," said Abe. "If that's so Democracy and
Liberty will spread over the earth."

"The seed of Universal Brotherhood is falling far and wide and you can
not kill it," Kelso continued. "Last year Mazzini said: 'There is only
one sun in heaven for the whole earth, only one law for all who people
it. We are here to found fraternally the unity of the human race so that,
sometime, it may present but one fold and one Shepherd."

Then Lincoln spoke again: "I reckon we are near the greatest years in
history. It is a privilege to be alive."

"And young," Dr. Allen added.

"Young! What a God's blessed thing is that!" said Kelso and then he
quoted from Coleridge:

  "'Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying
   Where Hope clung feeding like a bee,
   Both were mine! Life went a maying
   With Nature, Hope and Poesy
   When I was young!'

"Abe, have ye learned the _Cotter's Saturday Night_?"

"Not yet. It's a heavy hog to hold but I'll get a grip on an ear and
a hind leg and lift it out o' the pen before long. You see."

"Don't fail to do that. It will be a help and joy to ye."

"Old Kirkham is a hard master," said Abe. "I hear his bell ringing every
time I get a minute's leisure. I'm nigh through with him. Now I want to
study rhetoric."

"Only schoolmasters study rhetoric," Kelso declared. "A real poet or a
real orator is born with all the rhetoric he needs. We should get our
rhetoric as we get our oxygen--unconsciously--by reading the masters.
Rhetoric is a steed for a light load under the saddle but he's too warm
blooded for the harness. He was for the day of the plumed knight--not for
these times. No man of sense would use a prancing horse on a plow or a
stone boat. A good plow horse is a beautiful thing. The play of his
muscles, the power of his stride are poetry to me but when he tries to
put on style he is ridiculous. That suggests what rhetoric is apt to do
to the untrained intellect. If you've anything to say or write head
straight across, the field and keep your eye on the furrow. Then comes
the sowing and how beautiful is the sower striding across the field in
his suit of blue jeans, with that wonderful gesture, so graceful, so
imperious! Put him in a beaver hat and broadcloth and polished calfskin
and a frilled shirt and you couldn't think of anything more ridiculous!"

In the last diary of Samson Henry Traylor is this entry:

       *       *       *       *       *

"I went to Gettysburg with the President to-day and sat near him when he
spoke. Mr. Everett addressed the crowd for an hour or so. As Kelso would
say 'He rode the prancing steed of Rhetoric.' My old friend went straight
across the field and his look and gestures reminded me of that picture of
the sower which Jack gave us one night long ago in Abe's store. Through
my tears I could see the bucket hanging on his elbow and the good seed
flying far and wide from his great hand. When he finished the field,
plowed and harrowed and fertilized by war, had been sowed for all time.
The spring's work was done and well done."

       *       *       *       *       *

At a quarter of ten the Doctor rose and said:

"We're keeping Abe from his sleep and wearing the night away with
philosophy. I'm going home."

"I came over to see if you could find a man to help me to-morrow," Samson
said to Abe. "Harry is going over to do the chinking alone. I want a man
to help me on the whipsaw while I cut some boards for the upper
flooring."

"I'll help you myself," Abe proposed. "I reckon I'll close the store
to-morrow unless Jack will tend it."

"You can count on me," said Jack. "I'm short of sleep anyhow and a day of
rest will do me good."

Abe went with his friends to the door beyond which the two boys from
Clary's Grove sat as if sound asleep. It is probable, however, that they
had heard what Samson had said to Abe.

"Well, I didn't know these wild turkeys were roosting here," Abe laughed.
He roused them from their slumbers and said: "Boys, you're trying to saw
the day off a little too short. It's got to run till you get to Clary's
Grove. Better take those horses home and feed 'em."

The boys got up and yawned and stretched themselves and mounted their
horses which had been tied to a bar and rode away in the darkness.

Next morning Abe and Samson set out for the woods soon after daylight.

"I like that boy Harry," said Abe. "I reckon he's got good stuff in him.
The way he landed on Bap McNoll was a caution. I like to see a feller
come right up to the scratch, without an invitation just in the nick
o' time, as he did."

"Did you see him jump in?" Samson asked.

"I saw everything some way. I saw you when ye loosened the ear o' John
Callyhan. That tickled me. But the way I felt yesterday--honest, it
seemed as if I could handle 'em all. That boy Harry is a likely young
colt--strong and limber and well put together and broad between the
eyes."

"An' gentle as a kitten," Samson added. "There never was a better face on
a boy or a better heart behind it. We like him."

"Yes, sir. He's a well topped young tree--straight and sound and good
timber. Looks as if that little girl o' Jack's was terribly took up with
him. I don't wonder. There are not many boys like Harry around here."

"What kind of a girl is she?" Samson asked.

"Awful shy since the arrow hit her. She don't know what it means yet.
She'll get used to that I reckon. She's a good girl and smart as a steel
trap. Her father takes her out on the plains with him shooting. She can
handle a gun as well as anybody and ride a horse as if she had growed to
his back. Every body likes Bim but she has her own way of behaving and
sometimes it's awful new-fashioned."

Harry Needles went whistling up the road toward the new house with
sickle, hoe and trowel. As he passed the Kelso cabin he whistled the
tune of _Sweet Nightingale_. It had haunted his mind since he had heard
it in the woods. He whistled as loudly as ever he could and looked at the
windows. Before he had passed Bim's face looked out at him with a smile
and her hand flickered back of the panes and he waved his to her. His
heart beat fast as he hurried along.

"I'm not so very young," he said to himself. "I wish I hadn't put on
these old clothes. Mrs. Traylor is an awful nice woman but she's
determined to make me look like a plow horse. I don't see why she
couldn't let me wear decent clothes."

Sarah had enjoyed mothering the boy. His health had returned. His cheeks
were ruddy, his dark eyes clear and bright, his tall form erect and
sturdy. Moreover the affectionate care his new friends had given him and
his interest in the girl filled his heart with the happiness which is the
rain of youth and without which it becomes an arid desert.

He had helped Alexander Ferguson with the making of the fireplace and
knew how to mix the mortar. He worked with a will for his heart was in
the new home. It was a fine September morning. The warm sunlight had set
the meadow cocks a crowing. The far reaches of the great, grassy plain
were dimmed with haze. It was a vast, flowery wilderness, waving and
murmuring in the breeze like an ocean. How long those acres, sown by the
winds of heaven, had waited for the plowman now arrived!

Harry felt the beauty of the scene but saw and enjoyed more the face of
Bim Kel