A Man for the Ages Part 27

Such was his faith in the common folk of America whose way of learning and whose love of the right he knew as no man has known it.

In this connection the New Englander wrote in his diary:

"He has spent his boyhood in the South and his young manhood in the North. He has studied the East and lived in the West. He is the people--I sometimes think--and about as slow to make up his mind. As Isaiah says: 'He does not judge after the sight of his eyes neither reprove after the hearing of his ears.' Abe has to think about it."

Many days thereafter Abe and Harry and Samson were out in the woods together splitting rails and making firewood. Abe always took his book with him and read aloud to Harry and Samson in the noon-hour. He liked to read aloud and thought that he remembered better what he had read with both eye and ear taking it in.

One day while they were at work Pollard Simmons came out to them and said that John Calhoun the County Surveyor wanted Abe to be his a.s.sistant.

"I don't know how to survey," said Abe.

"But I reckon you can learn it," Simmons answered. "You're purty quick to learn."

Abe thought a moment. Calhoun was a Democrat.

"Would I have to sacrifice any of my principles?" he asked.

"Nary a one," said Simmons.

"Then I'll try and see if I can get the hang of it," Abe declared. "I reckon Mentor Graham could help me."

"Three dollars a day is not to be sneezed at," said Simmons.

"No, sir--not if you can get it honest," Abe answered. "I'm not so careless with my sneezing as some men. Once when Eb Zane was out on the Ohio in a row-boat Mike Fink the river pirate got after him. Eb had a ten dollar gold piece in his pocket. For fear that he would be captured he clapped it into his mouth. Eb was a good oarsman and got away. He was no sooner out of danger than he fetched a sneeze and blew the gold piece into the river. After that he used to say that he had sneezed himself poor and that if he had a million dollars it wouldn't bother him to sneeze 'em away. Sneezing is a form of dissipation which has not cost me a cent so far and I don't intend to yield to it."

Immediately after that Abe got Flint and Gibson's treatise on surveying and began to study it day and night under the eye of the kindly schoolmaster. In about six weeks he had mastered the book and reported for duty.

In April Abe wrote another address to the voters announcing that he was again a candidate for a seat in the Legislature. Late that month Harry walked with him to Pappsville where a crowd had a.s.sembled to attend a public sale. When the auctioneer had finished Abe made his first stump speech. A drunken man tried to divert attention to himself by sundry interruptions. Harry asked him to be quiet, whereupon the ruffian and a friend pitched upon the boy and began to handle him roughly. Abe jumped down, rushed into the crowd, seized the chief offender and raising him off his feet flung him into the air. He hit the ground in a heap some four yards from where Abe stood. The latter resumed his place and went on with his speech. The crowd cheered him and there was no further disturbance at that meeting. The speech was a modest, straightforward declaration of his principles. When he was leaving several voices called for a story. Abe raised a great laugh with a humorous anecdote in which he imitated the dialect and manners of a Kentucky backwoodsman. They kept him on the auctioneer's block for half an hour telling the wise and curious folk tales of which he knew so many. He had won the crowd by his principles, his humor and good nature as well as by the brave and decisive exhibition of his great strength.

Abe and Harry went to a number of settlements in the county with a like result save that no more violence was needed. At one place there were men in the crowd who knew Harry's record in the war. They called on him for a speech. He spoke on the need of the means of transportation in Sangamon County with such insight and dignity and convincing candor that both Abe and the audience hailed him as a coming man. Abe and he were often seen together those days.

In New Salem they were called the disappointed lovers. It was known there that Abe was very fond of Ann Rutledge although he had not, as yet, openly confessed to any one--not even to Ann--there being no show of hope for him. Ann was deeply in love with John McNeil--the genial, handsome and successful young Irishman. The affair had reached the stage of frankness, of an open discussion of plans, of fond affection expressing itself in caresses quite indifferent to ridicule.

For Ann it had been like warm sunlight on the growing rose. She was neater in dress, lovelier in form and color, more graceful in movement and sweeter-voiced than ever she had been. It is the old way that Nature has of preparing the young to come out upon the stage of real life and to act in its moving scenes. Abe manfully gave them his best wishes and when he spoke of Ann it was done very tenderly. The look of sadness, which all had noted in his moments of abstraction, deepened and often covered his face with its veil. That is another way that Nature has of preparing the young. For these the roses have fallen and only the thorns remain. They are not lured; they seem to be driven to their tasks, but for all, soon or late, her method changes.

On a beautiful morning of June, 1834, John McNeil left the village. Abe Lincoln and Harry and Samson and Sarah and Jack Kelso and his wife stood with the Rutledges in the dooryard of the tavern when he rode away. He was going back to his home in the far East to return in the autumn and make Ann his bride. The girl wept as if her heart would break when he turned far down the road and waved his hand to her.

"Oh, my pretty la.s.s! Do you not hear the birds singing in the meadows?"

said Jack Kelso. "Think of the happiness all around you and of the greater happiness that is coming when he returns. Shame on you!"

"I'm afraid he'll never come back," Ann sobbed.

"Nonsense! Don't get a maggot in your brain and let the crows go walking over your face. Come, we'll take a ride in the meadows and if I don't bring you back laughing you may call me no prophet."

So the event pa.s.sed.

Harry traveled about with Abe a good deal that summer, "electioneering,"

as they called it, from farm to farm. Samson and Sarah regarded the a.s.sociation as a good school for the boy who had a taste for politics.

Abe used to go into the fields, with the men whose favor he sought, and bend his long back over a scythe or a cradle and race them playfully across the field of grain cutting a wider swath than any other and always holding the lead. Every man was out of breath at the end of his swath and needed a few minutes for recuperation. That gave Abe a chance for his statement of the county's needs and his plan of satisfying them. He had met and talked with a majority of the voters before the campaign ended in his election in August. Those travels about the county had been a source of education to the candidate and the voters.

At odd times that summer he had been surveying a new road with Harry Needles for his helper. In September they resumed their work upon it in the vicinity of New Salem and Abe began to carry the letters in his hat again. Every day Ann was looking for him as he came by in the dim light of the early morning on his way to work.

"Anything for me?" she would ask.

"No mail in since I saw you, Ann," was the usual answer.

Often he would say: "I'm afraid not, but here--you take these letters and look through 'em and make sure."

Ann would take them in her hands, trembling with eagerness, and run indoors to the candlelight, and look them over. Always she came back with the little bundle of letters very slowly as if her disappointment were a heavy burden.

"There'll he one next mail if I have to write it myself," Abe said one morning in October as he went on.

To Harry Needles who was with him that morning he said:

"I wonder why that fellow don't write to Ann. I couldn't believe that he has been fooling her but now I don't know what to think of him. Every day I have to deliver a blow that makes her a little paler and thinner. It hurts me like smashing a finger nail. I wonder what has happened to the fellow."

The mail stage was late that evening. As it had not come at nine Mr. Hill went home and left Abe in the store to wait for his mail. The stage arrived a few minutes later. It came as usual in a cloud of dust and a thunder of wheels and hoofs mingled with the crack of the lash, the driver saving his horses for this little display of pride and pomp on arriving at a village. Abe examined the little bundle of letters and newspapers which the driver had left with him. Then he took a paper and sat down to read in the firelight. While he was thus engaged the door opened softly and Ann Rutledge entered. The Postmaster was not aware of her presence until she touched his arm.

"Please give me a letter," she said.

"Sit down, Ann," said he, very gently, as he placed a chair in the fire-glow.

She took it, turning toward him with a look of fear and hope. Then he added:

"I'm sorry but the truth is it didn't come."

"Don't--don't tell me that again," she pleaded in a broken voice, as she leaned forward covering her face with her hands.

"It is terrible, Ann, that I have to help in this breaking of your heart that is going on. I seem to be the head of the hammer that hits you so hard but the handle is in other hands. Honestly, Ann, I wish I could do the suffering for you--every bit of it--and give your poor heart a rest.

Hasn't he written you this summer?"

"Not since July tenth," she answered. Then she confided to Abe the fact that her lover had told her before he went away that his name was not McNeil but McNamar; that he had changed his name to keep clear of his family until he had made a success; that he had gone east to get his father and mother and bring them back with him; lastly she came to the thing that worried her most--the suspicion of her father and mother that John was not honest.

"They say that n.o.body but a liar would live with a false name," Ann told him. "They say that he probably had a wife when he came here--that that is why he don't write to me."

Then after a little silence she pleaded: "You don't think that, do you, Abe?"

"No," said the latter, giving her the advantage of every doubt. "John did a foolish thing but we must not condemn him without a knowledge of the facts. The young often do foolish things and sickness would account for his silence. But whatever the facts are you mustn't let yourself be slain by disappointment. It isn't fair to your friends. John McNamar may be the best man in the world still the fact remains that it would be a pretty good world even if he were not in it and I reckon there'd be lots of men whose love would be worth having too. You go home and go to sleep and stop worrying, Ann. You'll get that letter one of these days."

A day or two later Abe and Harry went to Springfield. Their reason for the trip lay in a talk between the Postmaster and Jack Kelso the night before as they sat by the latter's fireside.

"I've been living where there was no one to find fault with my parts of speech or with the parts of my legs which were not decently covered,"

said Abe. "The sock district of my person has been without representation in the legislature of my intellect up to its last session. Then we got a bill through for local improvements and the Governor has approved the appropriation. Suddenly we discovered that there was no money in the treasury. But Samson Traylor has offered to buy an issue of bonds of the amount of fifteen dollars."