THE DISMEMBERED "YALLER" DOG.
Toward the end of December, 1864, the news trickled in of the utter discomfiture of Confederate General Hood's army at Nashville, by General Thomas. An enthusiastic friend of the President said to him:
"There is not enough left of Hood to make a dish-rag, is there?"
"Well, no, Medill; I think Hood's army is in about the identical fix of Bill Sykes' dog (the application from Dickens is noticeable as showing Lincoln's eclectic reading) down in Sangamon County. Did you never hear it?"
As a Chicago man Mr. Medill might be allowed to be ignorant of Sangamon Valley incidents.
"Well, this Bill Sykes had a long, hungry yaller dog, forever getting into the neighbors' meat smokehouses, and chicken-coops, and the like. They had tried to kill it a hundred-odd times, but the dog was always too smart for them. Finally, one of them got a coon's innards, and filled it up with gunpowder, and tied a piece of punk in the nozle. When he see this dog a-coming 'round, he fired this punk, split open a corn-cake and squoze the intestine inside, all nice and slab, and threw out the lot. The dog was always ravenous, and swallered the heap--kerchunk!
"Pretty soon along come an explosion--so the man said. The head of the animal lit on the stoop; the fore legs caught a-straddle of the fence; the hind legs kicked in the ditch, and the rest of the critter lay around loose. Pretty soon who should come along but Bill, and he was looking for his dog when he heard the supposed gun go off. The neighbor said, innocentlike: 'William, I guess that there is not much of that dog left to catch anybody's fowls?'
"'Well, no,' admitted Sykes; 'I see plenty of pieces, but I guess that dog as a dog, ain't of much account.'
"Just so, Medill, there may be fragments of Hood's army around, but I guess that army, as an army, ain't of much more account!"
(Joseph Medill was editor of the Chicago Tribune; he was one of the coterie who claimed to have "discovered" Abraham Lincoln, and surely added propulsion to the wave carrying him to Washington. Another version of this anecdote is applied to the breaking up of General Early's rashly advanced army in July; but it would seem, by Mr. Medill's name, that this is the genuine; the other is not told in the Western vernacular of Mr. William Sykes.)