The next morning Abe Lincoln was at the store early, waiting to see McNeil pass. When he had heard half a dozen times before that Ann Rutledge was engaged to marry McNeil, the words had been as idle gossip. Nor had he given McNeil any special attention. Now all was different. With keen eye and feverish desire he waited to pass judgment.
As the young man passed, the watching Lincoln felt himself moved by some tremendous impulse of destruction, a destruction that would annihilate this man from the face of the earth as completely as though he had never existed.
As he stood in the doorway of the rude frontier store, no Sinaitic thunder roared its disapproval of this primitive animal impulse. But he heard, instead, the gentle voice of a woman who had long lain sleeping under the tangle of a forsaken wildwood—a voice that had read to him from an open book by the light of a pine torch fire, "Thou shalt not covet."
THE MYSTERIOUS PIG
One day a poverty-stricken and dispirited woman, whom Abe Lincoln had not before seen, entered his store to buy a few candles and a small quantity of molasses.
As she went out the storekeeper was informed that she was the wife of a notorious drunkard, known throughout the settlement as "Snoutful Kelly," who lived in a miserable shack out near Muddy Point.
After the woman had gone, in casting up his accounts, Abe Lincoln found himself with a few pennies more than he should have, and, after puzzling over the small excess, he discovered that he had overcharged the wife of Snoutful Kelly.