An Unofficial Patriot

by Helen H. Gardener

"You don't mean to tell me that you are carrying that knife yet, Mr. President?"

Both laughed. Griffith felt strangely at home already with this wonderful man. He did not realize that it was this particular aim which had actuated Mr. Lincoln from the moment he had entered the room. This reader and leader of men had taken the plan of his legal years, and was taking time to analyze his guest while he threw him off his guard. In the midst of the laugh he stretched out his long leg and dived into his trousers' pocket.

"No, sir, you may not believe it, but that's not the same knife! I carried the other one—well—I reckon it must have been as much as fifteen years—with that offer open. It lost its beauty—and I didn't gain mine. It was along in the fifties somewhere, when one day I was talking with a client of mine on the corner of the main street in Springfield, and along came a fellow and stopped within ten feet of us. I looked at him and he looked at me, and we both looked into a looking-glass in the store window. I'd tried to be an honorable man all my life, and hard as it was to part with an old friend, I felt it was my duty to give him that knife—and I did."

There was a most solemn expression on his host's face. Griffith laughed heartily again. The President was gazing straight before him.

"I don't know where that man came from, and I don't know where he went to, but he won that knife fair and square. I was a good deal of a beauty compared to him!"

The very muscles of his face twinkled with humor. No one would have felt the homeliness of his face, lit as it now was in its splendid ruggedness, with the light and glory of a great and tender soul playing with its own freaks of fancy.

But before the laugh had died out of Griffith's voice, the whole manner of the President had changed. He had opened the pen-knife and was drawing the point of the blade down a line on the large map which lay on the table beside him.

"Morton tells me that you used to be a circuit-rider down in these mountains here, and that you know every pass, defile and ford in the State." He looked straight at Griffith and ran his great, bony hand over his head and face, but went hastily on: "I know how that is myself. Used to be a knight of the saddlebags out in Illinois, along about the same time—only my circuit was legal and yours was clerical. I carried Blackstone in my saddlebags—after I got able to own a copy—and you had a Bible, I reckon—volumes of the law in both cases! Let me see. How long ago was that?"

"I began in twenty-nine, Mr. President, and rode circuit for ten years. Then I was located and transferred the regular way each one or two years up to fifty-three. That—year—I—left—my—native—state."

Mr. Lincoln noticed the hesitancy in the last words, the change in the tone, the touch of sadness. He inferred at once that what Senator Morton had told him of this man's loyalty had had something to do with his leaving the old home.