"The horse went round and round, round and round, just as steady as clock-work, until the grist was nearly out, and the sound of the grindin' was low, when he began to lag, sleepy-like. Abe he run up behind him, and said, 'Get up, you old jade!' then puckered up his mouth, so, to say 'Gluck.' 'Tis a word I taught him to use. Every one has his own horse-talk.
"He waved his stick, and said 'Gl—'
"Was the horse bewildered? He never did such a thing before. In an instant, like a thunder-clap when the sun was shinin', he h'isted up his heels and kicked Abraham in the head, and knocked him over on the ground, and then stopped as though to think on what he had done.
"The mill-hands ran to Abraham. There the boy lay stretched out on the ground just as though he was dead. They thought he was dead. They got some water, and worked over him a spell. They could see that he breathed, but they thought that every breath would be his last.
"'He's done for this world,' said Gordon. 'He'll never come to his senses again. Thomas Lincoln would be proper sorry.' And so I should have been had Abraham died. Sometimes I think like it was the Evil One that possessed that horse. It don't seem to me that he'd 'a' ever ha' kicked Abe of his own self—right in the head, too. You can see the scar on him now.
"Well, almost an hour passed, when Abe came to himself—consciousness they call it—all at once, in an instant. And what do you think was the first thing he said? Just this—'uk!'
"He finished the word just where he left it when the horse kicked him, and looked around wild-like, and there was the critter standin' still as the mill-stun.' Now, where do you think the soul of Abe was between 'Gl—' and 'uk'? I'd like to have ye tell me that."
A long discussion would follow such a question. Abraham Lincoln himself once discussed the same curious incident with his law-partner Herndon, and made it a subject of the continuance of mental consciousness after death.
It was a warm afternoon. A dark cloud hung in the northern sky, and grew slowly over the arch of serene and sunny blue.
"Goin' to have a storm," said the blacksmith. "Shouldn't wonder if it were a tempest. We generally get a tempest about this time of year, when winter finally breaks up into spring. Well, I declare! there comes Johnnie Kongapod, the Kickapoo Indian from Illinois—he and his dogs."