A tall Indian was seen coming toward the smithy, followed by two dogs. The men watched him as he approached. He was a kind of chief, and had accepted the teachings of the early missionaries. He used to wander about among the new settlements, and was very proud of himself and his own tribe and race. He had an honest heart. He once composed an epitaph for himself, which was well meant but read oddly, and which Abraham Lincoln sometimes used to quote in his professional career:
"Here lies poor Johnnie Kongapod,
Have mercy on him, gracious God,
As he would do if he was God,
And you were Johnnie Kongapod."
The Indian sat down on the log sill of the blacksmith's shop, and watched the gathering cloud as it slowly shut out the sky.
"Storm," said he. "Lay down, Jack; lay down, Jim."
Jack and Jim were his two dogs. They eyed the flaming forge. One of them seemed tired, and lay down beside his master, but the other made himself troublesome.
"That reminds me," said Dennis Hanks; and he related a curious story of a troublesome dog, perhaps the one which in its evolutions became known as "Sykes's Dog," though this may be a later New Salem story. It was an odd and a coarse bit of humor. Lincoln himself is represented as telling this, or a like story, to General Grant after the Vicksburg campaign, something as follows:
"'Your enemies were constantly coming to me with their criticisms while the siege was in progress, and they did not cease their ill opinions after the city fell. I thought that the time had come to put an end to this kind of criticism, so one day, when a delegation called to see me and had spent a half-hour, and tried to show me the great mistake that you had made in paroling Pemberton's army, I thought I could get rid of them best by telling the story of Sykes's dog.
"'Have you ever heard the story of Sykes's dog?' I said to the spokesman of the delegation.
"'No.'
"'Well, I must tell it to you. Sykes had a yellow dog that he set great store by; but there were a lot of small boys around the village, and the dog became very unpopular among them. His eye was so keen on his master's interests that there arose prejudice against him. The boys counseled how to get rid of him. They finally fixed up a cartridge with a long fuse, and put the cartridge in a piece of meat, and then sat down on a fence and called the dog, one of them holding the fuse in his hand. The dog swallowed the meat, cartridge and all, and stood choking, when one of them touched off the fuse. There was a loud report. Sykes came out of the house, and found the ground was strewed with pieces of the dog. He picked up the biggest piece that he could find—a portion of the back with the tail still hanging to it—and said: