Page:He Knew Lincoln and Other Billy Brown Stories.djvu/117

 keep 'em still a while—a kind of Daniel Webster he was tryin' to be, makin' a new compromise.

Douglas got so busy tryin' to please the South he clean lost sight of what the people was thinkin' back home. I reckon he wan't countin' on us thinkin' at all—just took it for granted we'd believe what he told us, like we'd always done. Surprisin' how long you can fool people with the talk they was brought up on. Seems sometimes as if they hated to break in a new set of idees as bad as they do new boots. I reckon that was what Douglas was countin' on back there in '58. But he got it wrong that time. He hadn't reckoned on what Abraham Lincoln had been doin'. Before he got through them debates, Douglas susspected it in my judgment. He knew that even if he did git to the Senate, Lincoln was the one that had come out ahead.