Page:Life of Abraham Lincoln - Bowers - 1922.djvu/10

 8 con County, where on a bluff overlooking the muddy Sangamon they built a cabin, split rails, fenced fifteen acres and broke the prairie. Young Lincoln was twenty-one and free, but he remained at home during the summer, helping his father and his devoted step-mother to establish their new home. The following winter he split the historic rails for Mrs. Nancy Miller—"four hundred for every yard of jeans dyed with walnut juice necessary to make him a pair of trowsers."

In the spring, a pioneer adventurer, Denton Offut, engaged Abraham, with Hanks and one other helper, to take a boat load of provisions to New Orleans, for the wages of fifty cents a day and a bonus of sixty dollars for the three. This and the preceding trip down the river gave Lincoln the sight of slavery which caused him to say, "If ever I get a chance to hit that thing I'll hit it hard."

New Salem was a very small village destined to be of only a few years duration. Here Offut erected a small general store and placed Lincoln in charge while Offut having other unimportant business ventures went about the community bragging that his clerk, Lincoln, was the best man in the country and would some day be president of the United States. Offut's boasting attracted the attention of the Clary's Grove boys, who lived near New Salem, and they determined upon a wrestling match between Lincoln and their champion bully, Jack Armstrong. Lincoln did his best to avoid it, and a prominent citizen stopped the encounter. The result was that Armstrong and his gang