t night when the door of the cabin
was suddenly thrown open and a monster appeared on the threshold, a
spectral thing in the darkness, furry, with the head of an ox, Thomas
Lincoln shrank back aghast; little Abraham, quicker-sighted and
quicker-witted, slipped behind the creature, pulled at its furry mantle,
and revealed a forest Diana, a bold girl who amused herself playing
demon among the shadows of the moon.

Seven years passed and his eighth birthday approached. All this while
Thomas Lincoln had somehow kept his family in food, but never had he
money in his pocket. His successive farms, bought on credit, were never
paid for. An incurable vagrant, he came at last to the psychological
moment when he could no longer impose himself on his community. He must
take to the road in a hazard of new fortune. Indiana appeared to him
the land of promise. Most of his property--such as it was--except his
carpenter's tools, he traded for whisky, four hundred gallons. Somehow
he obtained a rattletrap wagon and two horses.

The family appear to have been loath to go. Nancy Lincoln had long been
ailing and in low spirits, thinking much of what might happen to her
children after her death. Abraham loved the country-side, and he had
good friends in the miller and his kind old mother. But the vagrant
Thomas would have his way. In the brilliancy of the Western autumn, with
the ruined woods flaming scarlet and gold, these poor people took their
last look at the cabin that had been their wretched shelter, and set
forth into the world.(9)

II THE MYSTERIOUS YOUTH

Vagrants, or little better than vagrants, were Thomas Lincoln and his
family making their way to Indiana. For a year after they arrived they
were squatters, their home an "open-faced camp," that is, a shanty with
one wall missing, and instead of chimney, a fire built on the open side.
In that mere pretense of a house, Nancy Lincoln and her children spent
the winter of 1816-1817. Then Thomas resorted to his familiar practice
of taking land on credit. The Lincolns were now part of a "settlement"
of seven or eight families strung along a little stream known as Pigeon
Creek. Here Thomas entered a quarter-section of fair land, and in the
course of the next eleven years succeeded--wonderful to relate--in
paying down sufficient money to give him title to about half.

Meanwhile, poor fading Nancy went to her place. Pigeon Creek was an
out-of-the-way nook in the still unsettled W