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 West, and Nancy during the
two years she lived there could not have enjoyed much of the consolation
of her religion. Perhaps now and then she had ghostly council of some
stray circuit-rider. But for her the days of the ecstasies had gone by;