scout Harry Needles and seven of his
comrades had been surrounded and slain. When Mr. Davis called at the
little home in La Salle Street that evening he found Bim in great
distress.

"I throw up my hands," she said. "I can not stand any more. We shall be
homeless to-morrow."

"No, not that--so long as I live," he answered. "I have bought the claim.
You can pay me when you get ready."

He was very tender and sympathetic.

When he had left them Bim said to her mother: "Our old friends do not
seem to care what becomes of us. I have no thought now save for you and
the baby. I'll do whatever you think best for you two. I don't care for
myself. My heart is as dead as Harry's."

CHAPTER XX

WHICH TELLS OF THE SETTLING OF ABE LINCOLN AND THE TRAYLORS IN THE
VILLAGE OF SPRINGFIELD AND OF SAMSON'S SECOND VISIT TO CHICAGO.

Bim's judgment of her old friends was ill founded. It was a slow time in
which she lived. The foot of the horse, traveling and often mired in a
rough muddy highway, was its swiftest courier. Letters carried by horses
or slow steamboats were the only media of communication between people
separated by wide distances. The learned wrote letters of astonishing
length and literary finish--letters which were passed from hand to hand
and read aloud in large and small assemblies. They presented the news and
the comment it inspired. In these old and generous letters, which
antedate the railroad and the telegraph, critics have discovered one of
the most delicate and informing of the lost arts--the epistolary. But to
the average hand, wearied by heavy tools, the lightsome goose quill,
committing its owner to dubious spelling and clumsy penmanship, and
exposing the interior of his intellect, was a dreaded thing. When old
Black Hawk signed a treaty he was wont to say that he had "touched it
with the goose quill." He made only a little mark whereupon a kind of
sanctity was imparted to the document. Every man unaccustomed to its use
stood in like awe of this implement. When he "took his pen in hand" he
had entered upon an adventure so unusual that his letter always mentioned
it as if, indeed, it were an item of news not to be overlooked. So it is
easy to understand that many who had traveled far were as the dead, in a
measure, to the friends they had left behind them and that those
separated by only half a hundred miles had to be very enterprising
to keep acquainted.

In March Abe Lincoln had got his license