con study it out. He's got more time
'n I have, and mebbe knows all about it. I can't spend no more time on
it. No. 3, passenger, from the West 's due in 20 minutes, and I've got
to get ready for it. Good luck; there comes the Deacon's darky now, with
a load of wheat. I'll send it out by him."

The operator wrote out his last version of the message on a
telegraph-blank, inclosed it in a West ern Union envelope, which he
addressed to Deacon Klegg, and gave to Abraham Lincoln, with strong
injunctions to make all haste back home with it.

Impressed with these, Abraham, as soon as he delivered his grain to the
elevator, put his team to a trot, and maintained it until he reached
home.

Everything about the usually cheerful farm-house was shrouded in
palpable gloom. The papers of the day before, with their ghastly lists
of the dead and wounded, had contained Si's and Shorty's names, besides
those of other boys of the neighborhood, in terrific, unmistakable
plainness. There were few homes into which mourning had not come. The
window curtains were drawn down, the front doors closed, no one appeared
on the front porch, and it seemed that even the dogs and the fowls were
op pressed with the general sadness, and forebore their usual cheerful
utterances. Attired in sober black, with eyes red from weeping, and with
camphor bottle near, Mr. Klegg sat in Si's room, and between her fits of
uncontrollable weeping turned over, one after another, the reminders
of her son. There were his bed, his clothes, which she had herself
fashioned in loving toil for him; the well-thumbed school-books which
had cost him so many anxious hours, his gun and fishing rod. All these
were now sacred to her. Elsewhere in the house his teary-eyed sisters
went softly and silently about their daily work.

The father had sought distraction in active work, and was in the
cornfield, long corn-knife in hand, shocking up the tall stalks with a
desperate energy to bring forgetfulness.

Abraham Lincoln burst into the kitchen, and taking the dispatch from his
hat said:

"Hyah am a papeh or sumfin dat de agent down at de station done tole me
to bring hyah jest as quick as I done could. He said hit done come ober
a wire or a telugraph, or sumfin ob dat ere sort, and you must hab hit
right-a-way."

"O, my; it's a telegraph dispatch," screamed Maria with that sickening
apprehension that all women have of telegrams. "It's awful. I can't tech
it. Take it Sophy."

"