However, this bold throw of the dice of fortune was not quite so impertinent as it seems.  During the months when he was in charge of Offut’s grocery store he had made a conquest of New Salem.  The village grocery in those days was the village club.  It had its constant gathering of loafers all of whom were endowed with votes.  It was the one place through which passed the whole population, in and out, one time or another.  To a clever storekeeper it gave a chance to establish a following.  Had he, as Lincoln had, the gift of story-telling, the gift of humor, he was a made man.  Pigeon Creek over again!  Lincoln’s wealth of funny stories gave Offut’s grocery somewhat the role of a vaudeville theater and made the storekeeper as popular a man as there was in New Salem.

In another way he repeated his conquest of Pigeon Creek.  New Salem had its local Alsatia known as Clary’s Grove whose insolent young toughs led by their chief, Jack Armstrong, were the terror of the neighborhood.  The groceries paid them tribute in free drinks.  Any luckless storekeeper who incurred their displeasure found his store some fine morning a total wreck.  Lincoln challenged Jack Armstrong to a duel with fists.  It was formally arranged.  A ring was formed; the whole village was audience; and Lincoln thrashed him to a finish.  But this was only a small part of his triumph.  His physical prowess, joined with his humor and his companionableness; entirely captivated Clary’s Grove.  Thereafter, it was storekeeper Lincoln’s pocket borough; its ruffians were his body-guard.  Woe to any one who made trouble for their hero.

There were still other causes for his quick rise to the position of village leader.  His unfailing kindness was one; his honesty was another.  Tales were related of his scrupulous dealings, such as walking a distance of miles in order to correct a trifling error he had made, in selling a poor woman less than the proper weight of tea.  Then, too, by New Salem standards, he was educated.  Long practice on the shovel at Pigeon Creek had given him a good handwriting, and one of the first things he did at New Salem was to volunteer to be clerk of elections.  And there was a distinct moral superiority.  Little as this would have signified unbacked by his giant strength since it had that authority behind it his morality set him apart from his followers, different, imposing.  He seldom, if ever, drank whisky.  Sobriety was already the rule of his life, both outward and inward.  At the same time he was not censorious.  He accepted the devotion of Clary’s Grove without the slightest attempt to make over its bravoes in his own image.  He sympathized with its ideas of sport.  For all his kindliness to humans of every sort much of his sensitiveness for animals had passed away.  He was not averse to cock fighting; he enjoyed a horse race.(5) Altogether, in his outer life, before the catastrophe that revealed him to himself, he was quite as much in the tone of New Salem as ever in that of Pigeon Creek.  When the election came he got every vote in New Salem except three.(6)