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 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; no great revival broke the seals of the spirit, stirred its deep waters, along Pigeon Creek.  There was no religious service when she was laid to rest in a coffin made of green lumber and fashioned by her husband.  Months passed, the snow lay deep, before a passing circuit-rider held a burial service over her grave.  Tradition has it that the boy Abraham brought this about very likely, at ten years old, he felt that her troubled spirit could not have peace till this was done.  Shadowy as she is, ghostlike across the page of history, it is plain that she was a reality to her son.  He not only loved her but revered her.  He believed that from her he had inherited the better part of his genius.  Many years after her death he said, “God bless my mother; all that I am or ever hope to be I owe to her.”