Page:He Knew Lincoln and Other Billy Brown Stories.djvu/105

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BACK THERE IN '58

You never would believe how I felt when I seen that, for that meant goin' back on Little Dug, leavin' the party and votin' for a Black Republican, as we used to call 'em. I tell you when I begun to see where I was goin' there wa'n't many nights I didn't lie awake tryin' to figure out how I could git around it. 'Twa'n't long, though, before I got over feelin' bad. Fact was every time I heard Mr. Lincoln—I used to go to all the speeches between debates, and there must have been twenty or thirty of them—he made it clearer. 'Twas amazin' how every time he always had some new way of puttin' it. Seemed as if his head was so full he couldn't say the same thing twice alike.

One thing that made it easier was that I begun to see that Douglas wa'n't thinkin' much of anything but gittin' elected and that Lincoln wa'n't thinkin' about that at all. He was dead set on makin'

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