"You don't know yet; Mr. Lincoln has not yet declared what he will do," replied Abner. "Has not? Hem, hem, hem!" Mr. Diggs stumped about furiously, his head inclined backward in order to see his companion's face through his ornamental glasses, while he cleared his throat for a fresh burst of thunder. "Has not, hey? Hem, hem! He might as well. We all know what he will do if elected. And I'll tell you something more," he added, walking back and forth, his hands plunged in his pockets, while seeming to grow more and more furious, "if Lincoln is elected there will be _war_!" (Great emphasis on the last word.) At this moment Crazy Joe, who had reached the village in search of his mud man, came up to the excited Diggs, and, laying his hand on his arm, in a very serious voice said: "Say, why didn't you stay where I put you until I showed you?" "What do you mean?" demanded Mr. Diggs, pausing in his agitated walk, and gazing furiously into the lunatic's face, for he suspected some one of attempting to play a joke on him. "What made you go away before I showed you?" said Joe, earnestly, gazing down upon the furious little fellow. "I--I don't understand what you mean," said the puzzled Mr. Diggs, drawing himself up to his full height, which was hardly imposing. "When I make a man of mud, and go off and leave him, to get people to come and look at him, I don't want him to go off, as you did, before I come back." Abner Tompkins, and several others, who had heard the story of Joe's mud man, were now almost bursting with suppressed merriment. "I can't tell what the deuce you mean?" said the angry Mr. Diggs. "I made you out of mud and clay, and left you standing by the big tree at the creek while I went to get some people to show you to, that I might convince them that man was made out of clay, but before I got back you walked off. Now, why didn't you stay until I showed you?" The men gathered about Mr. Diggs could no longer restrain themselves, and burst into peals of laughter, which made Mr. Diggs furious. "This is some trick you are playing," he cried, and, turning upon his heel, he strutted away to his office, where he shut himself up for the next two hours. The joke spread rapidly, and in two hours every one in the village knew that Crazy Joe claimed Mr. Diggs as his mud man; while poor Joe, satisfied that he had found the object of his creation, consented to go home with Abner. CHAPTER VI. A TRANSITION PERIOD. All Snagtown was astonished one day when a flaring handbill announcing that Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas would speak in that unpretentious little village. Their presence there was due to the accident of missing connections in passing from one city to another.