"'He's done for this world,' said Gordon. 'He'll never come to his senses again. Thomas Lincoln would be proper sorry.' And so I should have been had Abraham died. Sometimes I think like it was the Evil One that possessed that horse. It don't seem to me that he'd 'a' ever ha' kicked Abe of his own self--right in the head, too. You can see the scar on him now. "Well, almost an hour passed, when Abe came to himself--consciousness they call it--all at once, in an instant. And what do you think was the first thing he said? Just this--'uk!' "He finished the word just where he left it when the horse kicked him, and looked around wild-like, and there was the critter standin' still as the mill-stun.' Now, where do you think the soul of Abe was between 'Gl--' and 'uk'? I'd like to have ye tell me that." A long discussion would follow such a question. Abraham Lincoln himself once discussed the same curious incident with his law-partner Herndon, and made it a subject of the continuance of mental consciousness after death. It was a warm afternoon. A dark cloud hung in the northern sky, and grew slowly over the arch of serene and sunny blue. "Goin' to have a storm," said the blacksmith. "Shouldn't wonder if it were a tempest. We generally get a tempest about this time of year, when winter finally breaks up into spring. Well, I declare! there comes Johnnie Kongapod, the Kickapoo Indian from Illinois--he and his dogs." A tall Indian was seen coming toward the smithy, followed by two dogs. The men watched him as he approached. He was a kind of chief, and had accepted the teachings of the early missionaries. He used to wander about among the new settlements, and was very proud of himself and his own tribe and race. He had an honest heart. He once composed an epitaph for himself, which was well meant but read oddly, and which Abraham Lincoln sometimes used to quote in his professional career: "Here lies poor Johnnie Kongapod, Have mercy on him, gracious God, As he would do if he was God, And you were Johnnie Kongapod." The Indian sat down on the log sill of the blacksmith's shop, and watched the gathering cloud as it slowly shut out the sky. "Storm," said he. "Lay down, Jack; lay down, Jim." Jack and Jim were his two dogs. They eyed the flaming forge. One of them seemed tired, and lay down beside his master, but the other made himself troublesome. "That reminds me," said Dennis Hanks; and he related a curious story of a troublesome dog, perhaps the one which in its evolutions became known as "SYKES'S DOG," though this may be a later New Salem story. It was an odd and a coarse bit of humor. Lincoln himself is represented as telling this, or a like story, to General Grant after the Vicksburg campaign, something as follows: