So when Lincoln saw that Kirkpatrick was a candidate for the captaincy, he said to Greene, who had worked with him in Offutt's store: "Bill, I believe I can make Kirkpatrick pay me that two dollars he owes me on the cant-hook now. I guess I'll run against him for captain." Therefore Abe Lincoln announced himself as a candidate. The vote was taken in an odd way. It was announced that when the men heard the command to march, each should go and stand by the man he wished to have for captain. The command was given. At the word, "March," three-fourths of the company rallied round Abe Lincoln. More than twenty-five years afterward, when Lincoln was a candidate for the presidency of the United States, he referred to himself in the third person in describing this incident, saying that he was elected "to his own surprise," and "he says he has not since had any success in life which gave him so much satisfaction." IGNORANCE OF MILITARY TACTICS But Lincoln was a "raw hand" at military tactics. He used to enjoy telling of his ignorance and the expedients adopted in giving his commands to the company. Once when he was marching, twenty men abreast, across a field it became necessary to pass through a narrow gateway into the next field. He said: "I could not, for the life of me, remember the word for getting the company _endwise_ so that it could go through the gate; so, as we came near the gate, I shouted, 'This company is dismissed for two minutes, when it will fall in again on the other side of the fence.'" A HISTORIC MYSTERY EXPLAINED Captain Lincoln had his sword taken from him for shooting within limits. Many have wondered that a man of Lincoln's intelligence should have been guilty of this stupid infraction of ordinary army regulations. Biographers of Lincoln puzzled over this until the secret was explained by William Turley Baker, of Bolivia, Ill., at the Lincoln Centenary in Springfield. All unconscious of solving a historic mystery, "Uncle Billy" Baker related the following story which explains that the shooting was purely accidental: "My father was roadmaster general in the Black Hawk War. Lincoln used to come often to our house and talk it all over with father, when I was a boy, and I've heard them laugh over their experiences in that war. The best joke of all was this: Father received orders one day to throw log bridges over a certain stream the army had to cross. He felled some tall, slim black walnuts--the only ones he could find there--and the logs were so smooth and round that they were hard to walk on any time. This day it rained and made them very slippery. Half of the soldiers fell into the stream and got a good ducking. Captain Lincoln was one of those that tumbled in. He just laughed and scrambled out as quick as he could. He always made the best of everything like that.