Toward the end of December, 1864, the news trickled in of the utter
discomfiture of Confederate General Hood's army at Nashville, by
General Thomas. An enthusiastic friend of the President said to him:
"There is not enough left of _Hood_ to make a dish-rag, is there?"
"Well, no, Medill; I think Hood's army is in about the identical fix of
Bill Sykes' dog (the application from Dickens is noticeable as showing
Lincoln's eclectic reading) down in Sangamon County. Did you never hear
it?"
As a Chicago man Mr. Medill might be allowed to be ignorant of Sangamon
Valley incidents.
"Well, this Bill Sykes had a long, hungry _yaller_ dog, forever getting
into the neighbors' meat smokehouses, and chicken-coops, and the like.
They had tried to kill it a hundred-odd times, but the dog was always
too smart for them. Finally, one of them got a coon's _innards,_ and
filled it up with gunpowder, and tied a piece of punk in the nozle.
When he see this dog a-coming 'round, he fired this punk, split open a
corn-cake and _squoze_ the intestine inside, all nice and slab, and
threw out the lot. The dog was always ravenous, and swallered the
heap--kerchunk!
"Pretty soon along come an explosion--so the man said. The head of the
animal lit on the stoop; the fore legs caught a-straddle of the fence;
the hind legs kicked in the ditch, and the rest of the critter lay
around loose. Pretty soon who should come along but Bill, and he was
looking for his dog when he heard the supposed gun go off. The neighbor
said, innocentlike: 'William, I guess that there is not much of that
dog left to catch anybody's fowls?'
"'Well, no,' admitted Sykes; 'I see plenty of pieces, but I guess that
dog _as a dog_, ain't of much account.'
"Just so, Medill, there may be fragments of Hood's army around, but I
guess that army, _as an army_, ain't of much more account!"
(Joseph Medill was editor of the Chicago _Tribune;_ he was one of the
coterie who claimed to have "discovered" Abraham Lincoln, and surely
added propulsion to the wave carrying him to Washington. Another
version of this anecdote is applied to the breaking up of General
Early's rashly advanced army in July; but it would seem, by Mr.
Medill's name, that this is the genuine; the other is not told in the
Western vernacular of Mr. William Sykes.)
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