Читать книгу Life of an American Workman - Boyden Sparkes - Страница 5

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Being a machinist, I have always wanted to know how things work. A machine enabled my pioneering father and mother to provide for me; it was a steam locomotive of which my father was the engineer. All my training, instincts and aptitudes have combined to make me want to penetrate the workings of any machines I see.

Curiously, my earliest recollection of being alive is involved with an adventure growing out of the resentment of certain Americans against machines—railroad machines, and all they portended.

With a German-fairy-story fancifulness, my mother enlisted me in the service of the brass lamp in our kitchen that had its own wall shelf to roost upon. She made it seem a living thing, that lamp whose smoked-up chimney gave her a daily cleaning chore.

"You must go to the store," she told the barefooted child who nagged her for a slice of bread with sugar on it; that was me between five and six years old. "The lamp is empty and, therefore, hungry—just like you. We must give his wick a big drink or he will sulk and keep us in darkness tonight. You take this can and get some coal oil."

A withered, blackened potato was impaled upon the oil-can spout. Ours would get a fresh potato for his nose once a month, when our account would be squared at the store on payday.

What I wore that day was a gingham shirt and a little pair of jeans-cloth pants that buttoned to it. The empty oil can clanged musically as now and then a flowering weed swished against its emptiness. We lived on the south side of the tracks; the stores, the saloons and other excitements were on the north side of the tracks. Ellis, Kansas, the railroad town where we lived, was in the heart of the short-grass country.

Two utterly different streams of life bisected each other in the vicinity of our small, isolated community; east and west ran the railroad, and its tracks bridged the creek that slanted across the prairie. This creek was a yellow thread of wilderness at the edge of town. If the railroad and its attendant establishments represented the excitements of the tame world far to the east, the stream was sometimes a murmuring reminder of other kinds of excitement. Throughout my early years there were being freshly printed in the soft banks of that stream the tracks of wild animals of the prairie by which we were surrounded—of buffalo and antelope, and of coyotes. Sometimes there were tracks of a creature that wore moccasins, a creature that hated the railroad.

You had to be a tough kid. Out there where I grew up, if you were soft, all the other kids would beat the daylights out of you. Consequently you grew tough in all your sensitive parts, just as your bare feet did in order to avoid the pain of splinters, stone bruises and rude boot heels. Nevertheless, there was one valid, scalp-raising fear in my early life which has completely lost touch with current realities. When I have spoken of it, my children have seemed incredulous. Yet history is on the side of my memory when I say that along that narrow fringe of plains civilization where we grew up, everybody lived in fear of Indians.

I was a year old when, to the north of us, Custer and his men were massacred. In the fall of 1878, when I was three and a half years old, a band of Northern Cheyennes, led by Chief Dull Knife, slaughtered some white people living on Sappa Creek and Beaver Creek, in Decatur and Rawlins counties. Other things had happened, were happening and were told of over and over in the nighttime glow around our kitchen stove, while neighbors sat and blew upon their steaming coffee poured in saucers. A Kansas white woman, when carried off by Indians, had written pleas for help on scraps of paper with which she made a trail for rescuers to follow. Why, so often did we hear the tale I almost seemed to see that despairing woman tearing paper and even her apron into scraps. Though adult voices were lowered to discuss her plight, only a dumb kid would fail to get better than a glimmering of an understanding as to why the Indians saved the women and girls, although invariably scalping men and boys. At five I was a paleface vulnerable to scalping, and knew it.

On that day, as I went for coal oil toward the railroad tracks and the stores, I saw another boy running; he cleared the tracks and headed toward me along the path. As we passed I flung a question at him.

"Indians!" he yelled. "Indians are coming!"

Right now I take a lot of credit to myself, because I did not drop the oil can as I scooted for home, clearing tufts of buffalo grass at just about the height of a prairie chicken when it flies for fresh cover. I still had the clanging oil can as I panted into our yard, yipped a warning to my mother and scrambled out of sight, down a flight of earthen steps into the moldy darkness of our cyclone cellar.

My memory of that occurrence ends as abruptly as a picture that is torn across, but another recollection which may be a piece of it begins with my small self seated on the floor, amid the smell of dust, against the wall of the second floor of the stone railroad station in Ellis; this was also the hotel. Many people were there. The women, with shawls and sun-bonnets on their heads, were enjoying the excitement of being frightened, if I can trust what I seem to remember.

Just to prove that we were in danger, the children were not allowed to play or make any noise. Every man who showed himself carried some kind of weapon; most had rifles, but a few younger men made savage gestures with axes and whiffle-trees. I remember one naked saber carried almost like a doll baby in the folded arms of an old man who leaned against the wall close to me. There was stable manure on his wrinkled black boots. That occasion was certainly one of our Indian scares. I think this was in 1880; it might have been in '81. However, the Indians never got me, in keeping with my mother's promise that they never would; she would reassure me whenever I hesitated to invade, alone, the awful blackness of the bedroom. Sometimes she tucked me in, not always.

Frontier hardships accounted for great changes in the lovely Missouri-born girl with peach-bloom complexion, tender mouth and youthful form whom my father married in 1871. She was a shapely bride when she left the comfortable German culture of her father's Missouri farmhouse. By the time I became conscious of my dependence on her, my mother's large dark eyes were set in a big powerful woman of the frontier. I was the third of four children she bore in Kansas railroad towns in the 70's before the prairies had been tamed. She ate buffalo meat to nourish her sons. Sometimes now I seem to see her eyes looking at me, miraculously, out of the face of one of my grandchildren. Sometimes, in a mirror, I catch a fleeting trace of her in my own eyes. At such times I hope afresh that they were right, those vanished Ellis neighbors who, when drinking coffee in our kitchen, would cast a nod at me and say, "Walt takes after his ma."

Work? Of course, a boy had to work in a household where my mother was the ruler. She worked all the time herself and had prodigious energy. What awakened me every day was the clangor of iron lids on her cookstove before the sun was up. For years her kitchen fire was the only heat we knew in winter, and to reach its blazing comfort in a morning that was still night-black, often I had to scamper bare-footed across a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badly fitting windows. I shared a bed with my bigger brother Ed, who was three years and three months older. Before breakfast Ed had cows to milk, but I had other work to do.

Sometimes I was sent early to get the soup meat. Until I was six or seven, the few hundred people who lived in Ellis almost never got beef; we all ate buffalo meat. There was an abundance of it and it was cheap; some of it was shipped east to other towns. The rump was what my mother wanted. She would put a great hunk of this maroon-and-bluish gristled meat into the big black iron pot in which she made her soup. I have never tasted any other soup quite so good. She never served her soup on the day she made it, but, steaming hot, it would appear on the table the next morning when we had breakfast. What enormous meals those were with which a Kansas day began back in the '80's! Steaks, potatoes, pancakes, followed soup. Often we had hominy, but if we did, we owed it, every grain, to my mother. She soaked the yellow grains in lye water until the flintlike yellow coating vanished. A mound of hominy was material out of which to build a dike to retain a lake of gravy. My mother not only made the hominy but she grew the corn. She had a garden where no weed was ever tolerated. There was no task she ever dodged for lack of strength or skill or willingness.

A certain soft scraping sound that I hear faintly sometimes in a barbershop is like an echo of a harsh and loud scrape, scrape, scrape that I used to hear in our kitchen when I was a boy. As I listen, with my face and mind erased of present things by a barber's soothing towel, I doze; and, dozing, slip back to one of those moments of my past that is quickened by the razor's noise. Our kitchen was the only barbershop my father knew. My mother was the one who always cut his hair and shaved him. We never spent money for anything that we could get without spending.

When it happened on a Sunday morning, the shaving of my father was a part of the family preparation for attendance at church services. His upper lip, by design and in accordance with the prevailing masculine fashion of the West, was always black with a thick glossy mustache that drooped at the corners of his mouth. That was proper, but the stubbly growth of whiskers on his cheeks, neck and chin was as disturbing to my mother, as little to be tolerated, as weeds in her kitchen garden. So, badgered by her, my father would seat himself midway between the window and the stove, on which a basin of water would be steaming. I have forgotten how the lather brush had been improvised, but I never can forget that the soap, often with my conscripted labor, was home-made out of grease and lye. With a prod of her thumb against the bristles of his chin, my mother would tilt his head and give him an iridescent beard of bubbles. When this had become foamy, she would start to scrape.

You can bet my father's skin was tough! It had to be to withstand that kind of homemade soap, along with Kansas sun and wind and blizzards. But if his skin was like bristly leather, his heart was gentle. We two boys, his sons, were a pair of fighting chore-dodging cubs, unruly and frequently in need of taming; yet he never laid a hand on us in anger. He would reason with us and get obedience, but his mighty arms and calloused hands were never used against us. In many of the visions of him that recur to me, there is a paintbrush in his hand, or a hammer or a saw. Always he was trying to make life better for his family. Our first Ellis house—the first of three—was of the plainest kind. It was badly put together and, in winter, through its cracks, the snow intruded. It had a little porch, though, and two bedrooms beside the combination kitchen-dining-living room. A railroad shanty? Oh, no. It was Hank Chrysler's home, a house to swell my mother's heart with pride as she showed it off to neighbors who still were living half buried in the prairie earth in houses made of sod.

We were lucky. Because my father worked for the railroad, we were privileged to buy some of its coal when certain other folks in Ellis had no fuel except the dried dung of buffalo or cows. Out hunting, I've warmed my hands over a quick-burning fire of cow chips, oh, many a time, when my fingers got too numb to feel a shotgun trigger. But at home we had a shed full of coal to burn, along with kindling that my brother Ed and I were required to find and cut. When we neglected this, or when we disobeyed her slightest order, our mother spanked us. The mace of her authority was a hairbrush. Corporal punishment? When my mother flailed me on my rear, it seemed to be inflicted by a major general at least. Once, against my private person, that hairbrush was jarred from all its bristles, but it was kept in spanking service until I was nearly seventeen. I was not docile then, or ever, but my mother had the strength to put me, big as I was, across her knee and spank me until my roars convinced her that I was blushing in my pants and improved in my intentions.

My father and mother were a great pair of people; hard-working partners devoted to the job of bringing up a family.

My mother's pumpkin pies were famous out in Ellis, but Henry Chrysler was known, I guess, from end to end of the Union Pacific. Certainly he was the best locomotive engineer on the division. When the railroad bought its first coal-burning locomotive, he was the engineer chosen to leave the cab of a wood burner and take command of that grand mechanism that snorted in an even cadence when it went puff, puff, puff, puffing eastward out of Ellis at 7:30 in the morning. I used to watch him then and still be thinking of him when I got to school at eight o'clock.

Often when he left the house I walked beside him, lugging his dinner pail. What he carried rested on his hip—a great big six-shooter that sagged below his coat. It had a black butt of a size to fill his fist. When I was ten, the handle of that weapon hung on my father just at the level of my stubbly, home-cut hair, above my eager eyes. I always called him papa. He was no swashbuckler, just a railroad man who had been a soldier, as I used to boast, "when he wasn't as big as Ed." That was a fact.

My father, Canadian born, had been brought from Chatham, Ontario, to Kansas City when he was only five or six. His forbears had founded Chatham; the family stock was German; eight generations back of me there had come to America one who spelled his name Greisler, a German Palatine. He was one of a group of Protestants who had left their homeland in the Rhine Valley, gone to the Netherlands, thence to England and embarked, finally, from Plymouth for New York. After the Civil War began, when my father was twelve, he ran away from home to Armourdale, Kansas, and enlisted in the Twelfth Kansas Regiment as a drummer boy. His father tried to get him out, but he drummed for the regiment until the end of the war. I used to listen to him tell about the times when he went hungry or had to sleep in snow or rain with just a blanket. He was not injured by the hardships. I suppose there never was a man more healthy. In the twenty-seven years that he had that passenger run out of Ellis, I never knew him to lose a day. Nevertheless, what happened to him in the war was a visionary part of my young life. My brother Ed and I pumped out of him every scrap of what he could remember of his life as a drummer boy in the Civil War.

When the war was over and he was mustered out, he went to work in the railroad shops in the same town where he had enlisted, in Armourdale. Then he was put on the pay roll as a fireman, and after that was promoted to be a locomotive engineer. He was an engineer on the railroad until he retired. Of course, when he began, it was not the Union Pacific; what was being built westward out of Kansas City then was called the Kansas Pacific Railway. The train his engine hauled in that time supplied the construction gang that laid the first rails across the state. Great herds of bison sometimes blocked the right of way and were stampeded off only when the bulbous stack of his wood-burning engine threatened them with dragon snorts of smoke and fire. There were swarms of Indians, too, and they killed some of the men he knew.

Sometimes, but rarely, he would get a permit that let me ride with him up in the cab, from Ellis all the way to Brookville. At Fort Hays, only thirteen miles from where we lived, I'd see the blue-clad soldiers of the garrison and then, farther on, at Victoria, right beside the railroad station, I could see some graves of men my father said he knew.

"Indians killed 'em," he would say, and then, while his great monster shook and reared across the land, he would point out other places where whites and redskins had fought and killed one another. On the run back, he always had the evening train out of Junction City. Waiting for that allowed us idle hours in which to see the sights at Brookville, but nothing gave me quite the thrill that came at nighttime, watching how he made that engine roar across the land.

At my father's nod the fireman would leap to sweaty action, swinging back the fire door with a devilish clang. In that moment of glare, each face in the cab turned as red as an Indian mask. With frantic grace the fireman would scoop coal from the tender, swinging the big shovel so expertly that the lumpy succession of black galaxies went in tight clusters to the center of the white-hot fire. Outside the engine cab the night would seem to moan and scream every time my father pulled the whistle cord. I watched the muscles writhe below the hair on his forearms when he used his hands to turn a cock or pull the throttle farther back upon its quadrant. I watched his face when he fixed his gleaming eyes in a gaze ahead into the headlight's yellow corridor through which we rode. The padded board on which I huddled bounced and throbbed and shook from side to side. Hot cinders bit me on the face.

If I seemed somewhat less than wide-awake I was allowed, a time or two, to yank the whistle cord myself or to let my hand ride with my father's big and greasy fingers as he pulled at the cotton rope that sent the bell into a brassy clamor. It was a perfect experience to ride in the midst of that fire-and-water miracle and to know that to the boss of it, my father, I was more important than his engine. The old engine was just our slave. Climbing down, at the end of the run, to the cinders of the right of way in Ellis, the part of me most tired would be my face, and it was tired from grinning in my hours of ecstasy.

The G. A. R. hall in Ellis was in the basement of the stone schoolhouse. I got to know that place real well, because one year, when I was twelve, I guess, the Grand Army men decided to organize us kids into a drum corps, so we could march with them in their Memorial Day parade. Ten boys were chosen, and my father drilled and taught us all. We had to learn the way he learned to drum: one-twenty time at first, and later on we practiced the faster marching time. He bought me a snare drum that was good enough to take to war, and he taught me how to stand as soldiers do. The drilling of those days fixed on me, I suppose for life, the habit of putting my feet at right angles, heels together, with my hands at my side.

Chairs were placed close together around the walls of that G. A. R. hall, and every chair was squired by a big spittoon. There was a silken flag, fringed with stiff blue cords, a fine thing that stirred me every time I saw it uncased. There were stacks of muskets, with their bayonets fixed, in each corner of the room. There were rusty shell fragments, and on the walls big pictures of Lincoln, General Grant and others. The drum corps, the sound of drums, seemed to take me by the throat. I stamped around that hall behind my father until he fixed into my blood the rhythm of the beat for marching men. It seems as if I hear his voice and see the dust rise from the floor as he marked the time with his big foot and called out, "one step, one step, one step."

Most of the adult railroad workers of our town had been in the war. All the pain had leached out of their days of glory. They wore their uniforms on important occasions and gave one another military titles until there seemed to be no privates in the hall. They chewed tobacco, spat and yarned. What they all attempted in their yarning was to evoke the past, but my father had a skill that could really do this thing. With drumsticks and a drum, he could make them all sit straighter, make their eyes shine as they remembered.

On Decoration Day and the Fourth of July, when the G. A. R. marched, my father, with his drum, was up at the head of the parade and all us kids were there in back of him, and back of us were the fifers, making the shrillest kind of music. On such occasions I would tingle from the excitement of my own fancy until my skin was like goose flesh.

A drum did not satisfy my mother's notion of what constituted a proper musical education. My brother Ed had always been a successful rebel against such matters, but she had her way with me; I was sent once each week to Miss Cartwright for a piano lesson. As well as I remember, I was one of the three Ellis boys thus afflicted. There were seventeen round buttons arranged in a series of extraordinary curves over the promontories in the front of Miss Cartwright's basque. My attention would wander to those jet buttons when I could not keep it on the keys. I sometimes think that I would have been as much an insurrectionist against this culture as my brother Ed, except that one of the dozen Cartwright pupils was a girl named Della Forker.

I was a great marble player; in a time when marbles and spinning tops were the only games common to men of Ellis and the other towns along the railroad, I was the local champion. There were several of us boys who practiced from the schoolyard games, had skill enough to hold our own and more in the big game. Where the men played was close to the stone buildings of the railroad, within the sound of its chattering telegraph instruments in the train dispatcher's office. A cinder surface there, hard packed by many feet to a smooth blackness, was the rendezvous of idling trainmen; engineers, conductors, firemen, brakemen and others gathered there before the start and at the end of all their runs. Occasionally, there was to be found in that assemblage some cowboy, a farmer, or even a soldier from Fort Hays. Scratched upon the ground we'd have a twenty-foot circle, and into the middle of this were massed twenty marbles from every player. Often there were a dozen of us playing, while other dozens watched us shoot.

Each player had his favorite shooting marble, of agate or onyx or glass; these were our taws, which we believed were fraught with what we had of luck. When your turn came to shoot, you'd take your taw and knuckle down on the edge of the ring. Any marble you knocked out of the ring you kept, and then took another shot. The trick was to keep yourself in position. I could make my taw obey me like a billiard ball. If you hit a marble squarely, your taw stayed at the point of contact, spinning away its momentum until it stopped. The men might play for money, but when kids played, the only prizes were those little plaster "keesters," which, in the big game, were always new and clean. That is why we liked to play with the men. They bought their marbles at the store, paying real money for them.

Us kids supplied ourselves with marbles by winning from the men. Neither Ed nor I ever saw the day, in our boyhood, when we dared spend good money for marbles. A German sense of thrift was our standard in such matters. We got that not from our father but from our mother. Although she was born in Rocheport, Missouri, her background, her feeling, her instincts were German. She spoke German to us when my father was not around; it was long since a strange tongue to him, but we children could understand and speak it with her. Now I have forgotten almost all my German, but this I do remember: In her tenderest moods my mother's words came boiling out of her in German.

While antique hunting on an autumn day in 1936 I went into a house near Saratoga where a sale of the contents was in progress. In a china closet there I saw some little flowered cards, and for a moment I almost felt as though I were twelve years old again. Those cards had all the power of a perfume to call up the past. It almost seemed to me that I could hear my mother exclaiming, in her German words, her deep pleasure over the exquisite calling cards I had provided for her.

In Ellis, except for staple goods, we did our shopping by mail. Every year we sent five cents in stamps to some Eastern house, so as to receive its catalogue. Another means by which we extended our knowledge of what was right and proper in the world outside of Ellis was by reading all the advertisements in the magazines we saw. We traded magazines around among the neighbors, but eventually my favorite, almost my Bible, was The Scientific American. However, I am not sure just where I saw the printed offer to set me up in business as an agent for these calling cards. Anyway, my mother, as she stirred, bare-armed, some creamy batter in a yellow mixing bowl, looked at me proudly and consented to be my first customer.

The calling card she selected, edged with scallops, was almost like a valentine. Against the white background of the stiff card was fixed a rich design of glossy, highly colored paper lace. Through a cluster of forget-me-nots, a cuff of lace and two loops of golden bracelet, was extended a likeness of a hand, patently that of a lady who had never cooked nor scrubbed. This hand clasped another that was just as white and lovely, and was chastely cuffed in lace obscured by leaves, two pinkish roses and a bud.

I had samples ready when the boom began. All Ellis ladies seemed to want such cards as Mrs. Chrysler had. I remember that there was a special good-luck card on which a warm and pinkish hand extended a gilded horseshoe wreathed with red and yellow roses and a bluish ribbon on which was inscribed, "All joys be thine." The hand motif was much too general, in my opinion. One of these hands held out a design of lilies of the valley, white peonies and green leaves surrounding an oak leaf on which were printed trembling letters spelling, "To the one I love." The sample revealed that this was intended to be a man's card. But what sort of man? His like was not to be found among the railroaders in Ellis! Nor was there any male customer for the gilt-edged card of baby blue, with a turned-down pinkish corner. On that one the sample name was "John B. Hard," hidden by a green-and-brown bird's nest containing three greenish eggs. God alone knows the meaning of that symbolism now, but certainly no man of Ellis had the disposition to order any. Oh, beyond a doubt that fad was addressed to women.

I was not trying to improve the tone of social life in Ellis. I was trying to make a few nickels to spend for candy and other things I wanted. Next my merchandising fancy was caught by an advertisement of a house that offered inducements to any who would solicit orders for its silverware. What I displayed thereafter, from kitchen door to kitchen door in Ellis, was a black case of imitation leather with nickel clasps. When I unfastened these and raised the lid, I had almost made my sale! The lid was lined with white satinette; the box itself was lined with red plush which formed soft slots in which were held three knives, three forks, three spoons. Those women wanted silverware almost more than they wanted food. In the course of five or six paydays, I sold some of them four boxes, so that they had their silverware in dozens. I had competition, though, and so my mother's offer, plus her hairbrush, won me to another form of peddling. I sold milk.

The words I commonly applied to those cows are not permitted to be shaped in type. For a while, milking, morning and night, was a chore I shared with Ed, but he was so much bigger that I had no choice but to do any job that he neglected; either that or take a beating. He hazed me pretty constantly, thereby driving me into a closer alliance with my mother. He was three years and three months older. There would have been another brother between us, but he died before I was born. The only other child in the Chrysler household was our little sister Irene. Consequently, when Ed got big enough to declare his independence of mother's hairbrush and all the cows, I became the one who had to milk the cows, to clean their stable, fork down hay and fodder or round them up when any wandered. But that was not all; I had to sell the milk and cream.

Every evening, as soon as the milking was over, I delivered milk from house to house. I carried a big open tin bucket full of milk and measured out each customer's share with a tin quart cup I carried with me. Wagon? I had no wagon, and if any customer wanted cream I had to make an extra trip. I delivered fifteen to twenty quarts or more each night. We had no ice at first; mother just had a little cellar, and in its cool dampness the milk, cream and butter, in ordinary weather, kept quite sweet.

Nobody paid for anything in Ellis until payday. I kept a record of my customers' obligations in a small account book carried in a hip pocket of my pants. On payday I collected at the rate of five cents a quart. For that I was rewarded. The cut that mother gave me was a cent on every quart.

Despite the taming influences of chores and money-making, I confess I raised my small share of hell. Maybe there is as much fighting among boys today; I can only say I do not think so. In the schoolyard we often had four or five fist fights in the fifteen minutes of recess. A kid who had a yellow streak would lead a dog's life; several that I knew ran away because they lacked the necessary toughness. If you could take your beating fighting back with all you had, you did not have to take so many beatings. We really had a tough environment there in Ellis. It was never any cause for wonder in me that Kansas took to prohibition early in its history. On railroad paydays the saloons were set like traps; likewise every few months when the cattle ranches paid their hands.

The saloons were placed as islands down the middle of a most informal street, a pathway really; and each saloon was surrounded by its hitching rack. When the cowboys' horses were standing in slant-hipped weariness, flank to flank around the saloon racks, that was a good time for timid folks to stay at home, indoors. But for us kids, the hoof clatter, the yipping and the shooting as a band of thirsty, paid-off cowboys rode into Ellis was prized above most of our local excitements. I have seen cowboys full of whisky and the devil pull their guns and throw a shot or two at some derby hat worn by a stranger at the station. I have seen them shoot out a few store fronts and ride their horses out of the mud and along the board sidewalks, but it was all in fun, and I never saw one less than perfectly polite to any woman. They seemed to have more respect for a woman than did any other sort of men. On occasions they did some killing, but I saw none of that. However, us kids used to pick up the pistol cartridges that would jounce loose from the belts of galloping cowboys when they rode in town on payday. I had a cigar box full. I never wanted to be a cowboy; that I can remember, thanks to what I had to do with cows at home, but I certainly aimed in those days to grow up tough.

Ellis grew civilized so fast, however, that barbarianism never had a valid claim on me. At first there was no paving whatever; when you stepped off the boardwalk, you were in the mud. Then a bank was organized, and we had a butcher shop where beef was sold. The butcher would give you liver for the asking. First thing we knew, there was a coalyard and a lumberyard. Somebody opened a rival of the first general store, and finally we had a regular post office apart from any store. The streets intruded farther and farther into the prairie. It was about 1889, when I was past fourteen, that my father built a bigger house with two stories. It had a shingled roof, a nice porch, and just above it a dormer window. Around the yard was a wooden picket fence; there were lilac bushes in the corner of the lot and some maples my father planted eventually were big enough to shade our yard.

There was no plumbing in Ellis that anyone could brag about, and it was an event when my father, a progressive citizen, bought a windmill so we could have running water. The next thing was a bathtub, for which he built a special room against the kitchen. He made it himself, by lining a wooden box with sheets of copper, shaping the metal with a steep slope at each end, enclosing this contrivance in a sheath of tongued and grooved boards. When it was painted we had something of which all the neighbors envied us. Until then, our baths were taken in a wooden tub out in the kitchen. At the rear of our yard there was a stable—we had four horses as well as three cows—and a coal shed. It seems to me that the back door of our house was the only one I ever used. The alley was a thoroughfare that led to temporary freedom from the chores I hated. If Ed or I ran away after dark to play with the kids, when we came home we always got a licking, because my mother was unfailingly strict. It was her law that we must not be out after dark. Sometimes we would hop the evening train, riding on the blind baggage thirteen miles to Hays. You could bet, as you approached the house through the back yard, that she would be sitting in the kitchen waiting with that hairbrush, and a hand that would hold you by the neck with a grip like iron. Still, on certain nights, the excitement was worth the fee.

Arranged along the alleys in the proportion of one to every house were rows of small structures that an anthropologist, if a stranger in the land, might have supposed were shrines. If they were shrines, then we were vandals, because on Halloween we used to discommode the town by roving all the alleys, tipping over every little house we found unguarded. Surely those pranks disqualified any member of our gang from ever being accepted as a hero of the Horatio Alger pattern. My sole excuse for such behavior is that when we came home on Sundays from the Methodist Church, my mother always said, "Take off those clothes." Probably, with the clothes I stripped off something of the spirit.

Since my mother made practically all the clothes we wore, this was her right; she knitted our socks, she made our shirts and made my sister's dresses, and when I was big enough to assert a need to have my legs incased in long pants, she took an old pair of my father's, opened up the seams, turned them upside down when she cut them to my measure, and then, wrong side out, made me a pair that I was proud to wear. Oh, she had a lot to do to keep us clad and fed. We ate enormously, like famished demons. All day Saturday she baked, and so, for help, she required that whole day out of Ed's life and mine. Of course, when I got into high school, Ed had been emancipated from home into a job.

My brother Ed, as husky as anyone that Kansas ever grew, always was aggressive. He was a boy who managed to make more money than a lot of Ellis men. But he surrendered some of his money-making chances to become an apprentice in the machine shops of the Union Pacific there in Ellis. Ed was going to learn a trade.

Certainly, in our town it was thoroughly accepted that a sound way to keep a boy out of mischief was to require him to use up some of his energy in work. It was the same with horses; when they were not worked, they bucked and kicked and made a lot of trouble. Even so, us kids had fun. My father gave me my first gun when I was fourteen, and at the railroad shops they cut it down to fit me. I was a good shot. Of course, I always loaded my own shells; we all did. Later on, for a Christmas present, my father gave me a dozen brass shells. He was quite liberal with us kids, but he was never so foolish as to suppose that it would be a kindness to permit his sons to loaf while their parents worked from dark to dark. I was in high school when Ed was an apprentice, but when the summer vacation began I got a job myself.

A fellow named George Henderson who had a grocery store had to keep his wife behind the counter while he pushed a two-wheeled cart around, delivering orders. I offered myself as a delivery boy and was hired at ten dollars a month. I went to work at six o'clock in the morning and was through by 10:30 at night. That store was long and narrow, with just a plain board counter. Practically all the stock was kept in wooden boxes and barrels. We used the scales to measure almost everything we sold; even smoking tobacco was measured out by the pound.

The next year, when I had finished high school, I went back into the grocery store to work for Henderson. He was paying me fourteen dollars a month, but I did not like those hours and I was not satisfied with either my money or my prospects. I wanted to quit the grocery store and learn about machinery. That made Ed sore.

"Why don't you be a boilermaker?" he would roar. "One machinist in a family is enough."

"I don't want to be a boilermaker," I'd yell back to him.

My father wanted me to go farther in school. One of the prosperous merchants of the town planned to send his son to Quincy College at Quincy, Illinois. He talked my father into a frame of mind to send me, too, so that his boy would not get homesick. I did not like the thought of college and I liked that other boy even less. I argued my case at home. Indeed, I nagged my father until at last he said:

"You can't learn machinery, and that's all I got to say. You cannot get to be an apprentice until I say the word, and I won't recommend you." That made me mad.

I went down to the shops and succeeded in being hired as a sweeper. The flooring there was made of fourteen-inch planks two and a half inches thick, splintery and slick with grease. I swept them as I think they never had been swept before. I had a stubborn streak in me. Some of the other dirty work a sweeper had to do was in connection with the cleaning of the engine-boiler flues. In Kansas, these pipes, or tubes, of rolled iron would become thickly caked with alkali. Each was about fourteen or sixteen feet long and weighed perhaps 150 pounds, thickened as they were with that stonelike deposit of alkali. I had to lug them on my shoulder seven or eight hundred feet to a timber shed. They were rolled around in there until they were clean; then the ends were cut off and new ends welded on. I carried miles, I guess, of boiler pipe, and swept the floor and did all the other kinds of work that fall to the lot of a janitor.

But I loved it; I loved to see the engines with their mysteries exposed. I envied the mechanics who understood their inner workings. I liked to handle tools. Even as a janitor I was allowed to sharpen, on the big power grindstone, any tool I brought from home, but then, almost any man in Ellis was permitted to do that. Why, once, while I was near the grindstone, an Indian came and sharpened his hunting knife.

I worked ten hours a day, and for that the railroad paid me one dollar.

After six months, I braced the master mechanic himself and asked his help. His name was Edgar Esterbrook, and afterward my brother Ed married his daughter.

"You want to be an apprentice, hey?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, Walt, if ever anybody had a right to ask for the chance, it's you. You've stuck to your job and haven't belly-ached. The men like you. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll speak to your father. That is, if you are sure you want to be a machinist."

"Yes, sir, I do." I was a cocky youngster and full of confidence, but I was shivering in my eagerness.

Mr. Esterbrook won my father over. So I began my four-year term as a machine-shop apprentice. My pay at first was five cents an hour. Who could ask a better chance?