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A talisman that belonged to my father for more than half a century became a treasured memento in my office; it was his steam gauge. To a locomotive engineer, a steam gauge is as vital as his watch. On this cherished disk of silver-gleaming metal, with a glass cover on its dial that my two hands will barely hide, my father's life depended; oh, and many other lives. So he had it tested often and guarded it throughout his days. After he died my sister Irene, out West, found it among some things he left, and sent it on to me. This old steam gauge was my father's dearest implement, but now for me it has become a sort of crystal ball.

Gazing upon its face, obliged no longer now to register demonic pressures, it sometimes seems to me as if I can hear my father's engine whistle blowing faintly to me on the wind from far out of Ellis on the Kansas prairie horizon. What I hear, of course, is just a shrillness in the traffic noises rising from the street; yet it works a miracle! I can almost see the bustling at the little Ellis station platform at the moment his engine pulled the night train from Junction City into Ellis. It was his engine; his in a way that a trooper's horse is his, an extension of his power and intelligence, to defend, to brag about and love. Sometimes the vision takes another> form and the engine, venting cautious chuff, chuff, chuffs, is nosing through a roundhouse door and I am down below the level of its wheels, working in a roundhouse pit with a sooty face and my arms grease-blackened, all my muscles hard and lean and young. Many times I have wished I really could hear again my father's engine whistle as I used to hear it just before it reached the Big Creek bridge. Well, music works a trick for my memory, too; a band marching up Fifth Avenue may send a bit of melody, just a bar or two, that touches things within my mind. It sets me thinking of a time when I was a machine-trade apprentice in the railroad shops, when I played a tuba in the band, played second base on the baseball team and walked, on Sunday afternoons, with Della Forker to the Big Creek bridge.

A Union Pacific shop apprentice! You can bet that I was proud. Just as every locomotive on the road flaunted a pair of antlers on her boiler shield beneath her headlight, so I should have had a badge to show that I was a cadet of that vast loom for weaving the Western half of the continent into the nation. Not merely the U. P. but railroading, the entire art as we then knew it, held my imagination in focus.

My opinion of myself had expanded tenfold when I became an apprentice. Everybody in Ellis knew that any apprentice had been required to pass an examination—a stiff one. Some boys failed to make the grade, but I had done so readily, because algebra was one of my good subjects. I had used algebra when I worked in the grocery store, to help George Henderson figure out his costs. I had used it, too, when we were building a house, but I had never used it to better effect on my life than when I worked out some of the examination problems that had to do with locomotive wheels and driving rods.

Tools were what I wanted as soon as my term began. Times have changed a lot since then; nowadays an industrial company expects to furnish workmen with all their tools, but in my youthful days the unfailing sign of a skilled workman was the chest of tools he brought to any job. With good reason, he prized them above anything he owned. A good workman was likely to mistrust any tool whose metal had not been tempered by himself. But I had an even better reason for making mine: I lacked the money with which to buy them.

Years after I ceased to need them to earn a living those tools I made were brought from the attic of the old home in Ellis and placed on display in a glass case on the observatory floor, seventy-one stories up in the tower of the Chrysler Building. There, on a clear day, a visitor may look to a horizon nearly forty miles away, and by strolling around a corridor see in one quick panorama hundreds of densely populated square miles of this great land. Yet I am sure that one who neglects the view to gaze, with understanding, into that chest of tools I made, will have learned more about America than one who looks from an observatory window down into the uneven mass of steel, stone and brick that forms the city.

When I began to work at my trade, tools were crude, so that is probably why I see that mainly we owe the tremendous advances of the physical aspects of our civilization to new and better tools. Electric lights are a tool; the telephone is a tool; so is the motion picture, the radio and the automobile, to mention just a few. How can anyone be so shortsighted as to suppose that opportunities now are fewer? In a world that offers not only new and wonderful tools but likewise astonishing new materials, each of which is a fresh challenge to everything that men have made before, new human needs and bigger human problems are being revealed faster than a single human mind can even count them.

The first tool I made was a little pair of calipers; spread to their limit, they could measure a diameter of four inches. They were copied from a pair belonging to another fellow in the shop. I made other things as need of them arose. One of the mechanics allowed me to look through a catalogue he had received from a big tool firm in the East. In there was a picture and a description of a depth gauge.

I had never heard of such a thing; there were none in the shop. When we had to measure the depth of a hole in a piece of metal, we explored the hole with a wire, marked it with a fingernail and then applied the wire to a ruler. Maybe such a measurement would be right to a sixteenth of an inch; nowadays we work in ten-thousandths of an inch.

Well, I got permission to keep that catalogue awhile, and made a depth gauge for myself. It was crude, but it was a great improvement over the wire, fingernail and ruler method. Fixed in a small stand was an arm, forked at the end; attached to that by a thumbscrew was a stem marked in divisions of thirty-seconds of an inch.

Thereafter in making a plug for a hole, I could make it right the first time, without a lot of needless filing and chipping. In a few months I made an even better depth gauge. Superior tools got me better chances in the shop. You see, I was ambitious to do all the kinds of work at which I saw the older men engaged. Consequently, I set to work to make myself a pair of granddaddy calipers, with legs almost as long as my arm. When I had those, I also had the nerve to ask to be allowed to help on the first lathe, the big one on which locomotive piston rods were turned.

Ankle-deep in oak shavings in the carpenter shop, I sometimes talked with and listened to an old carpenter. He chewed tobacco with such vigor that his blond walrus mustache was constantly in motion. Now and again he became motionless, tilted back his head as if to unmask a battery concealed in that brush of whisker hair, and fired a charge of brown juice at whatever target he had fixed his eyes upon. One day when I complained to him, for about the hundredth time, of night-shift men who borrowed tools and never brought them back, he pulled a sack aside and showed me an unfinished chest of just the proper size for tools.

"It's for you," he said. It took him several months to find enough time to complete that box to his satisfaction and mine, but meanwhile I had been etching my initials on all my tools.

I had read in The Scientific American how you could do that; first putting asphalt paint on the surface to be marked, then cutting out the desired pattern and finally applying acid. I sent ten cents to the magazine for a little bottle of asphalt paint and almost from the day it came all my tools were branded "W. P. C." in acid.

The Ellis band could turn a dull day into a time of rich excitement any time it marched and played. I was a part of that excitement. Even before getting out of high school they had used me in this organization of railroad employees to play the snare drum, and my friend, Charlie Keagy, played the bass drum. Thanks to my father's drilling and my membership in the drum corps, I had become a good drummer, but all the time I drummed I knew there were sweeter instruments. Hell, you could not serenade a girl with a drum!

My big brother Ed played a tuba in the band, and Joe McMahon played a slide trombone. We three slept in the same attic room at home; Joe was boarding with us, because his Irish father, a section foreman, who had become road master, had retired and moved the nice McMahon family to Kansas City, and Joe wanted to stay on in Ellis to serve out the final year of his apprenticeship in the machinist trade.

Almost every night we three had a pillow fight that did not end until I, the smallest, was so mad that I was chasing them with a baseball bat. They teased me at home, they teased me in the shop and they teased me at band practice. In all the small towns I knew, band practice was first of all a device for fun; it gave an excuse for getting out at night, and hence a chance to meet the other boys and girls of other parents just as strict as yours.

When our band marched and played in Ellis, any young horses that happened to be among those hitched to the racks in town would pitch and rear, no matter how well our music had been rehearsed. But the thrill was compounded of much more than that; in front of all the stores, with false fronts instead of second stories, wooden awnings slanted out over the wooden sidewalks, supported as a kind of arcade on wooden posts; when half the town was lined up there to see and hear us, it was swell to be a member of the band.

Our uniforms were simply overalls and caps with long bills, so that when we marched, with red bandannas around our necks, we looked like locomotive engineers. The leader of the band was an engineer, Ed Pearson. He played a cornet. Well, I could read music, because I had taken piano lessons from Miss Cartwright when Della Forker did; moreover, I had practiced on our organ at home until I could play that too. But you can't play an organ with a marching band, and as I was tired of just beating a drum, I bought myself a B-flat clarinet. I tootled and tweetled on that instrument night after night until my mouth was sore.

One year, in our overalls and wearing big sunflowers, we band fellows rode, on railroad passes, to Kansas City and marched in the Priests of Pallas parade, an annual festival; Creole Belles, it seems to me, was what we played best that year. I think it was the next year when Ed, having more important engagements for his evenings, abandoned band practice and permitted his brass tuba to turn a greenish color from neglect. Ed was going with the daughter of Edgar Esterbrook, the division master mechanic; afterward, Ed and Mae were married. It was I who took Ed's place as tuba player. It made a big noise, and I liked it. I sent money to Kansas City and received a silver-plated tuba with a bell that had a gold burnish—a noble instrument. It was supported by a strap that went around my shoulder. You could play a solo on the tuba, but you were likely to be the only one who cared for it. Whenever I made mine grunt in practice or in earnest, I was having fun. Band or no band, however, I worked in the shop not less than sixty hours every week.

There was always a lot of horseplay around the shop when no boss was looking, and at times they might look in vain and not discover where the horseplay was; we had a hiding place. In the back side of one of the greasy pits the planking was incomplete, and through that empty blackness we could pass, with just a bit of squeezing, into a cozy little cavern big enough for four or five young fellows. The hideout had been formed as stealthily as if we who used it had been prisoners bent on escape. Well, whenever boredom came, escape was what we wanted.

In Ellis, playing cards was frowned upon by the Methodists, and that was the religious group to which I belonged. Association with bad women, the use of whiskey, cigarettes or cards were as evil brands; if you wore any one of these brands, the respectable mothers of the town would see that you were kept far from all decent daughters. A lot of years have passed and I can take the chance involved by my confessing: in that hideout we played cards, we smoked cigarettes and on a few occasions we had a little beer. All these iniquities were practiced in the earth below the shop floor, in the light of a candle stuck in a bottle's neck. Oh, how tough we felt ourselves to be!

That was fun, but it was not half so thrilling as the work I did when we overhauled an engine. Not books but the things themselves were teaching me what I wished to know. Wished? That word is not strong enough to describe my passion to learn about machines and the power that made them run. Concerning all the unfolding forms of magic which were then beginning to transform the continent, I was mad with curiosity.

As there were none in Ellis well enough informed to answer all my questions, I addressed myself in almost every mail to an Eastern oracle, The Scientific American. In that editorial office, whoever received the questions from subscribers must have thought that Walter P. Chrysler was the pen name of a dozen youths, at least half of whom were crazy. Yet many of my questions were answered; if you were a reader of the issue of November 5, in 1892, you may have seen a little of all that seethed in my mind. In that issue this was published:

W. P. C. asks what the Harden hand grenades for extinguishing fires are made of. A.—Hand grenades for extinguishing fires are made by filling thin spherical glass bottles with a solution of calcium chloride, sal ammoniac or borax.

2. A good insulating material that I can mold out for insulating storage-battery plates? A.—Use gutta percha.

3. Are there any two acids mixed together that will cause an explosion? A.—Yes.

4. Will sulphuric acid set fire to wood? A.—Sulphuric acid will char wood by extracting the elements of water.

5. Will the spray from the storage batteries set fire to wood? A.—We do not think it will set fire to wood.

For a long time I had been accustomed to making things I wanted when I could not buy them. I had made my first pair of ice skates; later on I made a good shotgun; but in the shops I made, on my own time, a model locomotive.

What I made was a twenty-eight-inch model of the engine my father drove; that was the standard type, which had a four-wheel drive. We had no blueprints then, so I had to do it all myself, laying out my own proportions. Then I took a solid piece of iron and started in to drill and chip and file.

A sculptor trying to release in marble some shape of beauty that is captive in his mind can give no more loving care and craftsmanship to what he does than was done by me as I created that locomotive model. Of course, that engine had to live within my mind so real, so complete that it seemed to have three dimensions there. That, so it seems to me, is what the fault is when someone fails to learn from books. My fingers were like an intake valve through which my mental reservoir was being filled; of course, my eyes and ears were helping in the process, but what I learned with my fingers and my eyes together I seem never to forget.

When the engine model was complete and had many yards of track to run upon, I made it run all around our yard. When its tiny whistle blew, you should have seen my father's mustache widen with his grin of pride.

It must have been about the end of my second year that trouble came. At first I had been paid five cents an hour; for a ten-hour day I got just half of that dollar I had received when I was only a sweeper. But through my second year I got ten cents an hour, and at the time I speak of I was within a few weeks of being entitled to the third-year rate of pay, twelve and a half cents an hour. That was enough money then; I slept and ate at home, and my mother still made most of the clothes I wore. If I worked on the night shift, my mother packed an oblong dinner pail with food enough to fill me up. If I worked days, I went home to lunch—not lunch; that was dinner, then.

Midday, when the shop whistle blew and told Ellis women to get ready for their men, I rushed, with the other soot-and-grease-stained mechanics, to a trough where we washed up. When I had been a sweeper, to fill that long blackened trough with water about ten minutes before noon had been a chore of mine. When all of us had washed our faces, necks and hands in that trough, the water was a dirty fluid, gray and bubbly.

One day as we began working in the afternoon, the wash trough, neglected by the sweeper, still was filled with dirty water on which floated an iridescent scum. Some of the men were idling there as I resumed the filling of a journal box with grease and wool waste so as to pack this lubricant around the axle end. I was bending over a tub of this grease and wool waste when I got a slimy blow upon the face and ear. Oh, I was mad! A fellow named McGrath had a dripping hand when I looked up; he had, I knew at once, thrown that rag after slopping it in the dirty water in the trough.

I said—well, never mind what I said. The first thing I thought of was going after him. I grabbed deeply into the tub of wool waste and started for him; he ran through a big door, which he slammed behind him. I knew he would not loiter outside long, because he had to run in the direction of the office of the general foreman, Gus Neubert.

I stood before the door, poised as if to throw from second to home plate, and addressing myself over my shoulder to some who mocked my anger, I said, "I'll soak that so-and-so right in the mouth." Then the latch clicked softly, a hinge squeaked, and I flung first one handful and then the other. But it was not McGrath that I splattered in the face; it was Mr. Neubert. He fired me before he had the stuff wiped off.

For some days thereafter I felt as if I had been banished from earth. I was sick; nothing in the world was half so important as my apprenticeship. Maybe my brother Ed helped out by speaking to Mr. Esterbrook, or it may have been my father. At any rate, the master mechanic sent for me. When I stood before his roll-topped desk piled up with papers, he gave me a lecture which I received contritely.

"That McGrath," I said, "he made me mad. I was working when——"

A vast man, Mr. Esterbrook. When he chuckled, his watch chain, that barely stretched across his vest, moved up and down; I saw it moving then and knew just a trace of hope.

"Next time," he said, "you wait and see who is coming through the door, or catch McGrath outside on your own time. Now, if you apologize to Mr. Neubert, maybe he'll let you come back."

Well, then, with a hangdog manner, I went to Mr. Neubert. I begged his pardon while tears splashed on my chest. He beckoned me to follow him outside the shop where no others could hear him dress me down. For more than half an hour he told me things. At last he said: "This must be a lesson to you. If it ever happens again, I'll fire you sure! And you'll never come back."

When you see a retriever frisking in the ecstasy that comes when you get out your gun, you will know just how I felt when I went back to work. That fright did me a lot of good. From that time on I really settled down to learn, because I knew then just how much I loved mechanics. And now, in 1936, out in Kansas City, on our pay roll, there is the name of a gentleman, a friend of mine, now quite old—the name is Neubert.

One night the man that I was helping underneath a locomotive stopped his work to look around us cautiously. Where others like ourselves were working on locomotives laid up for repairs, the darkness of the shop was torn by the orange flames of coal-oil flares. Upon the gaunt stone walls and cobwebbed trusses of the ceiling gigantic engine shadows alternately swelled and shrank.

"I'm going uptown." His voice was low and meant for just my ear. I was his apprentice helper, and devoted to old Arthur Darling.

"You'd better not," I warned him, scared on his account. "They'll fire you sure if you get caught." Sometime before, Darling had come into Ellis and got a job in the shops. He had worked in many places, but last of all in the Santa Fe shops. In our Union Pacific shops what was regarded as his best skill was in setting engine valves. He surely was an expert, and Mr. Neubert had put me with him as his helper, so that I could learn to do a valve job too. Men who could were hard to get. The pulling power of a locomotive depends upon the proper setting of its valves. Why, even now I can lie in bed at night and tell, from the sound of a distant locomotive as it labors with a heavy train, whether its valves are rightly set; when they are, there is a smooth even cadence to the puff, puff, puff, puff as the engine works. For that knowledge, and unnumbered other things I know about machines and metal and men, I owe a great debt to that grease-blackened old mechanic, Darling. Really, I owe him more than I can measure. The way of teaching in that time, whereby the good craftsman passed on his knowledge to an apprentice in the most practical way of all—while he worked—to my way of thinking was a most effective system. Certainly after the lapse of many years I feel impelled to say that no apprentice ever had a better teacher than Arthur Darling was to me.

"You just go ahead with these valves," he instructed as he moved away out of the light we shared. "I'll be back around twelve o'clock," he said, and vanished.

I was scared on his account.

I had begun to feel a warm affection for him. Although he was inclined to be almost surly when others tried to learn out of his vast experience, with me he was quite different; he wanted me to share his understanding. Knowing him was almost like getting away from Ellis, because he knew so much of other roads and of strange locomotive species we had never overhauled. He was the first really to teach me how to handle steel; he had been better educated than the Ellis men in the shop, and was so sure of himself when engaged with mathematics as to make me marvel.

"Listen," he had cautioned me, "when you start a valve job always take your own port marks! No matter if someone says he has taken them already; you take your own port marks and you won't go wrong."

You can bet I did not want to see the last of such a friend. I did not want to see him fired. So that night when he went on a spree, I struggled with that mechanical enigma to save his job.

The wheels, axles, main connecting rods and valve gear had been connected. I knew I had a chance, at least, if I could complete the job before the general foreman came to work in the morning. The rocker arm was put in its middle position. Then the valve stem was adjusted until it was in the center of the valve face. I placed the crank on the forward center, and the full part of the forward-motion eccentric above and that of the backward-motion eccentric below the axle. To fasten them temporarily, I tightened up the set screws and threw the link down until the block came nearly opposite to the end of the eccentric rod. It gave me satisfaction when I realized this was a puzzle I could work!

I was so intent on solving it that it startled me when Darling crawled under there and stood beside me. It was midnight; he had come back to check me up.

He ticked off what I had done. There was another helper there, but he was younger and just a little dumb.

"You're all right, Walt." Darling slapped me on the back. "I'm going back uptown. Around three o'clock I'll be back and take a look."

"Come on," I pleaded. "Crawl up in the engine cab and take a sleep. First thing you know you'll get it in the neck. They'll fire you sure."

"Nope! Going uptown. But wait a minute. I'll run those wheels around."

Big cast-iron rollers were put in place against the driving wheels; then, with pinch bars and ratchets, we could tighten screws until the weight of the locomotive was entirely on the rollers. Then, by pulling on a pinch bar, a man could turn the drive wheel of a standing locomotive. The other helper and I pulled the pinch bars, and as we turned the wheels, Darling observed the travel of the valve and made sure that it was equal to the throw of the eccentric.

In a mumble he explained to me just what he was doing, and why. Then, with an endorsing wave of his hand, he walked out again. I proceeded with the job to its conclusion. In the months that followed I do not think he completed three valve-setting jobs. Because I could do his work and because I covered him up, he warmed to me, and my experience, in this field of valve setting, far exceeded that of many journeymen. Old Darling said that I was a great young mechanic, and it is important that in my heart I agreed with him.

Sure I was cocky! I thought I was quite a kid. Long before our trains were equipped with air brakes, I had made myself understand how this Westinghouse contrivance worked and how to put it on an engine; my information came from the Westinghouse Company.

For compressing air there was a steam-driven air pump on the locomotive, and a reservoir, either on the tender or the engine, in which the compressed air was kept under pressure. The tender and each car had a cylinder and piston and a triple valve underneath its body; the piston being connected to the brake levers. Each car had a pipe extending along its bottom, and this was connected to the brake cylinder. I understood it long before the Union Pacific determined to equip its trains with this improvement. Consequently, when we did get air brakes, I got the job of putting them on the division locomotives. That was in the last year of my apprenticeship, I was getting fifteen cents an hour, but I was getting extra for examining firemen who wanted to be promoted to be engineers. They had a car rigged up with all the air-brake equipment. As I would show a fireman how it worked, I'd be thinking to myself: "What the hell do I want to stay around here for? With what I know, I could get a job in China!"

The next thing to come along was steam heat for the trains. We chucked out the old-fashioned little coal stoves that were the cause of so many horrible fires in train wrecks. I had been writing letters East, to technical magazines and other sources, so that I knew how to install that equipment, too, and got the job. Then along came electric signals. By that time I was primed with sufficient understanding of electricity to do this job. Naturally, as fast as I learned a thing that was new around the Ellis shops, I had to show it off, but in showing off I gained a lot of experience. I had a sense of hurry. I'd think: "Gosh, here I am already twenty-two—and still in Ellis."

Della Forker and I were waltzing in the G. A. R. Hall on a Saturday night. Her olive-tinted young throat was soft in a wrapping of velvet; just at the level of my mouth was her dark hair that waved back from her forehead into a Psyche knot. We were engaged; we had music aplenty in our hearts, and it was no concern of ours what sort of squeaky tune the other couples heard. Of course, for an ordinary dance, our crowd could not afford to import a four-piece orchestra from Junction City; we took our music raw out of a piano thumped by a thin colored girl, and a violin that was squeezed and maltreated by a lanky fiddler. It was fine to be engaged, but how could we get married on $1.50 a day?

Mr. Forker, Della's father, was a leading merchant of the town. His hobby was fast harness horses; he used a sulky, and found satisfying triumphs in dusty races on the prairie as he coaxed some high-shouldered, lathered pacer to throw its hoofs ahead of all the other horses in a race. I could not ask the girl to leave her home on what I could provide when we were first engaged, and anyway, we were agreed that there were better chances almost any place outside of Ellis. If we were civic traitors to our women-ruled community, well, then all small towns are filled with youthful traitors. Besides, I fairly ached to get around, to work in other shops, to learn and to have adventures.

As for romance, I showed a wisdom far beyond my years when I obeyed the inner promptings that told me the world did not contain a girl to match my Della.

Lying on my desk there is a letter from an elderly man in our Kansas City branch, who wants to see me again, shake hands and have a talk, "the same," he writes, "as we had many years ago when you passed through Kansas City on your way home from Europe. I can feel your hand on my shoulder and see the sparkle in your eye." He has signed his letter, "your friend, Gus." My spirit, as his does, warms to old memories. In those days he was "Mr. Neubert."

Mr. Neubert had left his place as general foreman in our shops; he had left the Union Pacific to take a more important job with the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

Long before this he had completely forgiven me for that awful blunder when I socked him in the face with axle grease and wool waste. May be it was his going away from Ellis that made me so determined to leave when my apprenticeship was served. It was nearly at an end when they learned at home that I was in a desperate mood, that I was full of a crazy scheme to seek work in another town.

My father spoke to me in deadly earnest, warning me about the men he saw stealing rides on trains. "Maybe, Walt, when they began they thought they wanted to see more of the world, to learn more things. What's the use of going off to another railroad to look for a job? The best railroad in the world is the Union Pacific. On this road you've got a lot of friends and so have I. In another week or so you will be getting a journeyman's pay. Mr. Esterbrook tells me there isn't a better mechanic in the roundhouse or the shops than you. You should stay right here in Ellis; settle down."

Settle down? Why, that was just the trouble! I'd never had a chance to put myself in a situation from which I could settle down, or so I felt. You couldn't hell around in Ellis. If the gang even had a keg of beer out at the ball field, every mother knew it and spoke her mind.

Besides, I just knew that any other town was better than Ellis; any time I met a stranger, no matter where he came from, he knew things that were unknown in Ellis. To my parents, my defense was that I had ambition and wanted to get ahead.

I was too big to lick with the hairbrush, so my mother tried to win me to her way of thinking by crying; at intervals she pleaded with me to have some sense and listen to my father. She would remind me that not all cooking was like that I got at home, and then she would shed more tears. I could not argue; what I did was to snatch my hat, rush out and slam the door. I did not want to hear their arguments, because what they had to say, I knew, was far from foolish. After all, they did like me at the shop.

I was a good worker. I always tried to please the man I worked for; even though I was a good mechanic, if I was asked to sweep the floor, I'd sweep it. However, I had my mind made up. I went to see the master mechanic, Mr. Esterbrook.

"You've been mighty nice to me," I blurted out as I walked up to his desk. "That I am a machinist is something I owe to you. I'll never forget it either."

"Why, Walt, I'm glad you've done so fine, I'll——"

"But I'm going to quit, Mr. Esterbrook."

His face changed completely. The smile with which he had accepted my thanks faded like a light blown out. He was hurt and astonished.

"Is anything the matter, Walt?"

"No, sir. Not a thing. It's just that I want to get more experience. I think I'm a good mechanic—say, I know I am." I saw him grin, because of my habitual willingness to appraise my qualities at their proper value. "I can do any job you ask me to, Mr. Esterbrook, but I want to learn more things."

"Walt," he said solemnly, "you are a good mechanic; as good as any we've got. You mustn't quit."

"I'm sorry."

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going to try to get a job on the Santa Fe."

"Where at?"

"Arkansas City. Mr. Neubert will give me a job."

Some days before, I had written a letter to Mr. Neubert—to my friend Gus, I mean to say—and he had written me that he would find a place for me. He did too. I got a long envelope from him; it contained a letter in which he told me to go to the Santa Fe shops at Wellington, Kansas. With it he enclosed a letter of introduction to a man named Sherwood.

My mother packed a basket full of food for me to eat on the long day-coach ride to Wellington. It was far to the southeast from Ellis; down in Sumner County on the border of the Indian Territory. I simply had to get away. I know that now. I had to give myself a chance to be a man away from home.