Then soon after we moved to Royston, Papa came to me and told me that he would have to sell the plow-tools and horses to me "Because," he said, "They keep hounding me and won't leave me alone as long as I try to help you as I am helping the others." He didn't tell me who "they" were and I didn't ask him; I didn't even care who they were.
The 1930s hit most all of us pretty hard, including those who were still in the trucking business. I knew men with families drawing wages of less than two dollars a day. When I was building a tractor, I hired a man, who was a good welder and mechanic, for 50 cents a day plus a hamburger for lunch. The burger cost me a dime. Those were the good old days. It was a wonderful depression but I'm glad it's over.
Dennis was eight months old when we moved to the Royston farm. The farm had been neglected for years and things were quite run- down—fences, barn, the house, everything.
My youngest brother lived with us three months after we moved to Royston. He and I would take our 22 rifles and go out after the milk cows in the afternoon, and it was a common thing for each of us to kill from three to ten rabbits each day. Our pasture had the smell of dead rabbits for three months.
Rattlesnakes were also plentiful on our farm during warm weather. We even killed one in our back room—that is, Ima did, with a 22 rifle. And when Anita was two years old, Ima and I were out early one morning milking cows and when Anita woke up she came out to join us. Ima picked her up and carried her back to the house, and there under the icebox, right by the door through which Anita had passed, was a rattlesnake.
Big rats and mice had their heyday the first few months we lived there. Rats would often wake us up at night gnawing holes up through the floor in our house. We managed to catch those in the house in traps, but those under the house sometimes kept us awake gnawing. I got out of bed one night and poured carbolic acid around a hole where one had been gnawing up through the floor. Later that same night one woke me up again and I found the hole large enough for a rat to come through, and I found the rat in the house feeling very sick—from acid poisoning.
We often saw mice run from furniture to furniture or peep out from their hiding places. Many times I carried my rifle to the dining table with me and also placed it by my side when I sat down to read. If a mouse hesitated just a moment he was apt to find himself to be a dead duck. One more little bullet hole added to the big holes in the floor didn't mean a thing in that house. Of course, as we continued living there we made some improvements and it became quite comfortable.
When Dennis was two years old, just about a month before Anita was born, Ima, Dennis, my brother, my brother's wife, and I all went to the Rocky Mountains sightseeing. We were driving my old Dodge sedan that wouldn't stay in high gear, leastwise it wouldn't voluntarily. We had to prop the gearshift lever in high with a forked mesquite limb about a foot long.
There in the Rockies one afternoon we had left Cripple Creek and were driving down Phantom Canyon when night overtook us. But before night had come on so strongly, we had gotten a good view of the canyon. On one side of our car we could see straight down hundreds of feet, and on the other side the mountain was straight up just about as far. And every few miles the road crossed to the other side of the deep gorge over dilapidated bridges with big holes in their floors. Most of the bridges had been patched with boards running lenghthways. And some of the patch-boards had holes in them also, and some of them were broken and split up. Others had come un-nailed and were loose and out of place.
Once we came to an abrupt stop on a bridge when a front wheel pushed one end of a board down through a big hole and kicked the other end up against our differential. We had to back up and detour around loose boards and big holes in the floor of the bridge,—all this at night, high above the floor of the gorge below. They condemned the bridges and closed the road soon after we made that trip. As a matter of fact, ours may have been the last car over it before they closed it.