There we were, all of us, in the cold winter, waiting for the weather to cooperate so we could begin improving the raw land.
Meanwhile the family who sold us the small farm with the house on it, and who had planned to be moved out by this date, had not moved out. And since it was coming a blue norther and snowing outside. They were not in a big hurry to move out. But they were kind to us and shared with us what they had—which was ours of course.
There were four in their family. They retained the kitchen with a cookstove in it, the livingroom with a heating stove in it, and a bedroom. They let us have two small rooms in which to store our furniture and cook and eat and sleep.
There was no flue for a stove in our part of the house. We ran a stovepipe out through one window and attached the lower end of it to a small heating stove so we could fry flapjacks and heat the room. But when the wind blew from the wrong direction, the fire smoked up our rooms and we had to aim the stovepipe out another window more in keeping with the direction the wind was going.
It seems that the family in the other part of the house was named Stewart—Mr. and Mrs. Stewart and their two kiddos. Boy! Did they deal us misery by not sharing a greater portion of our house with us. I think I would hate everybody named Stewart except I'm not quite sure Stewart is the right name.
Man, it was cold! As I said, there were four of them in three of our rooms with good stoves in two of the rooms. And in the two rooms that we had there was Papa, Mama, Susie, Dode, Earl, Joel, Albert, Ollie Mae, William Robert, and me—ten of us. And out in the pasture were all our cows and horses, practically freezing to death. Mr. Stewart was using our sheds for his cows and horses.
Papa had bought two or three carloads of cows in Jones County and had shipped them to Lamesa by rail, along with our horses, household goods and farming tools.
You know the old saying, "Things could have been worse." Well this time we didn't think things could ever be worse. But we were wrong. They did get worse; 1917 was a dry year.
We kids went to school while Dode and Papa went about farming the small farm and improving the large one. The dry weather prevailed throughout the year. Grazing dried up and cattle got poor. Papa did what he could to feed his family and his livestock.
The United States was at war with Germany and, luckily for us, Uncle Sam was buying rabbits. Jackrabbits brought ten cents each and cottontails brought six or eight cents. When we killed a rabbit, all we had to do was cut open his abdomen and sling his intestines out. Then we pitched the rabbits into the wagon and took them to town in the next two or three days.