It was almost sundown and I hadn't eaten since noon. Any kind of a little meal would take all of my 95 cents. So I went to a grocery store and paid a dime for two eggs. Then I went out back, cracked them one at a time and let them slide their way down. They didn't make the best tasting meal in the world, but our football coach had convinced me that it was a nourishing one.
By now it had stopped raining but the road was rough and the ruts were deep. Travel was slow on a motorcycle. It was way after dark by the time I got to Rankin, still 225 miles from Hamlin. But I didn't like to travel in the dark so I camped for the night.
I spread my blanket on the board walk by the front door of a small store and went to bed. Before sleep overtook me, I thought back on the last few days and on the beautiful night, and especially on the tomorrow I was about to experience. Could I go all day with nothing to eat? Sure I could. I had gone almost that long before without food. I knew that only one of us could afford to eat this time—either that little Indian Scout or me. This time I had to take care of her first. She would take me home, I could eat after I got there.
Next morning before the town's people began to stir, I rolled up my blanket and was on my way. In San Angelo I drained my pocketbook for gas and oil. On the road between there and Sweetwater, I drained the Scout's gas tank. I pulled into a filling station in Sweetwater with barely enough gas in my tank to wet the end of a stick. I gave the man a check for a dollar, filled up with gas and oil and got home with seventy cents in my pocket—and mighty hungry.
When I got my check for carpenter work in McCamey, I found that they paid me nine dollars a day instead of six. Maybe they paid six dollars a day to those who couldn't figure feet and inches between windows.
If you are beginning to get the idea that I was spoiled and didn't like to work, you are half right, I was spoiled. But the part about not liking to work is wrong. I liked to work; I was just choosy about the kind of work and where the work happened to be located. I had begun to realize that there was no need to go way off somewhere looking for work.
Perhaps that realization was the reason for my riding a train to Denver just to get a job washing dishes in a cafe. And a few days later I went high in the Rockies to work at a sawmill. That was knowledge working in reverse. I knew better; I just wanted to see some more of the world. In the Bible we are told to get knowledge and wisdom, then it adds, "And with all thy getting, get understanding." I suppose the understanding was the ingredient which was lacking in my getting.
Anyway, I landed at a sawmill 75 miles west of Denver, doing whatever they asked me to do. It was cold up there; man, I mean it was plenty cold! One morning it was 20 below zero, and that was two weeks before Thanksgiving. The lumber mill was in a valley between high mountains. During the three weeks I was there I saw the sun a couple of times. It didn't rise over the peaks until about nine-thirty in the morning and it set behind other peaks at four-thirty in the afternoon. We went to work before daylight and quit after dark. In the extreme cold, when the wind was calm, as I walked through the cold air, it felt like hot branding irons against my face.
One day five of us men were moving some cord wood and restacking it in another place. The foreman came and asked if any of us had ever driven a truck. I kept quiet because I had already seen the old truck and I didn't want any part of trying to drive it in the snow. It had solid rubber tires, no doors on the cab, and no antifreeze in its leaky radiator. The earth was completely covered with snow. I suppose there was earth somewhere under the snow; however, I didn't see any of it while I was there. Besides all that, there was not a level place within 50 miles. Everything was uphill, downhill, or leaning to one side or the other.
The other four men were eager to get out of the job we were doing, so each one tried to tell the foreman that he would be just the man to drive the truck. I kept my back to the foreman and kept working while he talked to the other men. I thought I might be lucky enough to escape having to drive the old truck. But no such luck. The foreman came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and asked, "You ever drive a truck?"