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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.