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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?