It was a poor starved-to-death school that the boys found at Lawrence in those days; with half a dozen instructors--most of whom were still in their twenties; with books lent by the instructors, and with appliances devised by necessity. But John was happy; he was making money with his horses, doing chores for his board, and carrying papers night and morning besides. The boy's industry was the marvel of the town. His limp got him sympathy, and he capitalized the sympathy. Indeed, he would have capitalized his soul, if it had been necessary. For his Yankee blood was beginning to come out. Before he had been in school a year he had swapped, traded, and saved until he had two teams, and was working them with hired drivers on excavation contracts. In his summer vacations he went to Topeka and worked his two teams, and by some sharp practice got the title to a third. He was rollicking, noisy, good-natured, but under the boyish veneer was a hard indomitable nature. He was becoming a stickler for his rights in every transaction. "John," said Bob, one day after John had cut a particularly lamentable figure, gouging a driver in a settlement, "don't you know that your rights are often others' wrongs?" John was silent a moment. He looked at the driver moving away, and then the boy's face set hard and he said: "Well--what's the use of blubbering over him? If I don't get it, some one else will. I'm no charitable institution for John Walruff's brewery!" And he snapped the rubber band on his wallet viciously, and turned to his books. But on the other hand he wrote every other day to his mother and every other day to Ellen Culpepper with unwavering precision. He told his mother the news, and he told Ellen Culpepper the news plus some Emerson, something more of "Faust," with such dashes of Longfellow and Ruskin as seemed to express his soul. He never wrote to Ellen of money, and so strong was her influence upon him that when he had written to her after his quarrel with the driver, he went out in the night, hunted the man up, and paid him the disputed wages. Then he mailed Ellen Culpepper's letter, and was a lover living in an ethereal world as he walked home babbling her name in whispers to the stars. Often when this mood was not upon him, and a letter was due to Ellen, he went downstairs in the house where he lived and played the piano to bring her near to him. That never failed to change his face as by a miracle. "When John comes upstairs," wrote Bob Hendricks to Molly, "he is as one in a dream, with the mists of the music in his eyes. I never bother him then. He will not speak to me, nor do a thing in the world, until that letter is written, sealed, and stamped. Then he gets up, yawns and smiles sheepishly and perhaps hits me with a book or punches me with his fist, and then we wrestle over the room and the bed like bear cubs. After the wrestle he comes back to himself. I wonder why?"