The traction engine, puffing forth smoke and attracting the excited attention of dogs and children as it rumbled along and pulled the heavy red grain separator, had trailed slowly over miles of road and had come down almost to Lake Erie. Tom, with the fat Bottsford boy sitting beside him on the water wagon, followed the rumbling puffing engine, and when they came to the new place, where they were to stay for several days, he could see, from the wagon seat, the smoke of the factories in the town of Sandusky rising into the clear morning air. The man for whom John Bottsford was threshing owned three farms, one on an island in the bay, where he lived, and two on the mainland, and the larger of the mainland farms had great stacks of wheat standing in a field near the barns. The farm was in a wide basin of land, very fertile, through which a creek flowed northward into Sandusky Bay and, besides the stacks of wheat in the basin, other stacks had been made in the upland fields beyond the creek, where a country of low hills began. From these latter fields the waters of the bay could be seen glistening in the bright fall sunlight and steamers went from Sandusky to a pleasure resort called Cedar Point. When the wind blew from the north or west and when the threshing machinery had been stopped at the noon hour the men, resting with their backs against a strawstack, could hear a band playing on one of the steamers. Fall came on early that year and the leaves on the trees in the forests that grew along the roads that ran down through the low creek bottom lands began to turn yellow and red. In the afternoons when Tom went to the creek for water he walked beside his horses and the dry leaves crackled and snapped underfoot. As the season had been a prosperous one Bottsford decided that his youngest son should attend school in town during the fall and winter. He had bought himself a machine for cutting firewood and with his two older sons intended to take up that work. “The logs will have to be hauled out of the wood lots to where we set up the saws,” he said to Tom. “You can come with us if you wish.” The thresherman began to talk to Tom of the value of learning. “You’d better go to some town yourself this winter. It would be better for you to get into a school,” he said sharply. He grew excited and walked up and down beside the water wagon, on the seat of which Tom sat listening and said that God had given men both minds and bodies and it was wicked to let either decay because of neglect. “I have watched you,” he said. “You don’t talk very much but you do plenty of thinking, I guess. Go into the schools. Find out what the books have to say. You don’t have to believe when they say things that are lies.”