Quite without ambition and with no definite objective at all I drifted along until, in the summer of 1903, I found myself working for a coal mining company in which my father was interested, in the Cumberland Mountains. I was even a worse mining engineer than I had ever hoped to be and was extravagantly overpaid by my salary of forty dollars a month. I am sure that I, at the time, never considered myself worth any more, but I found it difficult to save out of that forty a month a sum of money large enough to gratify the first great ambition of my life. It came to me suddenly, the very day I went to work in the coal business and consisted of a deep determination to get out of it with the least possible delay. Aside from the fact that the glamorous title of a mining engineer turned out to be just another name for a guy who dug holes in the ground, I simply detested the dirty little southern town in which I found myself. Also, as I happened to start my work on the very day the Debs strike started, I added fear for my life to my other reason for a prompt withdrawal. There I had to remain, however, all during the riots and shootings and murders of the great strike, and the town I lived in was sometimes held by the strikers, and sometimes by the Kentucky State Troops. On occasion both sides were forced to withdraw for a time, as this part of the mountains had long been reserved as a battleground by the Hatfield and McCoy factions, whose feud, arising out of the fact that some young lady of the generation before had looked funny in a hoop skirt, had resulted in the death, with their boots on, of many more worthy citizens than the entire population of the town in my day. Being even then of a strictly impersonal nature, I didn’t in the least care whether the McCoys killed the Hatfields or the strikers killed the state troops. It didn’t seem to be my party. All I wanted was a ticket to New York. I knew that I could expect no help from my father. He had, for the moment, lost all of his money. It was his habit to make and lose considerable fortunes with the rapidity and nonchalance of a Wilkins Micawber, and this was one of the times when, like Micawber, he was waiting for something to turn up. My father was, I am sure, the sweetest and gentlest and one of the ablest men I have ever known—and I am equally sure he was the worst business man. I don’t know how many months it took me to save the railroad fare to New York, but I know that I arrived there in due time with exactly twelve dollars in my pocket and a firm determination to conquer the theater, either as a writer or as an actor.