For the next few years I did all kinds of farm work, always being employed by Germans because nearly all of the farms in southern Wisconsin are owned by those people. Possibly there were many good people amongst them, but it always seemed to be my luck to get with the others. Hard workers themselves, they were also hard drivers of those who worked for them, and full of mean little tricks for getting more time out of you or for giving you less money. Of course, being quick-tempered and with a sort of standing grudge against all “square-heads” growing up inside of me anyhow, I was in hot water most of the time. The week that went by without a fight was very exceptional. If they were content to go after me with their fists, I usually kept to the same weapons, and hardly recall a time when I didn’t have the best of it. But if they ever tried anything else I always fell back on my trusty monkey-wrench, which I generally carried swung to my belt with a raw-hide. After a while, just as the Indians used to tally their scalps on the handles of their tomahawks, I started cutting a notch on the wooden grip of my monkey-wrench for every time I had dropped--I don’t think I ever killed one--a “square-head” with it. At first--proud of what they stood for--I cut them broad and long, but soon I saw I was using up my limited space too fast, and, to provide for “future developments,” began cutting them smaller. It was surprising how much the notches improved the grip. By the time I was twenty I was able to run both the engine and the separator of a threshing-machine outfit, and started going west every summer to the Dakotas and Montana to get the benefit of the high harvest pay. My winters I spent in a big factory in Racine, learning to repair and build threshers and tractors. Partly to save the money that I would have had to pay for a ticket, but more for the lark of it, I started beating my way back and forth between the east and the west on the trains. Sometimes I stowed away with a week’s food in an empty furniture car, sometimes I rode the “blind baggage,” but mostly it was the old stand-by of the “bindle-stiff” called “riding the rods.” My nerve was good and my arms strong, and it wasn’t long before I could swing up and disappear inside the “bumpers” of a train doing thirty miles an hour as easily as the conductor swung on to the tail of the caboose by his hand-rail. It was little idea I had that the tricks I learned in those days were going to make all the difference between my starving in a German prison camp and (what is happening now) being fed on chocolates and pink teas in London by way of training for another go at the Huns.