But she caught a ride most of the way. Green Goodwin, conductor of the local freight, told her to come aboard the caboose, that he would stop the train out near the farm and let her off. He had gotten lunches from her mother’s home. She said, “Mr. Goodwin said my lunch basket smelled good — like old times. He told a passenger in the caboose that he could always be sure of getting a good lunch at our home. I sure appreciated the ride, and I offered to give him my part of the lunch, but he wouldn’t take it. I’ll bet that traveling man who peeped in the basket wouldn’t have turned it down. But Mr. Goodwin did eat two of the cream-puffs: he said they were as good as the ones mamma used to put in his lunches. That leaves four cream-puffs for you—if I don’t eat any myself.” What manner of man would have eaten four cream-puffs—just then? Myrtle felt pretty chesty about getting this ride—to think Green would stop his train on a steep grade, to save her the walk. Well, it was a pretty steep grade—and it was kind of Green to give her this lift. It recalled the time when, on several occasions, freight trains had stopped at that same place to let me off. And when the train had started to move again I could easily have beaten the engine to the top of the grade, in a running walk. But that would not Tiave been what I had been taken on the engine for, in town. I walked, or trotted slowly, ahead of the train pretty close to the creeping engine, shooing grasshoppers off the rails. After the 1874 invasion of grasshoppers freight trains could not make that grade until the rails were cleared of hoppers—and I had to stay close to the engine so that the hoppers would not fly around me and settle on the rails again. I was always “Johnny on the spot” to catch those rides. To ride the engine was a thrilling experience for a twelve-year-old boy. While eating our lunch that day, a covey of half-grown quail came out from between the rows at the end of a cornfield. Myrtle said they were so cute that it was a shame to kill them. “And if you shoot any more of them,” she declared, “I will not cook them for you.” I said that I guessed I could cook them myself—that I had roasted them suspended on a stick over a fire in the woods. “Well,” she said, “I’ll cook them, of course—but I promise you that I will never eat any more of them.” I tried her out on six birds. She cooked them, of course—and kept her promise. And then, in due time, I also thought they were too cute to be killed. But I continued carrying feed to the quail, in snowy times.