In the spring of 1865 he moved back to the farm, and spent much of the summer in preaching. For the next four years his winters were spent in lumbering, and his summers in preaching, and improving his farm. Even while lumbering he preached somewhere nearly every Sunday; sometimes at home, sometimes in the schoolhouse near his timber, and sometimes he landed a raft at Port William on Saturday, and went across and preached for the church at Pleasant Ridge, Leavenworth county. And other Sundays he preached at various points easy to reach on Saturday evening, and return to his work on Monday morning. He rafted many of his logs to Port William or Leavenworth, and usually helped to take them down; and there was much joking about where he learned the rafting business. It was dangerous, however, for rafts sometimes struck snags, or became unmanageable in the swift current, and went to pieces. When the Central Branch Railroad was built, the company took corn of settlers in payment for lands, cribbing it by the road. Instead of shipping off the corn, they shipped Texas cattle to the cribs, to eat it up. They soon came to father in great perplexity. Their cattle broke every fence they could build, and they did not know what to do with them. So he told them how to build a fence the cattle could not break, and he had a quantity of extra strong lumber sawed for that purpose. When he called at the railroad office to receive pay for his lumber, the clerk paid him in rolls of bills sealed up in paper, with the value marked on the outside. After leaving the office he counted his money, and found that one of the rolls that was marked $100, really contained $1,000. Returning, he told the clerk he had made a mistake. "We correct no mistakes," was the gruff reply. "Young man, you are not doing business for yourself, but for the railroad company; come here and help me count the money." The label had been misplaced.