Big rats and mice had their heyday the first few months we lived there. Rats would often wake us up at night gnawing holes up through the floor in our house. We managed to catch those in the house in traps, but those under the house sometimes kept us awake gnawing. I got out of bed one night and poured carbolic acid around a hole where one had been gnawing up through the floor. Later that same night one woke me up again and I found the hole large enough for a rat to come through, and I found the rat in the house feeling very sick--from acid poisoning. We often saw mice run from furniture to furniture or peep out from their hiding places. Many times I carried my rifle to the dining table with me and also placed it by my side when I sat down to read. If a mouse hesitated just a moment he was apt to find himself to be a dead duck. One more little bullet hole added to the big holes in the floor didn't mean a thing in that house. Of course, as we continued living there we made some improvements and it became quite comfortable. When Dennis was two years old, just about a month before Anita was born, Ima, Dennis, my brother, my brother's wife, and I all went to the Rocky Mountains sightseeing. We were driving my old Dodge sedan that wouldn't stay in high gear, leastwise it wouldn't voluntarily. We had to prop the gearshift lever in high with a forked mesquite limb about a foot long. There in the Rockies one afternoon we had left Cripple Creek and were driving down Phantom Canyon when night overtook us. But before night had come on so strongly, we had gotten a good view of the canyon. On one side of our car we could see straight down hundreds of feet, and on the other side the mountain was straight up just about as far. And every few miles the road crossed to the other side of the deep gorge over dilapidated bridges with big holes in their floors. Most of the bridges had been patched with boards running lenghthways. And some of the patch-boards had holes in them also, and some of them were broken and split up. Others had come un-nailed and were loose and out of place. Once we came to an abrupt stop on a bridge when a front wheel pushed one end of a board down through a big hole and kicked the other end up against our differential. We had to back up and detour around loose boards and big holes in the floor of the bridge,--all this at night, high above the floor of the gorge below. They condemned the bridges and closed the road soon after we made that trip. As a matter of fact, ours may have been the last car over it before they closed it.