But you could be sure, if William Franklin Johnson heard of a farm implement that he thought could be used to do a better job on the farm, he would get it, if at all possible. And if it wouldn't do to suit him, he would make it do whatever he wanted it to do. I remember having seen Papa, as early as the Flint place, mind you, using a combination cultivator-planter. He could cultivate his young feed or cotton and, at the same time, plant new seeds in the skips where the first planting had not come up to a good stand. He built the implement himself. That was ingenuity. He was my father. This special two-row planter that I used was pulled by two big, gentle horses. They knew how to follow the furrows and stay on the rows. And they knew that "whoa" meant stop, even when a three-year-old said it. What's more, Papa was plowing along beside me, just a few rows away, and he worked the lever and turned my team around at both ends of the rows. Now, that doesn't sound so far out, does it? I'll bet the people around the little town of McCaulley would believe me without an explanation. They had a man in their community who used a dog to do his plowing for him. It's true. And the man didn't have to be there to work the levers for him and turn the team around at the end of the rows. There were no rows. He was flatbreaking his ground, going round and round. His mules followed the furrow all day long and the man only had to sit there hour after hour doing nothing. Then he got the idea of tying his lines up and slipping off to the house without his mules knowing he was gone. This worked well except when the mules would stop once in awhile, and he would have to go start them again. So, next he put his little dog on the plow seat. The dog liked to ride so well that, when the team would begin stopping, he would bark to keep them going. People could hardly believe their eyes--the very idea--a dog plowing while his master sat on his porch in the shade. Now, Papa didn't have a dog, so he used me. We Texans have to be careful what we say and to whom we say it. When I start talking with a man, the first thing I want to know is, where is he from? I know, Texans have a reputation of being big liars. It is true, all Texans are capable of lying, but they are not all liars. They don't have to lie. In Texas the truth is wild enough. If I am talking with a man from north of the Mason-Dixon line, I only have to tell the truth and he thinks I am telling a big Texas lie. But if the man is from Oklahoma, I sometimes have to lie just a little to make the story interesting to him. Those Okies are almost as bad as Texans about story telling. Some people think Texas is a state, but it's not. Texas is a state of mind, an attitude, a broad open expanse of freedom and liberty known only to Texans. It's a feeling you can never get just by living in Texas, you've got to be born in Texas.