Many's the time Grandma would send me to the "branch" (creek) to bring her a small hackberry limb for a tooth brush. (It was really a snuff brush.) She would take a hackberry twig about twice as big and twice as long as a wooden match and chew on one end until it "frazzled" out into a bristle. Then she would dip the damp bristle into her snuff, put it in her mouth, and work happily for hours, with the "brush" extending out one corner of her mouth. Now, this picture of contentment on Grandma's face as she dipped and worked, is what the devil showed to Susie when he told her she ought to climb up on the kitchen cabinet and get her some of that delicious brown snuff in the little tin box. She climbed up in a chair and got up on the cabinet, only to find that she couldn't reach the snuff. But she didn't give up. She climbed back down and put a chair up on the cabinet. Then she climbed up in the bottom chair to get onto the cabinet so she could get up in the top chair. And by leaning way over, she could reach the snuffbox. Now, Susie didn't want to climb down to dip her snuff. It would be too hard to have to climb all the way back up to put the snuff back on the shelf over the door. So she just sat down in the upper chair and began dipping the snuff. That's about all the story. At least that's all she remembered. She never did know how she got down from the chairs and the cabinet. She only remembers that, when she began to regain consciousness, she was a mighty sick little girl, and snuff had lost its charm and glitter. CHAPTER 3 AT THE EXUM FARM AFTER I WAS FIVE We, the Will Johnsons, owned this first farm 12 years. Then in the fall of 1910, Papa bought the Exum farm, just east of us. It was much larger and it fitted our needs better. There were 332 acres in the place, and we paid $9,000 for it. When January rolled around, it was time for us to move onto the Exum place. And on the day we moved that half-mile, I had to stay at our old home. I was allowed to help load the wagons at our old farm, but they wouldn't let me go with them to our new home to unload the wagons. Of course, that hurt my feelings terribly. But I was hurt even worse when one of the older boys came running back to the house to get a gun to kill a skunk down on the creek--and Mama wouldn't let me go with him. She said, "No, you can't go. You're too little." I didn't understand how Mama could be so mistaken in my size. I was as big as most of the other boys, I thought, and smarter than some of them. After we got moved to the new home, again Papa set out to build whatever buildings we needed to suit our wants. There was already a house and a good size barn. And when Papa finished building, there were shelters for tools, livestock, poultry, and a blacksmith shop.