So, it was there at the Exum place that I spent six of the best years of my life. They were years of family contentment and prosperity--we youngsters working, playing, exploring, wading in the creek, hunting rabbits with air rifles, going to school; gathering eggs, feeding chickens, feeding cows and horses; playing in the barn, playing in the cottonseed, eating peanuts in the barn loft, wading in puddles after summer showers; enjoying the warm fire in the fireplace, washing our feet by the warm hearth at bedtime, snuggling between warm blankets in cold bedrooms; in short, growing up and enjoying every minute of it. CHAPTER 7 DRY YEARS ON THE TEXAS PLAINS Papa had two rancher brothers, Joe and Simpson, who had remained in the cattle business when all the rest of the Johnsons went to farming. And Papa preferred cattle ranching over cotton farming. So he got the urge to get back to growing more cattle and not so much cotton. This was not just a far-out dream as if he didn't know what he was doing. After all, he had been in the cattle business with his father until the time they all moved back to Texas from Oklahoma. At that time he went to farming because it required far less capital to be a farmer than to be a rancher. And he was a young man just starting out on his own. But now he had accumulated a little of this world's goods and he thought it was time to step up to a larger place that would grow enough cows and calves to afford a better future for him and his family. This was not just a wild adventure. He knew it was easier to grow a dollar's worth of calves than it was to grow a dollar's worth of cotton. We had prospered greatly during our six years on the Exum farm. But our chances for expanding in Jones County were limited. Most of the good pasture land had been cleared and put into cultivation. But on the West Texas plains there was ample room to expand. The soil was rich for farming and yet not too expensive for pasture land. So in 1916 Papa went to that land of promise and bought a section of unimproved land ten miles southwest of Lamesa. It was a half- mile wide and two miles long. It was part of the old Higginbotham Ranch. The ranch was being sold piece-by-piece for farms. And it seemed to be a very good place to grow feed and cattle. Now Papa knew he would have to have a place to live. He knew he couldn't move onto unimproved land and start making a living on it. So he also bought another smaller farm about five miles from the large one. It was fairly well improved. His plan was to live on the small farm while he sent us kids to school, built five miles of wolf proof fence around the new land, had a well drilled, put up a windmill and a water tank and built an eight- room, two-story house to live in. He did all this on the new land.