Anyway, while Papa carpentered we lived in a tent--and it rained and rained and rained, week after week. Our tent didn't leak from the top, but it might as well have. Water soaked the ground and came up in our tent as out of an artesian well. Everything was wet. You could almost wring water out of the air in our tent. Mama had taken about all she thought she could. She wanted to go home to our farm at Abbie. So Papa loaded us all up and drove all one Saturday night. We arrived at the farm about daybreak. We hurried to get unloaded so Papa could drive back to Wichita Falls Sunday and be there ready to work Monday morning. But Mama didn't want to be on the Abbie farm without Papa there. Of course he couldn't stay because he just had to make a living for us. He had to go back. So we all loaded back into the car and drove all day, back to the wet tent in a pasture about a half- mile from where Papa was carpentering. When it didn't rain so much, we boys walked from our tent to nearby farms and picked cotton. We got to making so much money in the cotton patch that our parents reasoned that we all, working together in the cotton patch, could do much better than we could with the family split up, some picking cotton and Papa carpentering. Knowing that the cotton crops were good in parts of Oklahoma, we got ready and headed for Duncan. Before we got there we saw that the cotton was really good--fields were white beyond our expectations. Many people were in war work and there was a shortage of laborers for the harvest. But before we got to where we were going, we lost a suitcase off one front fender and hadn't noticed it was gone. The loss was discovered by one of the older boys when we stopped for one of the little ones to hide behind a bush. Naturally, we couldn't just drive on and leave the suitcase. We had to go back and find it. And about five miles back down the road we found it hanging on a fence post. It seemed we were always stopping for bushes and culverts. I was twelve years old and there were three others in the car who were younger. And no two little kids ever have to "go" at the same time. So it was stop here for one and stop there for another one. Lucky for us, we had to stop for another one before the suitcase got many miles behind. There were no service stations with fancy restrooms in those days- -only greasy garages with gasoline pumps out in front on the curbs and two-holers out back by the alley, all of which were dirty and smelly. Bushes along the road were much more sanitary. However, I remember one garage that had indoor plumbing. Years ago, when I was just a little kid nine years old, Papa had gone to a garage to get the carburetor adjusted on his car. Joel and I went with him. And since it took the mechanic more than 15 minutes to do the work it was a good thing there was a place for little boys to hide.