After Papa had stopped the fight, Old Scotch looked at me with a question-mark expression on his face. I smiled back at him just to let him know he had not misunderstood me, and he came over to me for a pat of approval, which I gave freely. No one had heard the "si-" except the dog and me. It would be our little secret. I certainly wouldn't tell, and he couldn't tell. I gave him a few friendly pats; he licked my hand and wagged his tail--the only way he knew how to say, "Thank you, it was fun while it lasted." Then he went back to investigating and making friends with the other dog. CHAPTER 12 MY INVENTIONS AND HIGH SCHOOL DAYS In the meantime, after we got back home to Hamlin, Papa gradually got into the trucking business. The truck replaced the horse in our lives and after a few years we sold our horses. Then Papa began to wonder if a truck would pull a trailer. He had a good wagon he didn't need, so he thought to himself, "Why not make a trailer out of a wagon?" He tried it and it worked. He cut the tongue off short, hooked it behind his truck and hauled cottonseed to the oil mill at Hamlin from gins in Hamlin and from gins in small towns near Hamlin. While Papa was experimenting with new innovations, I was doing some experimenting on my own in my spare time. Before we got electricity in our home, I had learned that the telephone company was in the habit of throwing away dozens of old batteries from time to time. Most of them were dead, others were sick and dying, but a few of them still had a little life in them. By connecting enough live ones together, I had enough current to light flashlight bulbs. I had brought back hundreds of feet of small insulated wire from electric blasting caps at Gorman. I strung the wire all through our house and had little night lights in all our rooms even before we got city current. Although the lights were small, they gave enough light to prevent most of the skinned shins which were usually caused by vicious chairs that jumped out and tackled a fellow as he made his way from his bed to the back door on his nightly journeys to the outhouse. I also had an Erector Set which had a little motor that ran off the old batteries. It came in handy in a lot of my experiments. We heated a part of our house with a wood-burning heater. I didn't like to get up and build a fire on a cold morning. So I got to thinking, "Why not make my old alarm clock light my fire?" One night I rigged the thing up before I went to bed. The next morning when the alarm went off, it started the motor that struck the match that lighted the kerosene that lighted the kindling that lighted the wood that heated the room.