In the afternoon I screwed my courage up a few notches higher and went out again, with the determination to do or die. I knew I had a fine line of cards, and the boss told me they would sell themselves. I vowed that at least they should have a chance. I showed them to a few ladies, and finally succeeded in taking my first order, for twenty-five cents. With that I felt encouraged, and went after them right. I did one dollar and twenty cents worth of business that afternoon, making sixty cents for myself. Just think of it. A man in the heart of Chicago, with his fortune all to make, and after walking his legs off all day, coming in at night with sixty cents as his portion, and board to pay out of it at that. But the ice had been broken; the plunge had been made, and I was proud and happy over the result. I stuck to the card business for some months, finally getting so I could make from one to two dollars a day at it. One day I chanced to fall into conversation with a lightning rod agent, who had taken a room in the house where I boarded. In a short time we struck up quite a friendship, and he proposed that I should travel with him. In consideration of my services, which would be only in helping him put up the rods, he agreed to pay all my expenses, teach me the business, and allow me to sell calling cards on the side. I accepted, and here let me say that I never fully realized what a truly typical lightning rod agent was until I started out with this man. I had heard of them, and remembered that my father was trimmed up to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars by one, but I never understood the breadth of intellect, fertility of resource and depths of trickery displayed in the legitimate pursuit of this vocation until I had obtained an inside view of the game. I traveled with Mr. Carlysle for a long while, working the country, and the towns as we passed through them. As this is to be largely a record of my own personal performances, I shall not give the details of this trip, except that I learned all that was going, which was a great deal. At the end of it we were on our way to Davenport, Iowa. I was getting tired of the business, and intended to quit when we reached that destination. I had twenty-three dollars in cash to show for my seven months’ work, and figured on fixing myself up a little and looking for a job. I could not travel and sell calling cards exclusively, since there was not enough in it to justify the expense, and I thought it high time for me to look around for some broader and more profitable field. Just as we got within a mile of the city our horse shied at a runaway team and Mr. Carlysle was thrown out of the wagon, run over, and both legs broken. He was taken into the city; and hotel, doctor and medicine bills broke us both as flat as anything you ever saw.