After I was out there, they liked my work, but my sister was with relatives in Kansas and wanted me to come and work there.
I told the folks about the letter and that I wanted to go.
I worked through the harvest, but didn't have enough money to do that, so I got another job. When that was over, in the fall, until I had the money to go.
When I got there, I realized I hadn't got much of an education, so I thought I ought to go back home to Colorado and go to school.
I said something to one of the men who was working at the same place I was and they told the man I was working for about my desire to go back to Colorado.
The man called me in on a Sunday morning to the front room.
He told me he understood that I wanted to finish common school (elementary or grade school), since I had only gone as far as the fifth grade.
He said "You don't have to leave to do that. You can go to school from right here. Just help with the chores, night and morning, and help around on Saturdays, whatever needs to be done. So I did.
I went to school and finished 6th, 7th, and 8th grades.
After I was there quite a while, the Mrs. said to me "Have you got any relatives?" Olsen was their name. They were Swedes. They had two girls and were very close. But she said "I never see you get any mail. Or send any."
I told her that when I left home I told dad I was leaving and asked him if he would write and he said "No, I don't know if I'll have time."
The Mrs. said "You sit down and write your father a letter."
I said "He won't answer it."
But she insisted, so I wrote him. He answered it, like she said he would.
I worked along time there and liked it. In the mean time my sister Lucy, who had got me to come to Kansas, was working about 18 miles from there. There were three children and no mother nearby, so she took the role of mother.
One morning, as she was finishing breakfast, one of the boys went to start the fire. They used corncobs soaked with coal oil to start the fire. By using coal oil on cobs to get the fire started, he'd soiked three corn cobs up in a tin can, and when he'd get the fire started he'd take the can to the pantry and put three more corncobs in it so it'd be ready for the next time.
One of the boys would do it in the morning, before he'd head out to do the feeding of the horses and cows. He'd get that done before feeding and by the time he'd finish feeding breakfast woudl be ready.
That morning he left the can on the warming oven on the stove. Lucy had taken the lid off and put a frying pan on the open fire.
After she finished cooking breakfast, she took the pan off the fire, reached for the stove hook to replace the lid over the fire, and knocked the can of oil over, spilling it on the stove, into the fire, onto the floor, and on her clothes. It all lit up.
She was burnt, and bad!
When the skin started to heal, they had to graft skin on. They couldn't do skin grafting near there, so they had to send her to Kansas City, to Memorial Hospital (KU Medical Center). They phoned me and said she'd have to be taken to Kansas City and a relative would have to go with her. She went on the train.
They said they'd bring her to Beloit, which was quite a ways from where she lived, to catch the Union Pacific railroad at the depot there. I was to meet her there. I spend a number of days with her at the hospital.
In the mean time, I got to talking to a man and a woman downstairs from Lucy.
They said they had a daughter, Ruth, there for eye surgery that was in the same ward. They were from Mead, Kansas. We got to be friends. When we got ready to leave, to go back to work, I was saying goodbye to them. The girl said she wanted me to write to her when I got back. So I did.
Finally Lucy and the girl were released.
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