Page:Micheaux - The Conquest, The Story of a Negro Pioneer (1913).djvu/295



preparing to seed the biggest crop I had ever sown. With Orlean helping me, by bringing the dinner to the field and doing some chores, during the fall we had put the farm into winter wheat and I had rented the other Megory county farm. I hired a steam rig, to break two hundred acres of prairie on the Tipp county homesteads, for which I was to pay three dollars an acre and haul the coal from Colone, a distance of thirty-five miles, the track having been laid to that point on the extension west from Calias.

I intended to break one hundred acres with my horses and put it into flax. I had figured, that with a good crop, it would go a long way toward helping me get out of debt. I worked away feverishly, for I had gotten deeper into debt by helping my folks get the land in Tipp county.

After putting in fifteen acres of spring wheat, I hauled farm machinery to my sister's claim, and then began hauling coal from Colone. It was on Friday. I was driving two horses and two mules abreast, hitched to a wagon loaded with fifty hundred pounds of coal, and trailing another with thirty hundred pounds, when one of the mules got unruly, going down a hill, swerved to one side, and in less time than it takes to tell it, both wagons had turned turtle over a fifteen-foot embankment and I was under eight thousand pounds of coal, with both