Soon he had a road-building contract of his own. (Having stretched himself to the limit to finance it, he almost went broke when rains turned the road into a sea of mud and forced him to stop work; at one point, when he could not afford to buy feed for his mules, a local merchant, taking pity on him and the mules, gave him credit. Decades later, Herman learned by chance that the merchant had gone broke in the Depression and, old now, was living in poverty on an isolated West Texas ranch. A day or two later, there arrived in the old man’s mailbox a check big enough to keep him in comfort for
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