Excerpt from the book

When I first thought of telling my life story, I thought a lot of it was unusual. I'm not sure now, but I want to go ahead and tell it because it seems to me that every man's life is important. I will try to tell the interesting parts along with the things that are important to me but probably not to anyone else. The main thing I have done all my life, it seems like, is fight. It has not been because I'm braver than most men. I just got started when I was little, and one thing or another kept me doing it until finally nobody wanted to pick on me anymore, and I didn't especially want them to, either.

One thing I learned early was never to make the other guy scared if you can help it. A scared man will kill you when you could whip him all day if he wasn't scared. This is what I learned in one of my early scraps around Lodge Pole. Me and this other boy were going at it. I was having an easy time with him.

-- from "I Am A Freight Train" novella by James Robert Campbell