Horse Tradin' (20 page)

In a soft, lonesome Southern drawl he replied: “How do yuh do, suh,” and moved over a step closer.

We talked a minute or two about the weather and Fort Worth, and he mentioned that he would like to have something to eat, that he had just come in off a long trip and got a room in the hotel, but he didn't know whether that dining room was the proper place to eat or not. Well, it suddenly occurred to me that the old man might not want to spend as much money as it cost to wipe your chin on the fine linen napkins in that dining room, so I told him I hadn't had a chance to eat either and that I knew a good place to get lots of grub and not too many frills for a fair price. He said: “Well suh, I'd be obliged if yuh'd show me around some, 'cause I ‘spec I'm goin' to be here for several days, and I needs to know where to get somethin' to eat.” I told my Southern friend that it wasn't far and we could just step out the side door here and walk and get a bit of supper.

I knew of a family-style eating place where you just sat down to the table and “pitch 'til you win” that was run by some good old women. That night they had everything
on the table that looked like it was good to eat, and my Southern colonel (I was by that time calling him Colonel) made himself right at home and ate way more than my money's worth. When he got up and left the table, and I had paid the boardinghouse woman, you could tell that he was well pleased with the feed ground and was liking my company pretty good.

When we stepped out on the street it was good dark, and a norther had struck which made it a little uncomfortable; so the Colonel and I hit a decent sort of a fox trot back to the hotel lobby. I looked around, and there wasn't many people in the lobby, and it was going to be a long black night, so I suggested to the Colonel that we set a spell before going to bed, and that was the master stroke. The conversation led off to his business and mine, and he confided to me that he had come to Fort Worth to buy some small mining mules to ship back to his native West Virginia. I tried not to show any excitement or pleasure in his statement, but I said to myself that those cute little fat Mexican mules were about to get introduced to the hardships of the life of a mining mule. The Colonel told me that he hesitated to buy mules at the auction and that he had gotten to town two or three days ahead of the auction day, hoping that he could buy mules without having to go into that crooked old auction and bid against them “professional” horse traders. Well I didn't want to booger the old man, so I worked up slow and easy to telling him that I had some little mules. I first asked him how many of these little mules he needed, and he said that they actually needed about a hundred in West Virginia but that he had no hopes of buying that many in one place. I finally told him that I had sixty of these little
mules that were fat and young and not too big, as he had cautioned me that he had to have a small mule. I told him that these little mules were unbroke but sound and in good flesh and would stand shipping a long way. I explained to him that I didn't like auctions either, and I had these little mules in some pens way back behind the auction barn, and I had been dreading the thought of letting them professional horse and mule traders steal them from me.

The Colonel was right interested in the mules and wanted to see them first thing the next morning. I told him that I'd meet him for breakfast, and he said that he got up early and would see me about daylight. He stretched and moved around the edge of his chair and finally got off toward the elevator, and I told him good night and that I'd see him in the morning.

He didn't know how bad off I was to sell these little mules, nor how little I slept that night, and how easy it was for me to be up at daylight. I was standing in the hotel lobby when he got off the elevator the next morning, about 5:30. It wasn't nearly daylight, but I was afraid that he might get down to the lobby or even to the stockyards, and that he might get caught by one of those “professional” mule dealers.

We stopped on the way out to the stockyards and ate breakfast. Then we were on the old streetcar going out to the stockyards, and I reached up and rang the bell, and we got off about three blocks before we reached Exchange Avenue. I told him I knew a short cut over to the pens and we wouldn't have to go through the auction barn, and he and I could look at the little mules without anybody being any the wiser.

We walked down a back alley and across the creek and crawled over the fence into the mule pen. The Colonel walked around among the mules a few minutes, and kind of waved the tail of his overcoat at them and made them jump and shy. It was still pretty cold and just daylight, and the mules were blowing a little fog out of their noses, and he turned to me and said: “Ben muh boy, these are just what I want. Now how much will yuh have to have fo' 'em?”

It had developed in our conversation that he was buying these mules for himself and some other mine operators, so I thought I should play it real honest with him. So I said: “Colonel, there's no use in me trying to rob you and your other miner friends, and I don't believe that you'd try to steal these mules from me. So why don't you tell me all that you can give for them per head, and represent your own interest and be fair to the other fellows at home that you're buying these mules for. If I can stand it at all I'll sell them to you, and you and I won't have any hard feelings if I can't take the price. That way there won't be any bidding and dickering and hard words among friends.”

He told me he thought that was the fairest way to trade and that he was going to give me every dollar that those little mules were worth in “West Virginy,” less what the freight would be; and he asked me if I knew what the freight would be per head by carload on these mules. I told him that the freight would be about $25 per head and if it was more than that I'd pay the difference.

He studied a few minutes, walked around the mules, and I was insisting that he cut out anything that didn't suit him, and he told me they all suited him. He looked at
them a few more times, and I was about to lose my breath thinking he might not ever tell me what they were worth in “West Virginy.” He finally turned, spit off into the ground, and said: “Ben muh boy, these mules are worth $100 apiece in West Virginy, and that'd amount to $75 apiece here, and that's all I can give yuh for 'em. If yuh can take it, we'll go call the folks back home and see if the deal is all right with 'em, befo' I give yuh a draft fo' the mules.”

I stood real quiet a few minutes trying to keep from shouting, and when I finally had control of myself I said: “I guess it's worth something to sell them all in one bunch, and I feel like you're being fair, so I'm going to sell them to you.”

For fear that somebody else might see him, we walked back up the alley to North Main Street and I hailed a cab instead of waiting for the streetcar. We went up into my room at the hotel, and in those days it took a long time to get a long-distance call back to West Virginia, and it seemed like an awfully long time. He finally talked, and he painted a glowing picture of these little mules and what a good man had them and he wasn't having to buy them through the auction, and they decided to close the deal.

He hung up the phone and we went to his room, and he got out a long checkbook and wrote me a check for the mules. Then I called the railroad office and ordered a forty-foot car to ship the mules in that day (the trick in shipping mules was that there were very few forty-foot cars and the railroad would have to furnish you two thirty-six-foot cars at the same price). I found that the mules couldn't be loaded until the next morning, and I was dying to get over to the bank with that check; so I
told him I would go out and see about the car and what time we could load them, and that he could stay around the hotel and rest up a little. I said I would be back in time for us to go to dinner, and that suited him fine. He immediately pulled off his soft black shoes, took off his coat and necktie, and was lying down on the bed when I left.

I hurried over to the bank, and they wired on the check, and it was good as gold. I warned my banker not to tell a soul about my Colonel from West Virginia until I got those little mules loaded.

I entertained the Colonel the rest of the day, and that night I took him to the old Majestic Theater to see a stage show which he thoroughly enjoyed.

We loaded the mules the next morning. Then I took the Colonel to the train, told him good-bye and, as the train whistled and left town, went by the bank and got some spendin' money. Then I set out to the stockyards to tell my dumb, “professional” horse-trading friends that were handling big mules the going price of little mules.

The spring movement
of big steers to the Osage grass country of Oklahoma and Kansas was getting into swing. Every year, big steers were wintered in Texas, then moved north for summer pasture.

Somebody went with these cattle to take care of them while they grazed the bluestem country. Cow men would lease these big pastures that didn't have any improvement on 'em other than grass and water and some kind of fence—and some cowboy would go along with the steers to take care of them through the summer and ship them out fat in the fall.

This year, hands were kind of scarce—the kind that would leave home and go to the bluestem to camp out in the pasture with a bunch of steers—and a couple of steer men out of Fort Worth made me a proposition to go up and spend the summer with their cattle. Well, I'd had a good winter; it was going to be a long hot summer in Texas; and I just decided I needed to see Kansas.

We shipped out eight hundred head of steers and a few over in the early part of May. It was still a little chilly when we unloaded them off the railroad in Kansas, but the grass had started and the bluestem was green, and it looked like it would be a good summer.

Around this pasture we had a few neighbors that were in the farming business; they had bad fences and worse dispositions. But outside of a little farmer trouble that goes with any cow operation where them clodhoppers join your pasture, the summer was mostly peaceful and not much work. We had some good rains and the cattle got fat. I had a good camp close to a windmill under an old shed—plenty of water, enough wood to cook with, and not too far from a little country town where a man could lope in and get some conversation, store-bought grub, and find out what was going on in the rest of the world.

In the same stock cars with these steers, I shipped up
some good saddle horses that belonged to me to ride during the summer. Of course they got fat and did good through the summer, and I didn't ride them too hard. When we shipped the cattle out in the fall, it wasn't to my liking to get rid of these good horses and come back to Texas afoot. It would be too expensive to have a boxcar or a stock car on the railroad to haul five head of horses, and trucks didn't haul cattle and horses like they do now.

We shipped our cattle out in the fall after they were fat; I drew my summer wages and the world looked pretty good; it wasn't too bad a-weather yet, and I just decided I would start out for Texas, using my horses to ride and to pack my camp. I had a packsaddle to carry my bedroll and stuff on, and I just thought I'd ride along and change about on my horses and get home before winter set in—with plenty of time to get into some kind of a stock deal at home for the winter.

These infernal combustion machines called tractors had begun to get kind of plentiful in the plains country and open country in Kansas and Oklahoma. Work stock had gotten cheap. Great big broad-hipped, good kind of sound, beautiful-headed, heavy-bodied Percheron and other draft-type horses weren't much in demand. Every tractor trader had a penful of them somewhere around the edge of every little town, and they were hard to sell. There weren't too many mules mixed up with them in that country, and very few saddle horses were ever traded in on a tractor. I camped along the way, and I kept noticing that every town I'd come through with my saddle horses, there was an awful lot of good draft horses around these traders' pens and around these farm implement warehouses.

These were kind of a new breed of people to me. In my country, when I was growing up, farm implements was a sideline to a general hardware store—not a major business. But after tractors got started in the country, they got to be all the vogue. Implement dealers and automobile dealers thought they were just as good as any horse trader. I never did share their opinion about that, but I might have been wrong. There got to be more implement dealers and less horse traders as time went on.

I rode into Liberal, Kansas, late in the afternoon, and found a trade yard with an empty lot and plenty of feed and water. It was next to a lot where one of those implement dealers was stacking in draft-type horses and a few mules. I couldn't help but notice there was a lot of nice dapple-gray horses—some a little lighter, showing a little more age, but a few young mares were just dark iron grays—good feet and sound legs on them, and good deep bodies. Most of them would weigh about sixteen hundred pounds apiece. Generally speaking, in work horses blacks and grays were mostly Percheron breeding. (Sorrels and red roans were usually from Belgian breeding.) These horses were gentle and well broke and as nice as any man had ever seen.