Horse of a Different Color (8 page)

February 1920 was bitter cold, cattle prices dropped sharply, and though I never missed a day from my territory there was little profit to be made. The first half of March the weather behaved as if it had been designed especially to punish stockmen. At dawn on the eighth the thermometer stood at twenty-two below zero. Six inches of snow covered the pasture, with a crust hard enough to support my heaviest trading cattle, and the wind was strong enough to blow the lighter ones off their feet. By noon on the ninth, summer seemed to be just around the corner. When I came home at three o’clock a balmy Chinook wind was blowing out of the southwest, and Bob had taken the family to Oberlin—partly to get fresh meat, but more to give Marguerite and the children a little outing. The cattle sunning themselves contentedly in the pasture stood in ankle-deep slush, and the feed-lot steers waded equally deep in sloppy muck and manure.

I pulled off my jumper before starting to load the corn wagon, and didn’t notice that the wind had shifted into the north until my sweat-soaked shirt slapped against my back, as cold as if it had been dipped in the creek. Before I’d finished loading, the wind had veered into the northeast, there was a raw edge to it, and though it wasn’t actually raining, there was enough moisture in the air to wet my face. As I filled the feed bunks in the lot the steers stood motionless, tails to the driving wind and heads hung low—a sure sign of a coming storm. The pasture cattle behaved the same way when I fed them, and few came to eat. By the time I’d finished feeding and had unharnessed the horses, the temperature had dropped to fifteen above zero and the moisture in the wind had turned to fine sleet.

So the house would be warm when the family got home, I lighted fires in the kitchen and parlor stoves, then went out to do the milking. I’d just finished stripping the brindle when the Buick clattered into the dooryard, so I went to lend a hand with the children. After I’d carried Betty Mae and Arvis to the house Bob told me, “You’d best to saddle up while I unload the groceries and Marguerite gets us a bite of supper. If we don’t keep them cattle on the move till this slush crusts over hard enough to keep ’em from busting through, there’ll be so danged many frozen feet around here that you couldn’t count ’em.”

I’ve spent some rough nights in my life, but I think that one was the roughest. The temperature never dropped below fifteen or rose above twenty, but all night long the wind veered from north to northeast and back again, striking in almost horizontal blasts of cutting sleet. If left alone ten minutes, the cattle turned tail to it, humped their backs, and stood waiting to freeze, so we couldn’t work in relays. Bob had to be constantly with the steers in the feed lot, and I with the cattle in the pasture, keeping them on the move to stir the circulation in their legs and prevent their feet from freezing in the slush and mud that extended above their hoofs.

I’d saddled Bob’s sorrel, but rode Kitten bareback so that the warmth of her body would keep my legs from stiffening too badly. Even then they ached with a dull grinding pain, and although the feed lot was somewhat protected by the trees along the creek, Bob, riding on a saddle, must have suffered much more than I. All through the night no hour passed that Marguerite didn’t come to the pasture fence with scalding-hot coffee, swinging a lantern to signal me in. Then as I rode back I’d see its glow moving on toward the feed lot.

As often happens in a storm of that kind, the wind let up at dawn. The sky cleared soon after daybreak, the temperature dropped to zero, and a crust strong enough to support an elephant formed over the feed lot mud and pasture slush. Bob and I reeled like drunkards as we put our tired horses in the barn and headed for the house, too weary and numb to speak. When we stumbled into the kitchen we found two tubs of steaming water sitting in the middle of the floor, with rough towels and dry clothes hung over a chair in front of the oven door.

During the next few days the temperature moderated to the mid-forties, while Bob and I worked constantly with the cattle. Each day we put every one of them across the scales, checking its weight, the gloss of its coat, and for any sign of leg swelling or tenderfootedness.

By the end of the week we were satisfied that we’d come through without a single frozen foot. But as the weather warmed I had from fifteen to twenty phone calls a day, all from farmers anxious to sell me crippled cattle. I had to explain that I couldn’t buy them because they’d be unable to stay on their feet for so long a haul to market, and advise the man to butcher any cripples immediately, so as to save the meat before gangrene set in. Bob and I estimated that more than a hundred cattle in my trading area went into corned beef barrels that week, and that an even larger number were shot, skinned, and their carcasses left for the coyotes.

On March 15 we had wind close enough to hurricane force that it scattered half the haystacks in the township. Then, as if winter had exhausted itself in a final burst of violence, spring came to stay, the frost drew out of the ground, mud dried to loam, and the first sprouts of new grass appeared. By mid-April our steers came into the bright bloom of corn-fat cattle that have reached their prime.

8

The Hog Cycle

A
FTER
seventeen consecutive weeks of decline, the prime steer market held steady during the third week of April, and Bob was sure it would bounce back to its December peak any day. I had no such illusions and—with a little help from George Miner—convinced Bob that it would be wasteful to hold our stock another week. Our hogs were already becoming overweight, and after cattle reach their prime any added weight is lardy fat that reduces their value.

I decided to ship six carloads of trading stock I’d accumulated at the same time we shipped the feed-lot stock, so ordered eighteen cars for the twenty-fourth of April, and applied for returning stockmen’s passes for Bob and me. That Saturday I had my biggest trading day of the spring, and more than twenty men stayed to help load the stock and see the train away. As always when I accompanied stock to Kansas City, I wore blue denim jeans and jumper, taking along only a change of underwear. But Bob wore his Sunday suit and carried a suitcase.

Riding two nights and a day in the caboose of a cattle train and trying to sleep on a bare wooden bench is no fun under any circumstances. But it is infinitely worse in wet clothes, and mine were sopping almost the entire trip. It began raining an hour after the train pulled away from Cedar Bluffs, and there was no letup. Bob, in his best clothes, was no help, and with so many cars I had to run forward a quarter-mile at every stop, to make sure we had no cattle down and injured. It was still pouring when we reached Kansas City, and in spite of the discomfort I was pleased, for on long hauls livestock shrinks less in rainy weather than in fair.

Our train was one of the first to pull into the stockyards Monday morning, and our stock came through in exceptionally good condition. The yards were six inches deep in muck, so Bob didn’t help with the unloading, but I’d brought along a pocketful of half-dollars for the roustabouts, and was able to get our stock penned in good positions. I had all the hogs penned close together, with my trading cattle nearby, but the steers—being prime—had to be penned fully a quarter-mile away. Regardless of the muck and rain, Bob wanted to stand as owner beside the auctioneer when our steers were sold, and I was glad to be free so I could look after the rest of the stock.

The hog market was good that morning, up half a dollar from Saturday, and although our feed-lot hogs were somewhat overweight they did well, netting almost five thousand dollars. My trading stock did well, too, averaging a little better than sixty dollars profit per car.

It was eight o’clock when my last cattle were sold, and when I went to our agent’s office Bob had been gone more than an hour. “He ran into some friends,” the agent told me, “and they went celebrating as soon as the last carload was auctioned. Bob said you’d look after the paper end of the deal.”

There was nothing but paper work to be done regarding the feed-lot stock. As was customary with mortgaged stock, ours had been shipped subject to attachment for the amount of our loans. And since the loans were greater than the value of the stock, the entire net proceeds had to be paid directly to the First State Bank of Cedar Bluffs. Even so, I couldn’t blame Bob too much for doing a bit of celebrating. In spite of the poor-quality feed and the drop in fat-cattle prices, our steers had brought very close to thirty-three thousand dollars net.

As soon as the agent and I had completed the paper work and I’d sent Bones a telegram, I picked up my bundle from the train caboose and went to the Stockmen’s Hotel. Not because I expected Bob to have been there, but to make conversation as I signed the register, I asked, “Seen Bob Wilson this morning?”

“I sure have,” the clerk told me. “Him and his friends come in half an hour ago, celebrating Bob’s good luck. He tells me he brought in ten carloads of prime steers this morning, topped the market with ’em, and cleaned up a profit of better’n thirty thousand bucks. A train whistle spooked some of his cattle while he was unloading, and they run him down in the slop. He was plastered with muck from head to heels, and on his way uptown to buy some new clothes.”

I thought I smelled a mouse, so asked, “Did he just stop in to leave his suitcase and cash a check?”

“Yeah,” he said, “the poor guy couldn’t wait around for the banks to open up—not in the shape his clothes was in—but three hundred bucks was all I had on hand.”

There was no sense in telling the clerk that Bob hadn’t a dime in the bank and that the check was worthless. But with a roll in his pocket I knew he’d be off on a wild spending spree, and there’d be less sense in trying to find him.

I spent the rest of that day and all the next around the hotel lobby, waiting for Bob to show up and listening to the stockmen and agents. Those who had been the most optimistic in December were wailing that any man who stayed in the feeding business was bound to go broke. My own agent still thought the prospects were good, and a stockman with agricultural school training argued that a feeder could break exactly even at the current prices. His argument interested me particularly, for Bob and I still had nearly enough corn and hay on hand to feed three hundred steers for four months.

Bob came back to the hotel just in time for us to catch the Denver night express. As I expected, he was barely able to keep on his feet, couldn’t remember where he’d been, and didn’t have a penny in his pockets. He was wearing a new brown suit and hat—the worse for rain and mud—but was carrying three or four packages that were dry and in good shape. “There’s presents in ’em for Marguerite and the girls,” he told me groggily, “shirtwaist with lace on the collar, and the likes of that.” He slept every minute until we transferred to the branch line, and then became as restless as a hound with fleas. The moment we pulled into Cedar Bluffs he hurried away toward home with the parcels, but forgot his suitcase.

I left it with Dad Haynes and went to the telephone office with the box of candy I’d brought for Effie. She looked as sad as if she were at a funeral, and her eyes failed to light up as usual when she saw the candy box. “You shouldn’t have went and spent money on candy for me,” she said, “not after the kind of lickin’ you must of took on them steers you fed. I was scared for you right from the start-off. How bad did you get hurt?”

“Not enough to amount to anything,” I told her. “My loss on the whole deal was barely more than five hundred dollars, and that’s nothing when you consider that the price of fat cattle dropped thirty per cent while we had our steers on feed.”

“Nothin’!” she scoffed. “You might call five hundred dollars nothin’, but I sure don’t. Up till the war commenced that’s more’n what I got for mindin’ this switchboard a whole year. And look at the four months of hard work you lost to boot.”

“I’d like to lose four months the same way every winter for the next fifty years,” I told her. “Since Christmas I’ve made enough on my trading and shipping business to pay my share of the living expenses, buy hog-wire fencing for the place, pay interest on my trading-account loans, and save eighteen hundred dollars. Besides that, I’ve learned enough about livestock feeding to be worth every penny it cost me.”

Before I’d finished, Effie had lost her mournful appearance and was eyeing the candy box hungrily. “Well then,” she said, “I ain’t goin’ to feel so bad over you fetchin’ me candy—exceptin’ only that you’re goin’ to fat me up like a Poland China sow if you don’t quit it. You don’t aim to go back into the feedin’ business, do you, Bud?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Most stockmen at Kansas City are afraid of cattle feeding now, but our corn and hay will go to ruin if it isn’t used before winter. I’m not going to do anything until I talk with George Miner.”

“Now you’re beginnin’ to show a smidgen of common sense,” she told me as she eagerly untied the candy-box ribbon, “and you’d better go see Bones before he jumps clean out of his hide. He’s called up three times a’ready, tellin’ me to send you right over to the bank as soon as ever I laid eyes on you.”

When I crossed the street to the bank, Bones came hurrying to meet me as if I were the Governor instead of a kid in dirty blue denims, congratulating me on how well we’d done with the steers in the face of a demoralized fat-cattle market. He led me back to his desk, pulled up a chair, and began urging that Bob and I put five hundred steers into the feed lot right away.

I told him about the conversations I’d heard at Kansas City, and said I wasn’t going to make up my mind until I’d talked with George Miner. Snatching up the phone receiver, he whirled the crank and asked Effie to get George on the line. I thought it might be a good time to get in a whack for Bob, so as we waited I said, “Oh, by the way, Bob had to write a check for some cash while we were down to the city. The rain and muck at the yards ruined his suit, and while he was getting another one he bought some clothes for his wife and the children.”

I was careful not to mention the amount of the check, and Bones didn’t ask. He just waved a hand and said, “That’s okay. Tell him to drop in and sign a note for it the next time he’s . . . Hello! Hello, George! This is Harry. Bud Moody is here with me, just back from the city, and we’ve been talking about him and Bob putting in another bunch of feeder cattle. We’d like to get your ideas on it if you could spare time to drop by. Fine! Much obliged, George.”

George came right away, but he wouldn’t do any talking until I’d repeated all that I heard in Kansas City. “Well,” he said at last, “down there where the tradin’ goes on every day they’d ought to know what the fat-cattle market’s goin’ to do if anybody does, but I misdoubt me that anybody does. Instead of bein’ the worth of stuff, market price is only a measure of how bad one man wants somethin’ and another man wants to get rid of it. You take the way prices have been runnin’ lately: bacon hogs fetchin’ a dollar a hundred more’n prime steers. That’s hind-end-foremost. Ever since I can recollect—exceptin’ when the market was on a spree, you understand—fat steers have fetched around a dollar more than top grade hogs. Sooner or later it’ll straighten itself out again, but your guess on when it’ll come about is as good as anybody else’s.”

“But aren’t hogs as apt to drop two dollars as fat steers are to go up?” I asked.

“I don’t reckon so,” he said. “Most stockmen never take note of it, but the hog market generally always runs in nine-month cycles, and it’s only four months since the upswing commenced—right after Christmas.”

“What do you mean by cycles?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “I suppose you know that it’s close to four months from the time a sow’s bred till she has her litter. If she’s a good brood sow and the pigs are put on corn as soon as they’re weaned, they’ll be bacon-hog size and ready for market by the time they’re five months old. That’s what I call a hog cycle, and if a man pays careful heed to it he ought to be able to figure out—by and large, of course—about how the hog market will behave for a spell ahead.”

“I understand the cycle,” I said, “but not how it would help a man figure what the market is going to do.”

“Then you don’t know farmers as good as a livestock dealer ought to know ’em,” he told me. “When the price of hogs goes down, ten farmers out of a dozen stop breedin’ their sows, figurin’ there’s no profit in raisin’ pigs. Nine months later hogs get scarcer’n hen’s teeth, so the price goes to shootin’ up, and every one of them farmers goes to breedin’ his sows again. By the time another nine months rolls around bacon hogs are plentiful as flies around a slaughterhouse, and there’s just about the same demand for ’em, so the bottom drops out of the market. Of course, that nine months can stretch out to ten, or even eleven, dependin’ on the price of corn. If it’s high, most farmers hold back a mite on the feed, so it takes the hogs a few weeks longer to grow to market size.”

“How long is the cycle for beef cattle?” I asked.

“If you put it that way, I’d have to say there wasn’t one,” he told me. “You see it’s upwards of three years from the breedin’ of a cow till her calf is ready for the beef market. That’s so long that raisers don’t pay much mind to a couple of dollars up or down in the market. Mostly, their breedin’ depends on how much pasture they’ve got, how the grass is doin’, and how many head of stock it will support. Of course, there’s what you might call a cycle in the price of prime fat cattle, because it takes only three or four months to put the fat on ’em. Most generally you’ll find that feeders are like hog farmers. When the market’s bad there won’t many of ’em put a new bunch of steers onto feed, so in about four months there’s a shortage of prime beef. Then the price goes to risin’, every feeder goes to fillin’ his lot, and in another four months the seesaw goes down again.”

It seemed to me that George was trying to give us his opinion in a roundabout way, so I said, “It’s more than four months since the fat-cattle market began falling, and feeder steers are way down too, so there can’t have been many put into feed lots lately. Don’t you think this might be the right time for Bob and me to put another bunch into the lot?”

The slightest trace of a grin broadened George’s lips, and he told me, “Well, son, like I told you about hogs last December, I ain’t sellin’ any cattle right now, but I ain’t advisin’ you to buy none either. A man ought to make up his own mind and not go too much on what somebody else thinks. How does Bob feel about puttin’ in another bunch now?”

“You know Bob,” I said. “He’d have put in a thousand head last December if he could have borrowed enough to buy them.”

George got up, stretched, and said, “Yep, old Bob, he kind of likes to jump in with both feet, don’t he? Sometimes a man wins big by doin’ that, but it’s awful easy to get mired if he happens to light on a soft spot. Reckon I’d better be gettin’ on home or Irene might suspicion that I’ve run off with the new schoolma’am.”

After listening to George, Bones seemed no more anxious than I to risk lighting on a soft spot, but agreed to lend Bob and me whatever we needed to put in another three hundred steers and half that number of pigs—on the same terms and conditions as our first loan.

For the next three days Bob and I were on the go from dawn till dark, and lucky there were fourteen hours of daylight at that time of year. Late Friday afternoon we finished our rounds, having bought a hundred and fifty pigs and nearly five hundred steers. By six o’clock Saturday morning stock began pouring in from every point of the compass. George came over to help me check it in, and Bob did the sorting. All the pigs and the three hundred best steers were put into the feed lot; the remainder divided into six carloads for shipping. During the afternoon George and I loaded the cars while Bob, with a couple of boys to help him, put all the new feed-lot steers across the scales, and no feeder could have wished for finer stock.