Horse of a Different Color (9 page)

9

Mustang Auction

S
UNDAY
morning I was up long before daylight, had my feeding done an hour after sunrise, and by seven o’clock Kitten and I were climbing the divide. The rain of the previous week had left the soil in our south field as mellow as meal and, as my grandfather used to say, “a-hankerin’ for the plow.” It was time for corn planting, but I couldn’t use Bob’s two-ton team for both feeding and plowing, so had decided to bring down four of my heaviest mustangs for the planting job.

I can’t remember many days when I’ve had more fun than on that Sunday. My mustangs had come through the winter in fine condition: were as round and sleek as otters and wilder than falcons. No matter how carefully a mustang is broken, or how tractable he may become during the working season, his instinct is to fight restraint after a winter’s freedom. All forenoon I worked with the four I’d use for corn planting: harnessing them to a wagonload of dirt, then letting them fight it till they’d blown off their excess steam and would answer the reins willingly.

I spent the whole afternoon playing: roping other broncs, saddling them, and riding them in a pole corral. Every one bucked furiously, but they showed no viciousness, and though I was tossed several times, I was unhurt—except for a few bruises and having the wind knocked out of me two or three times. I would like to have stayed and played with the horses till dark, but I knew Bob would find some excuse for not feeding the stock. With the sun still two hours above the horizon, I gave each mustang that I wasn’t going to use for plowing a slap on the rump, dodged its flying heels, and watched it race away to the pasture and a few more weeks of freedom.

In western Kansas the topsoil is deep, and because of the scant rainfall the plant-feeding chemicals haven’t been leached out of it; so few farmers dress their land. But I learned farming from my New England father, and couldn’t bear to plant corn on undressed land when there was a foot-thick blanket of manure in the feed lot. Bob and most of the neighbors told me I was wasting my time when I started hauling manure, but George nodded his head and said, “If I was in your boots I wouldn’t pay ’em no mind. Sure, a calf will live and grow on skimmed milk, but he’ll grow a sight faster if he gets the cream.”

I spent the whole first week of May hauling manure and spreading it over the forty-acre south field, then another two weeks plowing and planting, often with Betty Mae riding on my knee. The corn planting kept me too busy to work my territory, but there was always a trading session on Saturdays, and the six carloads of surplus steers we’d shipped made a profit of three hundred dollars.

That spring of 1920 was glorious for me, and Sundays were the best days of all, for I spent them at my place on the divide, getting ready for the wheat-hauling season that would begin in late July. To have the whole day free, I arranged to mail my specimens to Dr. DeMay and told Bob I wouldn’t be home to do the Sunday evening feeding.

I spent the forenoons reassembling my wagons, resetting the tires, making repairs, touching up the paint, and putting harness into first class condition. Then I devoted the afternoons to rounding the horses into shape: trimming their hoofs, hitching each pair to a heavily loaded wagon, driving them enough to sweat off their winter softness, breaking down their resentment of control by firm but gentle handling, and finally retraining each four-horse team until it responded as a unit to every command or touch of the reins.

I’d finished the corn planting and been working my trading territory a week or two when a lightweight truck passed me on the road. It was the first truck I’d ever seen on a country road, but five more passed me by the end of the week, all driven at breakneck speed by young fellows I’d never seen before. I should have had sense enough to know why they were there, but it never occurred to me until a farmer told me they were contracting to haul wheat at little more than half the price-per-mile I’d charged the previous summer. Even though I owned my horses and wagons clear of debt, I couldn’t afford to meet any such rate.

The coming Sunday would be Fourth of July, and harvest would start that week. At an auction just before harvest, horses and wagons would bring more than at any other time, and although I’d never owned anything I hated so badly to part with, common sense demanded that I sell quickly. The bigger the auction crowd the higher the bidding, so I headed straight for the telephone office. I told Effie my reason for having an auction and that it would be held at my place on Fourth of July afternoon, with the biggest barbecue ever seen in Beaver Township and fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks in the evening. Then I asked if she’d put out line calls and have the operators in all the nearby towns do the same.

Next I went to see Bones, told him what I was going to do, and asked if he’d get as many bankers as he could to come. Bankers were nearly as important to me as bidders, because I intended trying to sell my rigs as units: the four mustangs that had been trained as a team, their harness, and a pair of tandemed wagons. Few farmers, especially just before harvest, could write a check for as much as I hoped one of those rigs would bring unless his banker was on hand to approve a mortgage loan. From the bank I went to Oberlin, hunted up the best auctioneer in the county, arranged for him to handle my sale, and told him I’d pay an extra 1 per cent commission on rigs sold as a complete unit. At the Oberlin Cash Store I had an order sent off for skyrockets, Roman candles, and other fireworks.

That evening I told Bob about the auction, and that he’d have to do the evening feeding for the rest of the week, but that I’d load the hayrack and corn wagon for him each morning. I spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday collecting the hogs I’d bought during the past weeks. It not only gave me a chance to drive my teams, but let the farmers in four townships see how sleek and well-trained they were.

All four mustangs in the team I’d driven myself during the 1919 hauling season were old Kitten’s offspring: the smallest, toughest, wildest, and most unmanageable of all my horses. The former owner had nearly ruined them with cruelty, but they were highly intelligent and had become tractable under careful handling. By the end of the season they’d obey the reins with such machinelike precision that, in showing them off to Effie, I’d put them through a figure 8 in front of the telephone office while hauling 120 bushels of wheat on a pair of wagons hitched in tandem. I decided to train them in the stunt at a run, not only as entertainment for the auction crowd, but to show prospective buyers how strong, dependable, and controllable my little mustangs were. Along with collecting hogs and hauling supplies for the barbecue, I schooled the team morning, noon, and evening all week. By Friday they’d pull a pair of loaded wagons at a full gallop along the level quarter-mile stretch of road leading to the buildings on my place, swing through a figure 8 in the dooryard without slacking speed, and slide to a stop exactly in front of the corral gate.

A steady rain set in before daylight on Saturday, and lasted most of the day. It made schooling the horses impossible, but was so valuable to our corn crop that I was glad to have it. I spent all day and late into the evening getting ready for the auction, then stayed at the place all night. An hour before dawn on Fourth of July, I drove down to the Wilson place to feed the stock, and took my furniture along. It was all secondhand and nothing fancy, but I’d become sort of attached to it and didn’t want it auctioned off, so stored it in Bob’s empty bunkhouse.

Bob and Marguerite went back with me as soon as I’d done the feeding, and we took along a man from Cedar Bluffs to do the barbecuing. While they started getting the food ready I hitched up all seven rigs, put the teams through a final workout, then lined them up for display in the big corral. By noon there were jalopies of every kind and description, some fine automobiles, buggies, buckboards, carriages, and wagons lined up on both sides of the driveway and a quarter-mile down the county road. The dooryard was swarming with people, and Bob was acting as traffic cop to keep it free of vehicles.

It was customary not to serve the free lunch until after the auctioning, but it seemed to me that men with full bellies would bid more freely. When everyone had eaten and drunk all he could hold, the auctioneer climbed up on the corral gate and made a flowery speech about my four-horse tandem-wagon rigs being “famous throughout Decatur County and the whole region round-about.” After orating for more than ten minutes about my mustangs being the best trained, fastest, toughest, and strongest horses—pound for pound—in the world, he shouted that it would be a downright crime to break up any one of the teams, so he was going to auction each complete rig as a single unit. “I’m not asking you to take my word about these little horses,” he bellowed. “Before they’re put up for sale we will give you a fantastic demonstration of their strength, speed, sure-footedness, and ease of handling.”

As Bob and the auctioneer harangued the crowd, clearing the driveway and dooryard, I climbed to the high wagon seat behind my figure 8 team and gathered the reins in my hands. When the gate swung open I drove out into the empty yard, then stopped the team and called out, “I need a four-ton load here. How about fifty of you heaviest men and boys coming along for a ride?”

Four tons was far more than I wanted, but I was sure the boys would outrun the heavier men—and they did. Within ten seconds both wagons were packed tight, but the whole load weighed less than three tons. The driveway was straight and flat, hard-packed from the recent rain and heavy traffic of the forenoon. I let the team pick up a brisk trot as we neared the county road, swung them in a wide turn, still at a trot, and cautioned my riders to hold tight.

As I’d done in practice, I snugged the reins the moment the leaders were facing back toward the buildings, then sang out, “Yi-ya! Ha! Ha! Ha!” The four little mustangs—no one of them weighing over eight hundred pounds—sprang into their collars as if each Ha! had been a whip lash. In a dozen strides they’d picked their speed up to a full gallop, and by the time we reached the dooryard they were fairly flying. With the crowd yelling insanely, we swung so close to the corral that the skidding rear wheels of the trailer wagon missed the fence no more than an inch or two. By that time the leaders were halfway across the yard, streaking toward the house, then swinging back toward the barn to complete the bottom circle of the 8; across the yard again, and into the reverse circle at the top of the figure. As we’d always done in practice, I hit the brakes hard at the top of the circle, and the rig slid to a stop squarely in front of the corral gate.

Almost instantly there was a man at each bridle, and the crowd gathered tightly around us, wild with excitement. The auctioneer was too smart to let the opportunity slip away. He started the auctioning as soon as the crowd had quieted enough for bids to be heard, and within three minutes had sold the rig for nearly seven hundred and fifty dollars. No other rig brought so much, but they all sold above seven hundred. Even my six old tote horses brought sixty dollars apiece. Spare harness and other odds and ends sold for another couple of hundred, bringing the total for everything except Kitten and my saddle to slightly more than fifty-seven hundred dollars. I wasn’t at all displeased with the amount, but far from happy otherwise. As men climbed to the high seats and drove my teams away I felt almost as guilty as if I’d sold my own brothers and sisters.

After the auction there was nothing I wanted less than a big celebration, so I asked Bob to host the rest of the affair, then saddled old Kitten and rode away. It seemed unbelievable that only a year had passed since I’d come there, dead broke, and as part of a rag-tag harvest crew. I’d planned to stay only to earn railroad fare to Denver, but the place had become my home, and I found myself riding away from it with an ache in my throat.

For an hour or more I let Kitten have her head as I thought back over the year and how good it had been to me. I’d made far more than I’d ever dreamed of making in a single year, and if the stock Bob and I had in the feed lot did as well as we expected, I’d make as much again before the summer was over.

For the next month I worked my territory every possible hour and shipped two car loads of stock a week. In early August there was a cloudburst near McCook, and an inch of rain fell at Cedar Bluffs. It was fine for our corn, but I had to cultivate right away to keep the moisture from evaporating in the scorching heat. By the time I’d finished there was no doubt that Bob and I would make a huge profit on the stock we were feeding, for the price of fat cattle had risen steadily since early June. Because we were nearly out of feed, I suggested shipping on August 14, but Bob insisted that the steers needed another two weeks to reach prime, and George agreed with him.

I’d never seen George so optimistic about livestock prospects. Prime steers were bringing seventeen dollars a hundred, bacon hogs sixteen, and corn had leveled off at a dollar sixty. He had a theory that the whole market was in balance when hogs were ten times the price of corn, and prime steers a dollar higher. “A man might as leave predict which way a flea will jump as to forecast the livestock market,” he told us, “but I’ll say this: the way the price of corn and hogs and prime steers have pulled into line is the healthiest sign I’ve seen since the war.”

Bob cut in to predict that prime steers would be bringing twenty-five dollars a hundred before Christmas, but George told him, “I’d stake anything I own that you’ll see another war before you again see fat cattle as high as twenty dollars, leave alone twenty-five. But I look for ’em to stay right around seventeen or eighteen while corn brings a dollar sixty.”

With George confident that the market was in a healthy condition, Bob and I wanted to put another bunch of stock on feed as soon as possible after shipping. Next morning we went to see Bones about the financing, and found him not only willing but eager. He urged that we put in double our present amount of stock, enough high-quality feed to fatten it, and do all our buying immediately to avoid higher prices. When I pointed out that it would require an eighty-thousand-dollar investment he said he knew it and had ample funds to provide the financing.