Horse Tradin' (14 page)

I had brought my bridle and saddle along in the car and had left my horse tied with a rope. We saddled this horse, and he seemed to be gentle, but the owner warned me that he was a little spooky—which along about then didn't make no never mind to me. He held the horse by the bridle and I stepped on. When he turned him loose, the horse humped a little bit but he didn't really try to buck. He did show to be a nickel's worth snorty, but I think back now and that could have been because he was rested. He was a good eight-year-old horse, with good feet and legs; he had a nice running walk, a good fox trot just like my horse Tom, and I thought how nice it would be to have two horses that good and that much alike. When I looked in his mouth I noticed his teeth were a little brown, but the man said it was because he had been running in the field eating cotton stalks. I didn't know whether cotton stalks would turn a horse's teeth brown or not, but it sounded reasonable.

The man asked me $125 in cash, or, he said, he'd pay me $25 difference between this horse and mine—just because
he was a little afraid of this horse. I wasn't in any bind for money, and I never did have enough good horses, so I offered him $100 for his horse. He hemmed and hawed a little bit, while he stood kicking the dirt around with the toe of his shoe and looked at the ground. Finally he looked up at me and said: “I'm going to sell him to you because I'm
afeared
of him.”

That made me feel awfully good because I could buy the horse cheap and because I wasn't afeared of him.

I rode back to town, stopped at the blacksmith shop, and had my new horse shod. I picked the cockle burrs out of his mane and tail while the blacksmith shod him, and there never was a gentler horse. I remember now that the blacksmith said he knew the man was trying to sell the horse, but he didn't know what his reason was.

As I rode out of town on my new horse, leading Tom, I heard somebody holler at the man I had bought the horse from: “I see you got rid of that cribber.”

Well, that didn't disturb me any. I had heard horses called oaters and hay-burners, and I thought cribber was another name for horse feed. That night I made camp, staked Tom out on some tall grass, and told him how lucky he was that he had somebody to do part of his work.

Then I turned around to stake my new horse out. He had ahold of the top of a fence post with his teeth and was leaning back sucking air with all his strength. I hit him with the stake rope and said: “You old fool, there's grass to eat on the ground. What are you trying to bite a post for?” I staked him out on a long rope, made down my bed, and went to sleep about halfway between my two horses.

There was an awful noise woke me up in the middle
of the night, and I could see by the moonlight that this horse had ahold of the fence post, groaning and pulling. I squalled and threw rocks at him, then laid back down and went to sleep. He must have repeated the performance several times that night, because I saw the bark knocked off a stump and that post top was bit—which were about the only two things he could reach. His teeth and gums were sore in the front part of his mouth.

I saddled Tom, took up my camp, and led the other horse. Up in the morning, I stopped in the little town of Jarrell just to loaf and visit a little, drink a coke, and pass the time of day. I tied my horses to a hitch rack behind the grocery store. I was sitting in the back of the grocery store eating some ginger snaps and drinking a coke, when I looked out the back door and saw that my new horse had ahold of that wooden hitch rack with his teeth and was setting back groaning like he was going to tear that hitch rack down. The old gentleman running the grocery store looked at me and looked at the horse, and I asked him: “What makes that old fool do that?” Then I told him about the way the horse had acted the night before when I had made camp.

The old storekeeper laughed and said: “Young fellow, you've got a stump sucker.”

Then I remembered about the man hollering and using the word cribber; so I asked the old storekeeper what was the difference between a cribber and a stump sucker. He said: “There ain't any difference in the vice—the difference is in the location. If he's in Kentucky, he's a cribber—and if he's in Texas, he's a stump sucker.”

The old gentleman went out and looked at his mouth
and saw that his teeth and gums were bloody. He said: “You'd just as well buy you a leather strap and buckle it real tight around that horse's neck at the throat latch, because then he can't swell his neck to bite and suck wind. That will keep him from getting his mouth sore. Anytime you tie him or turn him out, you better have that strap good and tight around his neck.”

I sat down on a sack of salt at the back of the store. I was about half mad, but still it was funny about the man's belt and his story about the kids letting the horse get away; so I told the old storekeeper, and we had a good laugh. When I got up to leave and started to pay for my coke and cookies, the man said: “Young fellow, the treats are on me!”

As I rode along that day, I wondered what I was going to do with that stump sucker. I was on the road several
days, and I kept a tight leather strap around the horse's neck every time I tied him or staked him to graze. Two or three days later I rode into Hillsboro and went to a livery stable with my horses. Of course, I knew enough to take that strap off the horse's neck before I got close to town. There were several horse traders around the livery stable, and I noticed a Fort Worth buyer with a big diamond horseshoe stickpin and a big diamond ring. He was highly dressed, was entertaining the crowd, and was buying a good many horses and mules. He immediately bannered me to sell him a horse.

I had ridden the stump sucker part of the day, so he had dried sweat on him which showed he was a saddle horse—and he was shod. I told the man I might sell him the horse I was leading 'cause I couldn't ride both of them. He said: “Saddle him up and ride him for me.”

So I took my riggin' off Tom and saddled the other horse up. He had a good fox trot; he reined good and was a nice-looking horse. This fancy horse and mule buyer didn't want to get his hands too nasty mouthing a horse, so he just opened the horse's lip at the corner and saw that he was open in the corners—which meant that he was eight years old. Another nice thing about it was that a stump sucker doesn't damage his corner teeth as much as he does his front teeth.

After a short conversation with everybody listening, my dressed-up horse buyer offered me $110. Of course I had asked a lot more, but I remarked: “You ought to know more about what the horse market is than I do, so I'm going to sell him to you.” I unsaddled the horse, and he paid me and said: “Turn him in that lot back at the end of the hall of the barn.”

As I started to lead the horse off, he said: “Just a minute. Of course I'm going to resell this horse, and if he has any bad habits I'd like for you to tell me about them. I've already paid you for the horse, but I'd just like to know if there's anything wrong with him.”

I didn't answer the man. I just turned around, took a strap off my saddle, buckled it around the horse's neck good and tight, and turned him in the lot. Nearly everybody in the livery stable knew what that strap was for, and they just about died laughing. The horse buyer took it good humoredly that he had been cheated by a kid.

When I was
a young man about sixteen or seventeen years old, Mineral Wells, Texas, was considered by many—and especially by the people in Mineral Wells—to be quite a health resort. People went to the Crazy Hotel to drink Crazy Water and take Crazy Baths and listen to the Crazy Hotel radio broadcast advertising Crazy Mineral Crystals and the Crazy Hotel, and maybe do some crazy things.
It all may have helped their health some, but I think the principal good they got out of it was bolstering their ego, adding to their social prestige, and giving them something to talk about when they went back home: what they did when they were at the Crazy Hotel in Mineral Wells.

Of course, these people had to have a place to go horseback riding. There was a Mr. Cush Wise who had a
very elaborate and elite public livery stable. He rented horses to people who were at Mineral Wells on vacation, and also stabled horses for people who lived there. Occasionally some real horse person would come from afar to the wonders of Mineral Wells and bring his own private saddle horse with him. And of course there was only one place where any horse could be kept with distinction and pride in Mineral Wells—Cush Wise's livery stable, which was on the south end of the main street, down close to the trade square.

Mr. Wise had been some kind of higher-up in the cavalry of World War I, and it was hard for him to overcome it. He wouldn't hesitate to mention to you what they did in the cavalry. He still wore the pantaloon cavalry britches and hard-top boots with low heels. He stayed well dressed and well groomed and had a military air about him, and in all respects was probably a good horseman. However, he led you to believe—in fact, he was ready to confess—that he was a gentleman of the highest order and horsemanship and horses were not a business with him, but a love; a part of his life that he couldn't do without. That was the real reason for his being in the horse business, and not because of any money that might be connected with the running of a livery stable and the buying, selling, and trading of horses.

This kind of angle on things was sort of a new breed of animal with me. I thought horse people were in the horse business because they had to be or because they wanted to be, and since I was a small boy I've more or less considered the horse business not a business but a disease. The thing a horseman ought to do was to learn all he
could about the disease, so he could live with it without its totally ruining him, financially and otherwise.

Anyhow, I rode into Mineral Wells one day on a nice dun horse with black mane and tail that weighed about eleven hundred pounds and had a nice way of carrying himself—a six-year-old, stylish enough, about as nice as western horses came. It was in the dead of winter and the usual tourist crowd had gone home, and the livery stable business was rather dull. Mr. Wise was having trouble passing the time of day. However, he always had a horse or two crosstied in the center of the hallway, with somebody brushing and currying them while he stood by with his hands in his pantaloon-britches pockets, waiting to tell them how it ought to be done and how it was done in the East and how far western horsemanship was behind eastern horsemanship. None of this ever made him too popular with the cowboys, but I guess it did make a hit with the people who came to Mineral Wells to enlighten themselves and build up their ego and ride a-horseback from a fancy stable.

I rode into the barn and stepped down off my horse, and Mr. Wise walked up and stuck his hand out and shook hands with me, and his hands were soft as a woman's. He was shaved and smelled good, had a pretty little snapbrim hat on, and those hard-top, flat-heeled boots. He introduced himself and told me he was Cush Wise. Well, I'd met him before, but I didn't see any use in embarrassing the man and embarrassing myself by making a point out of the fact that he didn't remember me; after all, there wasn't too much about me to remember.
I hadn't been in the cavalry and I hadn't been East and I didn't know all those things Mr. Wise professed to know above and beyond what a cowboy knew about a horse.

Finally he got around to asking me what he could do for me, and I told him I was going to be in town overnight—it was the middle of the afternoon then—and asked him if he could put my horse up for me. He very graciously said he'd be glad to. As I slipped my rigging off my horse, he commented that I was riding a nice horse that was well balanced and had a good back, and I must be one of the better kind of Texas cowboys since I didn't have any cinch sores or kidney sores or saddle sores anywhere on the horse's back. He also commented that my horse's feet were properly shaped and properly shod, and that except for the fact that I, like all Texans, hadn't brushed or curried his mane and tail, he showed he had been well cared for and properly fed, and there was a possibility that if I had the opportunity he had had I might make a horseman.