Horse Tradin' (19 page)

By this time I had the Easter Lily saddled. The lady had riding clothes on, and she mounted the Easter Lily with the greatest of ease, sat beautifully in the saddle, held the reins in her left hand, and rode off on the Kentucky-bred
mare. You could tell that the pair of them belonged together. She was gone maybe thirty minutes and came back in a walk. The mare was just warm, and there was just a little bit of moist hair up and down her neck, but she hadn't broken into a sweat. I had her good and hard, and she wouldn't be subject to sweating and fretting and getting nervous, as she would have when she was soft and fat.

The lady was aware of that too, and she said: “You have her in excellent condition. She'd be a pleasure to ride, since she has so much more stamina than she used to have when I kept her in Mineral Wells last year.”

Everything she said was in the vein of fairness and complete understanding of the fact that I owned the mare. Finally, she approached the subject of purchasing her and asked me how much money I felt I was entitled to for having rehabilitated the Easter Lily. That was a new word to me, but I had an idea what it meant because of the way she used it.

So I said: “Well, if you think I've done a good enough job on her, I think I should have $750 for the mare.”

She stroked the mare on the neck and walked around her and smiled at me and said: “That wouldn't be too much for the Easter Lily, if you'll deliver her to Mineral Wells.”

I thought it best then to tell her how I'd managed to change the mare's mind. I explained the strategy I'd used, feeding the mare somewhere besides the barn, brushing and currying her on the outside, not giving her the idea that a barn was a lap of luxury for fine useless horses to spend a life of idleness in. She thought this was all very odd and unique, and she had never heard of such a thing
before. She didn't know that horses thought or realized what their surroundings were, and she appreciated my telling her and giving her these details. She assured me that the Easter Lily wouldn't have the opportunity to take up bad habits again. She gave me her check and thanked me very much and climbed in that long car and drove away.

When the elegant lady from Kentucky said: “That wouldn't be too much,” she meant what she said. I have sold her and her friends and family horses through the years. And now, more than thirty-five years after the episode of the Easter Lily, I have an order for a pony from the elegant lady's granddaughter.

One early fall
in the thirties there was a good demand for mule colts, yearlings, and two-year-olds. Most of the fellows that wanted to buy these mules intended to feed them through the winter, and in those days we had a class of mules that was spoken of as “feeder” mules. Farmers would buy these mules, run them on oat fields through the winter, feed them a little grain, and sell them as two-and three-year-olds, depending on the age of the mules, in the coming spring or following fall.

I was in Fort Worth one night, sitting in a café at the Cattleman's Hotel on Exchange Avenue, and got into a conversation with some fellows sitting close to me about young mules being so high compared to some other classes of horse stock.

There was a half-Indian looking character sitting on a stool next to me, that followed me out of the café onto the sidewalk to give me a “real good” piece of information. He said he knew where there was sixty good young mares, and every one of them had a great big mule colt following her, and he knowed I could “shore buy 'em cheap 'cause the fellow was in a tight over some gamblin' debts and needed the money.”

After a considerable visit with this character, he sold me on the idea that I ought to go see these mares with mule colts. They were located away out West, on the Pecos. My hook-nosed, high-cheeked, newly made friend said he was busy and couldn't go with me but that he knowed they was there 'cause he was “rite fresh from the Pecos.”

The next morning I saddled up a brand new four-cylinder Chevrolet and headed for the Pecos, because it sounded like I could “steal” these mares and their mule colts. I bedded down somewhere on the way for part of the night, but I was driving hard because I was afraid someone else would find them first. I drove into Pecos, stopped at the Bell Garage, and inquired about the man that supposedly owned the mares with mule colts. They told me he lived about forty-five miles northwest of town, on the Carlsbad Road.

I didn't have too much trouble finding the place, and the man was home. I drove up, got out of the car, shook myself, and asked for a drink of water. I will tell you now that water wasn't very good—it was a little salty, a little gippy, and a little sulphury—but if you was dry enough and tough enough you could drink it. I swallowed it
without making a face; I knew better than to make fun of a man's country.

We passed the time of day, talked about the weather, and he asked me where I was from. I told him I was a horse and mule buyer from Fort Worth. To this remark the old man brightened up a little and said: “What kind of horses and mules you buy?”

By then I was a pretty smart young trader and replied: “You generally buy the kind of horses and mules the people have got for sale. They don't sell you their good ones.”

He smiled and said: “That's pretty good thinking, but I'll tell you a little different case from that. I'll sell you all I've got ‘ceptin' two saddle horses.”

Then he described his mares and mule colts to me and told how good they were and how young the mares were. He told me frankly that they were all unbroke, which was common in that day. Most everybody could break a mare or mule to ride or work, and that didn't depreciate the price as it does today in this world of softies.

He had a cowboy and a half-grown Mexican boy saddle up the two saddle horses that he didn't want to sell, and go out into a big greasewood pasture and round up these mares and mule colts and throw them up in a corner of the fence. He explained to me that he didn't have a corral that would hold them and that unless I was sure I wanted to buy the bunch of mares and colts there wouldn't be any use driving them to the stock pen, which would be about forty-five miles. We drove out into this big pasture, to a windmill that was down near the only draw running through the pasture. This draw was covered with mesquite trees about as tall as a horse's back and
was the only break in the scenery from a greasewood desert.

In about two hours we saw a trail of dust boiling up across the pasture, and here came the mares and their mule colts—sixty head of mares with sixty head of mule colts. The mares were all fat, and he hastened to explain that there had been a good mesquite bean crop and that all the horses in the country were fat, and that the colts were old enough so the mares had about weaned them. These mares were of fair size and good dark colors. The mule colts were almost as big as the mares, with shaggy manes and foretops falling down over their eyes, and, of course, long mule tails that had never been sheared. They were a very uniform bunch of young mules. I could just see how good they would look cut off the mares, with their manes roached and tails sheared.

The mares were snorty and so were the colts, and they kept trying to break out of the corner of the fence. As I tried to walk up closer to them, they made a break for that mesquite thicket and I got a glimpse of them as they ran into the brush.

The owner said that he needed the money for some urgent business, and if I would take them all, he would sell them for $65 a pair, meaning $65 for a mare and a mule colt. Well, I knew that the colts were worth from $60 to $80 and that the mares would be clear profit. We discussed how to get them shipped, and I made a fast trade with him before he backed out. Realizing that it would take two or three days to round them up again and get them out in the public road to drive them to the stock pens, he assured me that he would ship them for me and I could go on back to Fort Worth. Being a trusting young
horse trader, that sounded good to me. I paid him and headed my four-cylinder Chevrolet back East.

I had made the trip so fast that I had hardly been missed around the mule barns, but I had made such a good trade that I couldn't help but tell some of my close friends about my mule colts that would be in town in a few days.

One morning I went down to the horse and mule barn, and my mares and mule colts had been unloaded. My friend in the West had separated them and shipped them, and in those good, high, close pens, I got a real good look at my mares. They were just about as they had appeared in the corner of the fence, weighing from nine hundred to a thousand pounds, and of decent quality. However, I couldn't help but notice that none of the mares were suffering from the colts not having sucked, and I didn't hear from the next pen any colts braying for their mammies.

As I looked over the fence at my mules I had to face the sad realization that these mule colts had been colts about three to six years before this, far south of the Rio Grande River, and were the smallest sort of little fat Mexican mules. The rancher west of the Pecos River had done a real good job of keeping them mixed up with those mares, and had let them break loose and get away into that mesquite thicket just before I could get close enough to them to realize their true age and identity.

These cute little Mexican mules were next to worthless on the market, and the mares sold for a little more than half of what they all cost. I learned in later years that the “friend” in Fort Worth who gave me that “real good piece of information” also had an interest in the mares and mules!

That same winter
I was staying in town more than common, and the main reason for it was that I had my hook hung on that bunch of cute little fat Mexican mules.

These nice little, fat, young, hard-twisted, ill-tempered, unbroke Mexican mules were getting in bed with me, so to speak, because they were worth about $17 a head; I had been feeding them about two months, and I had a little more money than that in them to start with, not counting the feed bill. I had tried all the tricks that I
knew to get these little mules sold, and I had gone to my old mule-trading friends, and none of them knew where you could ship these little five-hundred-pound mules and get them sold for anything or something, much less a profit. I had given up on the idea of a profit, but I thought my banker would have greater esteem for me as a horse trader if I could get the money back out of them, and I was trying awfully hard.

I had taken so much hurrahing about my little mules, and about them being sold to me for colts, that it was almost unpleasant to live over on the north side of Fort Worth around the mule barns and stockyards. It had ceased to be too funny since those little mules ate grain twice a day and hay all night, and were working hard to run up the overhead. I was staying over at the Texas Hotel in big town Fort Worth, where there were fewer mule men, and I was enjoying a reasonable amount of relief from being hurrahed. However, I was more or less ill at ease and out of place in that great big hotel.

I was sitting in the lobby, bogged down in one of those big plush chairs with my big hat pulled way down over my face to where I was just peeping out from under the brim, and had my boot crossed over my knee so everybody could for sure tell I was from way out West. I was sitting there watching the people, when here came an unmistakable old Southern gentleman. He was wearing an old Kentucky black hat, raw-edged with a wide band on it and pushed back off of his face, which was proof to me that he hadn't faced much sunshine and was living in the shade or he would have had that hat pulled down over his eyes. He was wearing a double-breasted blue serge suit that had been his Sunday suit for a good fifteen years, and
he had on a soft-toed pair of black shoes. He walked up in the lobby and stood looking into the dining room; then he'd look back across the lobby and I could tell for sure that he was off of his home range and wasn't too sure about where to feed and water. Having a fair idea how he felt, I got up and stretched and moseyed up close to him to get acquainted, because I knew I looked country enough that he would ask me whatever it was that he was trying to find out. He turned around and looked at me a few minutes, and I turned just enough to catch him out of the corner of my eye and said: “Howdy.”