Horse Tradin' (24 page)

He hooked his heavy mules, that had been his wheelers, up in front of the mares. We visited and gave each other our addresses and shook hands. I told him if I was ever back I would come visit him.
And
he said if he ever
got down in my country, he'd look me up. We'd made a good trade and had a good visit and parted friends.

I had begun to think that maybe I wasn't too unsmart when I bought that bunch of horses. I had an interest in a café, $150 boot, and a pair of mules clear. It looked like I might not have such a hard winter after all.

I led my mules back to camp and tied them to the wagon wheel and sat around by the fire and stayed warm. The wind had died down in the night. It was still awful cold, but the sun was getting up higher and it had begun to warm up. I decided that I would rig up my horses and pull on out across the river and head for Anson, Texas. I didn't know much about this pair of little mules; they might try to run off or break loose or something. I had put a pair of black horses to the wagon—real good horses that I knew could pull it all right—and I just thought: “Well, that pair of mules might give me as little trouble up there as leaders as they would tied to the wagons.”

So I hooked them up for leaders and made me a four-up team, and in a few minutes I went across the bridge and hit the mudhole. I spoke to these horses a few times and held a tight line on the little lead mules. We got through the mudhole without much trouble, pulled out on the other side—it had been a pretty long pull—and I let them rest a few minutes to get their wind. Then we started on down the road.

For the next several days the winter was coming on. At night it was cold and in the daytime it didn't warm up too much. I went through a farming country where nobody wanted to buy any horses, it seemed, and you'd see those trade lots full of horses and mules around those tractor places. The trip was sorta uneventful for several days,
and then I pulled into Albany, Texas.

Down on the creek—out of town a piece after you came down the mountain from Fort Griffin, and before you got into town—there was a little glade that had always been a campground. I pulled out there and got my horses sort of fixed for the night. I watered them at the creek, gave them some feed, and got my camp laid out pretty good. It lacked a little while being dark, so I stepped on my saddle horse and rode on up to Albany.

Albany was then and is now and always will be a nice kind of West Texas cowtown. I ate supper in a café for a change, loafed around the drugstore and drank a coke, and visited a little bit. I let it be known that I was camped out there in the edge of town with a bunch of horses, and that I was going back home from being up in Kansas with a bunch of steers. I ran onto two or three fellows that I knew either by reputation or personally; then I went on back out to my camp about dark so I'd be there around my stock. After a while I went to bed. Nothing much happened.

Next morning I got up and thought: “Well, I'll harness my horses up here and get hooked up and pull on up in the edge of town somewhere—stop and eat breakfast instead of building a fire and cooking.”

I pulled up on the square where there was plenty of room and stopped my horses and my wagon and all, got out and went across the street to the old hotel about a block down. I was sitting there on a stool eating my breakfast when a great big rough fellow came in and said: “Wonder who that bunch of big horses belongs to up there on the square.”

I raised my head up and looked at him—you could tell
he was an oil-field man—and I told him they were mine.

He asked: “You want to contract some dirt work?”

I said: “No sir, I'm not a dirt work man. I'm started home with those teams.”

“Where's home?”

I said: “Over by Weatherford.”

“Well,” he said, “we need some slush pits dug out here around some oil wells, and the weather is bad and wet, and these boys haven't been able to do it with machinery.”

I told him that I understood his problem, but that I didn't have any fresnos to dig holes with—or turning plows or nothing—and I wasn't rigged up to do dirt work. And anyway it was getting winter and I was trying to get home. I'd rather just take my horses and go.

He asked: “What business you got with so many big horses like that if you ain't doing dirt work? Are they good for anything else?”

That was sort of a compliment coming from a construction worker out of the oil fields, and I said: “I reckon those horses can do just about anything. It ain't the horses you are having trouble with, it's me. I don't want to do any dirt work.”

He said: “I know where there are some fresnos, turnin' plows, and everything you'd need to do some dirt work—and you could do it in a week or ten days.”

I said: “Yeah, that's about the length of time it would take me to get home.”

I knew that if he was hurting, he would buy a team of these horses—or two teams—or he would get somebody to buy them and contract his dirt work. I knew that I wasn't a dirt work man and wouldn't know how to figure
it and would get cheated anyhow. By this time I had finished my breakfast; so I paid the cashier and went out on the sidewalk and started toward my wagon.

He had gone out ahead of me, and when I looked up he was closer to the wagon than I was and just stepping right up and walking around my horses when I got there. I had the black horses hooked to the wagon, and they were the most stylish pair I had. They were good six- and seven-year-old horses, both geldings, and good true pulling horses with nice dispositions and good legs—the kind of horses that could go out and do a hard day's work at a fresno or any other kind of work.

I said: “I might sell you that pair.”

He said he didn't have any business with one pair of horses. If he had to do any fresno work, he had to have from three to five.

I said: “Well, I might sell you more than two, but the more of them you take, the higher they are going to come because I don't want to get rid of these horses too bad.”

He said: “What'll you take for five head and me pick 'em?”

I could tell by looking at him that he had been a mule-skinner in the oil fields. An old teamster would know what kind of horses he was going to pick. I knew that when he got through he'd get five as good horses as I had. Of course these were all good horses, and there wasn't a whole lot of difference in the ones I had left since I'd sold the gray pair—they were the oldest—and I'd sold that other pair that went into the chile business. So he couldn't hurt me much, whatever he picked out. I told him I would take $200 a round, and he could get five head.

He said that he wouldn't give it; that he would give
$100 a round. So I said: “Well, I've just found out you don't have much dirt work to do, and there ain't no use in me and you taking up each other's time. I just as well get on up the road.”

He said: “I'll give $125 a head for five of 'em.”

“Well,” I told him, “you're still talking like a cheapskate. I guess I gotta go. Good-bye.” And I clucked to my team and drove off.

Going east out of Albany you go up and cross the railroad track and pass the schoolhouse. I was topping out on the hill at the edge of town when he overtook me, driving some kind of a red automobile.

He stopped me and said: “I'm going to make one more pass at you. I'm going to give $150 a head for some of these horses if you've got harness to fit them.”

He had decided that he could make do with four head instead of five; so after he walked around and walked through them and looked at their mouths and picked up their feet, and showed off and made you understand that he was sure enough a horse man—he picked out four good horses. He took the two black horses, and he took a pair of dark-gray young mares. Said he'd rather not have any mares, but he couldn't do much about it. The two blacks were the only geldings I had left. He gave me a check for $600 for four head of horses and the harness that fit them. His check was on the Albany bank, and I just thought that would be a good place to get the money—where the check was written—so I just pulled my wagon out by the side of the road, fastened my horses up along the fence, and got on a saddle horse and rode back to town. It was early and I had to wait a little while, but the bank opened soon, and sure enough the man's check
was all right. I put the money in my pocket.

I went back up on the hill and had to figure out another team and another set of harness to hook up so I could get on the road. I was getting along pretty good. I had gotten rid of eight of my horses out of sixteen and had taken in two mules. I had my five saddle horses and that made fifteen head. I still didn't know just how that café deal was coming out, but I had half-interest in a café, two mules, $750 of my $1,200 back, and still had half of my big horses. I began to think that business wasn't too bad after all.

I got to Breckenridge in a couple of days. There was a trade lot on down close to town in the flat. I stayed there a couple of days and rested—visited around, ate some town grub, and went to the picture show. I didn't do anything smart and didn't have any horse business. I heard some more about tractors and how much big horses ate. It had got to where it didn't worry me much, I'd heard so much of it—and then, too, I was getting a lot of my money back. I just let those smart people advise me, but I didn't pay it much mind.

The day I left Breckenridge—it was up in the middle of the afternoon—there was a farmer that had plowed out to the end of a row and had seen me coming down the road. He stopped his team, did up his lines, and walked over to the fence and waited for me to get there. He had been breaking some sandy land that he raised peanuts on. He bragged on how big and how pretty my horses were and told me how they used to have such horses there in the days of the oil boom—which was before my time. He noticed the little bay mules, and he liked them real well and asked me if they were for sale. We had
quite a visit while he walked around them, and he had a long hard time making up his mind about them.

He thought they would be awful nice. I offered to take $100 a piece for them. He said he guessed they were worth it, but he was a little short of cash. He didn't think he could give that, but he could give $150 for both of them if I wanted to sell them. I didn't think that was all the money he had, and I didn't show much interest. I told him I guessed I'd better take them on with me—that I believed they would be a little higher down the country and somebody would have more need for them than he did. He crawled back over the fence and said he guessed he'd better get back to plowing. I had started to drive off when he turned around and said he would give me $165 and that was all.

I told him: “I guess that will be all. That's enough. I'll just sell them to you.”

I pulled on down the road a little piece where the gate turned into his place. He walked on down, opened the gate, came out and got the mules, and said: “I guess you're throwing the halters in.”

He was being just a little stingy with me, so I said: “Well, no. At the price these mules are going, I guess I'll want my halters back.”

He led them through the gate, took the halters off them, and threw the halters back to me. He went to the house and told his wife to write me a check for $165. I sat outside the house and listened, and it sounded like a young war. She told him about how many different things they needed worse than they needed a pair of mules. He would beg her and plead with her and say: “Now honey, you know we've got to have an extra team.”

I listened to this domestic warfare about twenty minutes, but he finally came out of the house with a check for the mules. That cut my herd down a little more and added a little more to my pocket money. Now I had $915, still had eight head of big horses, and it looked to me like I was as good a trader as I thought I was before I heard about those tractors.

It was still fall weather but a little chilly, and it was threatening. A bank was in the north, and I was still four or five days from home. I thought I really ought to drive a little harder and get on in before bad weather set in; but still, I didn't need eight head of big stout horses to feed all winter. I was just wondering if maybe I ought to stop in Palo Pinto or Mineral Wells and spend several days and try to get rid of the rest of my work stock. I camped that night on a creek about eight or ten miles from Palo Pinto. It was a pretty cold kind of night and the wind blew hard. I had plenty of feed, and I was camped down in the creek bottom away from the wind, and had all my horses put away pretty good. But that wagon was a little lonesome. A few horses moved around in the middle of the night, and I began to decide I didn't want to stay on that road during the winter. I sort of made up my mind that the next morning I'd just start on in home and take my chances on trading on my horses through the winter.

A little before noon the next day I pulled up on the courthouse square in Palo Pinto. It was a nice, quiet, peaceful-looking place. There weren't many cars parked around and there weren't many people on the street. It was a bright, sunshiny day, and the wind had died down. This was kind of a pretty looking place, nestled down in a cove of the mountains. I saw that my horses would be
all right—they were content to stand there tied to the wagon. The team was standing good; so I did up my lines and looked around for a place to eat some dinner.

I noticed a big store on the side of the square. I walked over to it and up and down the side of it. I didn't see any signs sticking out up or down the street about an eating place; so I thought: “Well, maybe I'll go in the store here and get me some cheese and crackers, or sardines or something”—the kind of stuff you could buy in a store those days to eat on.

As I stepped inside I noticed back over in the corner of the building toward the back that there was a meat market, and you could smell some meat cooking. I walked on back—there weren't any customers in the store—and the man that ran the outfit was behind the counter in the meat market. There were three or four stools at a side counter; he had a barbecue pit in there, and he was cooking up a batch of barbecue. It smelled good, and I could tell that I had found a pretty good place to feed that day.