Some More Horse Tradin'

by Ben K. Green

I started out by sayin’ that I didn’t have no sorry horses and I’d just about soon trade him one as another, but since he had brought it up, the mare that was standin’ there hitched to the chain around the courthouse was eight years old and was a standard-bred harness mare, and I’d guarantee her not to run away.

  We walked out and looked at the mare; she was gentle to ride and was about the same color as his horse. He tried to conceal his anxiousness to trade for this mare by tellin’ me that a mare wasn’t worth as much as a horse and that he felt he wouldn’t be able to trade even since there was a little difference in our horses’ ages. I was quick to explain to him that two years difference in age might be one of the ways to account for the difference in her gentle disposition and his runaway horse. I let down pretty hard on that “runaway” when I said it, and you could see him flinch a little; but I knew his horse was worth about three times as much as my mare and I was hopin’ he didn’t know it too.

  We talked on about as long as I wanted to be seen in his company on the public square. People might go to thinkin’ that I was tryin’ to be a friend of his and that wasn’t too pleasant a thought so far as I was concerned. So I told him I wouldn’t be interested in givin’ any boot just to get a runaway horse, and started back toward the drugstore. He didn’t move; he was standin’ there lookin’ at my mare, but I didn’t glance back at him. I made him turn and call me by name to get me to stop. I knew then he was aweakenin’ fast. It didn’t take much more conversation till we had a horse trade.

  His little pasture ran up to the back of the furniture store, and he said, “Just wait here with the mare and I’ll go get the horse and lead him out there in front.”

  He thought he was real smart, but I was already wise to what was about to happen. When he brought his horse up, I unsaddled my mare and saddled this good bay horse that I had had a hankerin’ for ever since the first time I saw him. He had good clean straight legs, a short back, a long slopin’ shoulder, and a beautiful head and neck. His breeding was something different from the average stock of horses in the country, but I really didn’t know at the time what his ancestry might be.

  I slipped the bridle off the mare and he put his lead rope around her neck and then I put my bridle on the horse and fastened the throat latch a little tight. This handsome horse wasn’t bein’ mean, but he was showin’ a lot of interest in things. I led him around in a little circle a few minutes. I reached up and took ahold of the cheek of the bridle with one hand, twisted my stirrup, and reached for the saddle horn and stepped on him and turned his head aloose.

  He stood there for a few minutes and I could feel him swellin’ up under me and he’d begun to let his ears back. I knew that he was fixin’ to come undone! This didn’t bother me much because when he started the ruckus I was goin’ to help him. I was wearin’ spoke rowel spurs and carryin’ a loaded quirt. I glanced around the little country town; business had stopped and everybody was out on the courthouse square or standin’ in the doorways awaitin’ for a bronc ride. Mr. Undertaker had a pretty good crowd listenin’ and said in his loudest tone of voice, “Ben, you forgot to ask me if he was broke to ride!”

  People began to laugh and holler up and down the street and were waitin’ for the show. I thought I could ride this ole pony, but it seemed he had more reputation than I had heard about or all the natives wouldn’t be showin’ so much interest.

  I pulled my hat down real tight and I felt my heels quiverin’ a little in my stirrups, and I decided I’d better hit him before I got scared. I squalled at him and cut him across the rump with that quirt; he jumped high enough the first jump for me to scare the courthouse pigeons! When he hit the ground, he bawled like a bull buffalo that had just been caught on the cow catcher of an early-day train engine.

  For the next few minutes I was awful busy … his head made three in front and his tail made three behind … the place on his back where I cinched my saddle wasn’t no bigger’n a prairie dog mound on a mountain. He bucked all the stuff out of my britches pockets—my pocketknife and change … and if my shirt hadn’t been buttoned good, it would’ve come off me while we was sailin’ on one of them long jumps through the air. I’d lost my hat, tore my fingernails off on the saddle horn, and was damn near throwed when he lost his breath and throwed his head up and stopped!

  This country courthouse square was graveled and the thought of being throwed on that hard ground had sure encouraged me to stay on, but if he’d made just one more jump, he would’ve had the battle won. The crowd was ahollerin’ and agoin’ wild, and you could still hear Mr. Undertaker when he could get his breath from laughin’, being sure to tell all the natives that I hadn’t asked if the horse was broken to ride.

  Lester Lewis came out to the horse and eased up real careful and picked up the bridle reins and handed ’em back to me … you see, I lost them in the early part of the war. Lester was an old-time friend who was kind of a wore-out horse trader and mule dealer, and hadn’t been in on this “What was goin’ on” until he heard the commotion and had walked up the street from the livery stable.

  He had gathered up my belongin’s and my hat, and as he handed my stuff to me, he said in a low tone, “Ben, this horse has throwed a lot of good riders; don’t you get off of him this side of bedtime.”

  I said, “Much obliged,” and this time I wrapped the reins around my hand good and tight and pulled that old horse’s head up way high where he couldn’t buck and started out at the corner of the square headed to the northwest. Lipan was a good twenty miles away.

  Of course, this horse was bridle-wise because he had been worked in harness. About five miles out of town he’d begun to walk pretty near like a common horse and my arms were gettin’ tired so I let him have a little slack. When I passed through Thorp Springs I’d eased him up into a pretty good trot.

  This episode started a little after dinner and I rode into Lipan about two hours after dark.

  I had an old friend by the name of Ross that lived on the edge of town so I rode up to the edge of the yard and hollered, “Hello,” which was the custom of the country when you rode into a man’s house at night. Ross stuck his head out the door and hollered, “Git down!”

  I said, “Hell, I don’t think I can.”

  He saw who it was and started walkin’ out toward my horse. He said, “Ben, that’s the Cleveland bay horse that ole man Buck Hill traded that undertaker in on a bill because none of his cowboys could ride him. How come you with ’im?”

  I said, “It’s a long, painful story.”

  “Well, git down and spend the night and you can tell me all about it.”

  I told him I was pretty stiff and if this ole horse jumped as I started off, I might hang in the stirrups, and for him to reach up and git a hold of his bridle and twist one ear, and I’d try to git off. Ross was a good fellow, and we fed my horse and put him away and there was a whole lot less buck in him than there was when we started.

  It was already late when I got there, but Ross’s wife got up and fixed me a big supper and showed me where to go to bed. Ross and I visited a little while before we turned in.

  When I took my britches off, the hide was gone on both legs from the top of my boots plumb up past my knee joints, but I thought a night’s rest might cure a lot of that and it didn’t take me long to get to sleep. It didn’t seem like I’d been asleep for any time when I heard some pots and pans and noises around in the kitchen like country folk make that get up and cook and eat ’fore daylight.

  I eased up on the side of the bed, got my boots and britches on and finished dressing, and found that I could stand up. By this time I’d decided I was goin’ to live after all that buckin’, and the smell of ham and hot biscuits comin’ from the kitchen began to give me a new interest in life.

  After breakfast, Ross helped me saddle the horse that I forgot to ask if he was broke. He looked worse’n I did. Sweat was dried all over him, the hard ride had caused the hair to slip under the cinch on him, and you could tell that when we sta
rted out he was a soft, overkept horse. That’s where I had it on him. I was hard as iron and used to ridin’.

  He didn’t act like he was goin’ to let me get on, so Ross put an extra rope around his neck and ran the rope through his mouth and back around under his chin and twisted it a couple of times. This gave him a more reasonable outlook on the possibilities of me ridin’ him again, and I took my time about gettin’ on him. I finally got set down on them sore places and clenched my raw knees against the saddle and told Ross to turn ’im loose. I had his head pulled up and he didn’t offer to buck.

  I cut across the country to Weatherford that day and the next day I rode back to Granbury. I don’t know whether the folks in Granbury thought they would ever see me again or not, but by the time I rode in on the square, I had this used-to-be-badhorse drawed to about the shape of a greyhound. (In three days we’d been about a hundred miles.) He was unshod and his feet had broken off in a few places to the quick and he was feelin’ his way across the gravel where I was goin’ to tie him to that courthouse chain. It had been a hard three days, but to have this good horse under me broke was worth all the pain and trouble.

  I stepped down on the ground and as I started across to the drugstore, I tried to act like I was as fresh as a cowboy goin’ to a square dance. I glanced over my shoulder and here was comin’ Mr. Undertaker doin’ the single-foot, and four or five more people had started toward the drugstore. I hadn’t got to the soda fountain when Mr. Undertaker called my name in a very harsh tone. When I glanced around, several of my friends were standin’ around lookin’ and listenin’ and deathly silent.

  Mr. Undertaker’s neck swelled and his face turned red, his voice was tuned high and sounded full of mad when he started in. “That mare has stood in one place and kicked all the spokes out of my hack, broke the shafts out of it, and tore up the harness. And you guaranteed her to work. What are you going to do about having my hack repaired and bringing me a horse to work?”

  I smiled and reached over to the fountain for a drink of water the soda skeet had set out and very slowly turned around and said, “Mr. Undertaker, I guaranteed the mare not to run away!”

  FAST

  MULE BUYER

  It was midwinter and the horse and mule market was at its most active best. I had been shippin’ several carloads of mules a week to my customers over in the Mississippi Delta and in the southern states and had taken the time with this last shipment to get in my car and beat the train to its points of destination and help my customers unload their mules and do a little socializin’ and public relations in order to keep more orders comin’.

  I got orders from customers in Georgia for three carloads of good-aged, good-fleshed, small cotton mules to weigh from eight to nine hundred pounds each, which was the kind of mule that it took for the sandy land of Georgia.

  Then on my way back, I stopped in the Louisiana sugarcane country and got an order from an old customer for a load of sugar mules. A sugar mule was one of the better class of nice well-turned-out mules that would weigh about eleven hundred pounds and show a good deal of style and quality.

  On up in Arkansas some sawmill operators gave me an order for a carload of big, young, sound mules that were to be used in the lumber camps around the sawmill. Any mule buyer with orders for five carloads of mules is very much in business, so I was anxious to get back to Fort Worth for the Monday opening market.

  I stopped in Cumby on Thursday night and stayed with my folks. I hadn’t been to bed very much in several months and my eyes were givin’ me some trouble, mostly from night driving I guess, so Friday I went in to Greenville and my old friend Dr. Strickland tested my eyes. He told me he would send off the prescription and if I would wait until Monday morning, I could pick up my new glasses. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do in Fort Worth over the weekend, so I thought I would visit with my folks, get some rest, and wait for my glasses.

  I was up in Strick’s office Monday morning when he brought in his mail and, sure enough, he had my glasses. He put ’em on me and I made some right smart horse-tradin’ remarks about them windshields and he said, “They’ll feel so good that you’ll get to like ’em.”

  I paid him and broke off for Fort Worth. I sat up straight and spurred hard and got there just after the market opened and the auction was in full swing. I walked into the auction and shook hands and said my howdies with a few friends, but was careful not to wave my hand or nod my head in view of the auctioneer.

  I watched thirty or forty mules sell. Wad Ross was sittin’ in the auction box as he usually did. Jim Sheldon and old Bill Rogers were the auctioneers and they were taking time about selling the mules. It seemed to me that the morning’s stock was pretty good in quality, flesh, and age, with not too many blemishes, and the market was about $15 to $20 a head cheaper than it had been two weeks before, so I set in to buyin’ mules.

  I bought about a half a carload of the Georgia cotton mules almost without competition and I noticed Wad gettin’ real careful about callin’ blemishes and ages and havin’ them written on the ticket. Parker Jamison was working as ring man and he was sure givin’ me a lot of attention. Of course, the auction never stopped for dinner and about three o’clock I had nearly a carload of Georgia cotton mules, half a carload of sugar mules, and a full carload of lumber mules and was by far the fastest and biggest buyer of the day so far.

  I was a smart young mule buyer, but I had been at it long enough to know that there would be mules left after my money ran out since they had announced during the sale that the day’s run would be about fifteen hundred head. So I decided I would stop long enough to eat a sandwich and drink a Coke at the stand there by the auction and then go down the alley and look at my mules I’d bought.

  They had already assigned me three different pens for the different classes of mules that I was buyin’, and as the auctioneer dropped the hammer on each mule, a messenger boy would bring me a copy of the ticket. It was the custom of the trade that sometime during the day, you would go down the alley to where your mules were penned and inspect each mule against the description on its ticket. If a mule’s age had been misrepresented or if there were scars or blemishes that had not been called and written on the ticket, the bidder had the privilege of rejecting that mule. Rejects were then sold after all the fresh stock were sold and naturally brought less money than they had in the first go-around.

  Denny was helping me with my mules, and as he turned the pen of Georgia cotton mules out on the plank-floored alley for us to catch and look at, I realized that it was a good deal darker in the barn alley than it had been in the auction ring. Since I wasn’t used to glasses, I was catchin’ some shadows and reflections, so I reached up and pulled off my glasses. I leaned up against the fence and watched these mules for a few minutes; they suddenly lost half a hand in height and about a hundred and fifty pounds in weight from what they had appeared to be in the auction ring. I knew my judgment hadn’t slipped that much and it began to dawn on me that I had raised the market from $15 to $25 a head on the classes that I was buyin’ and that was why Wad was watchin’ the tickets so closely. As a nervous gesture, I put my glasses back on and them damn mules suddenly gained their height and weight that they had lost when I took my glasses off!

  My lumber mules would do for sugarcane mules, my sugarcane mules were about the right size for my Georgia cotton mules, and my Georgia cotton mules were about the right size for a clown or mine mules, but I didn’t have any orders for either one. And my new glasses that Strick had been so reasonable on had suddenly cost me about a $1,000.

  THE

  SHIELD

  MARES

  Old man Charlie Krinskey came through the barn at the San Antonio Horse and Mule Market just before the auction sale was to start and said, “Yeah, Ben, I see that you’re lookin’ at those fine old horses. The Shield horses, you know, have been famous for many years in this country.”

  The two horses that I was looking at were branded with a shield on the left hin
d leg about the level of the point of the flank, and I remembered that I had seen horses with this brand before. I saw that the legs of these horses showed signs of much abuse, but when you looked at their withers and their backs and their beautiful loins and their good hindquarters, when you noticed the set of their ears and the width between their eyes, you couldn’t help but wish that you’d had a horse like this when he was a four-year-old.

  Now a man that spends his life horseback—and starts at a tender age—develops a keen eye for a good horse. He is ever in search of one that is better than the horse he has under him, or even better than the ones he is trying to breed at home. When the clothes he wears and the very meat and bread that go into his mouth are earned with, by, or from a horse, a man gets pretty sharp about horses. And I’ve been in tight spots with wild cattle and bad horses, spots where what my horse could do within the next few seconds would determine how well I would enjoy the next gasp of breath. So with such a background, I asked, “Mr. Krinskey, where do these horses come from, and why don’t we see more of them?”

  Down on the Rio Grande, he told me, there was a family that had bred these horses for many generations. They branded a shield on the shoulder of the mares and a shield on the hindquarter of the horses, and he had never seen a sorry one. But he had heard that the breed was running out, the old horse-members of the family had passed on and it would just be a matter of time until the Southwest would lose another strain of fine horses.

  There was a severe drouth in the Southwest, it had been hanging on for several years. Cattle and horses had been sold off in great droves, and there wasn’t too much livestock left in the country. There had been no demand for broodmares. All men that were working livestock rode geldings. All the remudas at chuck wagons were geldings, and mares were seldom used for anything but to raise colts. Charlie and I talked about that, too.