Some More Horse Tradin'

by Ben K. Green

  I was cleaning off horses Sunday morning when up drove Mr. Brent. He got out of this long black Pierce-Arrow and said, “I see you have changed your sign.”

  I said, “Yeah, and it’s making a lot of difference in my business. I’m not sellin’ any horses, but I’m havin’ lots of lookers.”

  “That Texas Cow Horses’ will make any of these boys up here come to look. They don’t know but what a Texas cow horse is a Spanish pony, and I am sure they have been surprised to learn that you have some nice horses with breeding and size.”

  I said, “Oh, we’ve had lots of compliments on our horses and lots of visitors and lots of tryin’—but I’ve sold one horse.”

  “I think it will get better. These New Englanders are pretty clannish. You would not have had more lookers if the first one had not found something.”

  I said, “Shore ’nuff?”

  “Yes. You are in a strange land—to you. But these people will probably all buy horses before they wear you out looking at them.”

  I said, “I sure hope so.” Then I told him about the girls at the camp coming down and looking and that we had been going up there—and that some of our horses were up at the camp now where the girls were going to try to teach them to be hunters or jumpers.

  That brightened him up considerably; and when he realized that I might have some business, he looked at this good bay horse that he had ridden the Sunday before and said, “I think I’ll ride this horse again today.”

  I said, “Fine,” and we got his rigging out of the car and saddled up the horse for him. He rode a little while and came back and got down and went to cleaning the horse off himself. He took the saddle off and went to rubbing this horse down and sponging off his legs. (We had got a sponge. We had begun to catch on to this grooming business.) I told him Frank would do that.

  “No,” he said. “I always groom my own horse.”

  “Well, that’s fine, but I didn’t know this was your own horse.”

  “Yes,” he said, “he will be. However, we may have to discuss money. Your figure may be too high.”

  “No, I don’t think so. He’s the best horse we’ve got and I’m gonna sell him dirt cheap. I just want $500 for him.”

  He threw his sponge over in a bucket of water and went to kinda shaking his hands out in the air. Then he reached in his pocket and got a spotless white handkerchief out and wiped his hands off. He said, “I detest sponging another man’s horse on Sunday.”

  “You sure did swap that horse off quick, didn’t you, since I told you $500? It’s just like I said, Canada’s farther away from Texas than this Yankee country is, and I guess they get tougher the farther north you go.”

  He didn’t dare laugh—he hadn’t near decided not to buy this horse. He just smiled a little and said he felt like he could afford $350 for the horse.

  I told him I was sure glad he was in good circumstances, but that I couldn’t take $350. He was going to have to afford $400.

  He stomped around awhile. Finally he said, “If you weren’t a friend of Will Rogers, I wouldn’t pay it.”

  I said, “If that was my excuse, you ought to pay me $1,000 and I could send Will part of it.”

  He just laughed and wrote me out a check for $400 and said that he would send his man up with a truck sometime during the week and pick up the horse. I sure thanked him—and by that time there were a few more people around the barn looking at horses. They all had on those fancy Sunday riding clothes, those pantaloon britches, and hard-topped, flat-heeled boots. Some of them had been there before, and they were making themselves quite at home.

  One horse there had been tried by the same man five times. We had ridden this horse the day before, and the girls had jumped him the day before that. So when this man said he was going to try the horse again, I said, “No, I don’t believe you are unless you are gonna buy him. You’ve tried that horse enough, and he has been ridden pretty hard this week. I’d prefer that you didn’t try him unless you are gonna pay for him.”

  Well, this kinda ruffled him a little bit. He kinda growled and said this was a very impolite way to treat a guest. I said that I didn’t know horse traders were ever guests, but in my country you don’t ever try a horse that many times, so I just believed we would turn the horse back in the barn.

  This made him mad, but he had a friend with him, so he said, “Do you still want $400?”

  I said, “Yes sir.”

  “I wouldn’t give you but $300.”

  I said, “That would be enough. Just give it.” He didn’t know it, but I only had $50 and expenses in that horse that lacked a whole lot being my best horse. I was afraid if this man kept on tryin’ him, he might find out that the horse wasn’t so good; so we sold him right quick.

  Mr. Brent was listening to all this. “Ben,” he said, “you are being too abrupt with these people. Talk like that might be all right in Texas, but it won’t go over here.”

  I said, “To hell it won’t. Here’s the man’s check.”

  Mr. Brent laughed and got in his car and said he would see me again.

  The next week passed off fast. We were having the time of our lives up at the girls’ camp teachin’ riding lessons or ataking riding lessons or rompin’ and stompin’ and playin’ in the meadows of the green mountain country of Vermont. One night we fixed them a big Texas barbeque down at our barn. Even the old woman cook came. They just had more fun, and everybody laughed and hollered and squealed and took on.

  Then on Sunday the parents of all these young gals came out to watch their horse show—the likes of which I had never seen before. They introduced Frank and me as Texas cowboys, and we showed the people how a reining horse reined. We roped and cut and ran back and forth—of course they didn’t have any cattle there to demonstrate on, but we roped a few fenceposts. Then I ran by Frank and he roped my horse, and he ran by me ahorseback and I roped his. They thought that was marvelous, I guess. They just never heard of such a thing.

  While I was playing with my rope dropped loose, one of my horses got out of the barn and ran into the arena. As he ran past me, I just caught him by the forefeet with my loop. The whole crowd just ohed and ahed. Of course that old pony had been caught by the forefeet lots of times, and he froze in his tracks. He never made another move until I walked up to him, slipped the other end of the rope around his neck, and took the loop off his feet. You never heard anything like that cheering when I led him out of the arena. You would have thought these people were at the biggest rodeo ever held at Pecos, Texas.

  Before the parents went home that day, they just about bought the rest of our horses. We had more business than you could think about. These people weren’t too hard to separate from their money because their girls had been riding and using our horses and trying them out. Each girl knew which horse she wanted, and some of the mothers and fathers were buying horses for themselves.

  By this time I was getting pretty far along with this blue-eyed Vermont maid, this cute filly that was the teacher. I didn’t stop to notice whether she was older or younger than I was, and Apache Frank was busy being a ladies’ man and entertaining all the young ones. But this blue-eyed, black-lashed Vermont maid had gotten me over a lot of that bashfulness that cowboys are afflicted with.

  People don’t generally know it, but cowboys who are raised out in the range country and stay with a chuck wagon and grow up kinda wild—such cowboys don’t know much about gals. They just know that some of them are pretty and others sound nice and most of them smell good. There are lots of things young cowboys don’t know about gals, and this was pretty much my condition that summer I set out for Yankee country with my load of cow horses.

  But she had begun to get me over my timidness, and I had learned a lot about the fair sex from this Vermont maid. She would get her classes over in the mornings, and then she would take the station wagon and come down by our barns. I would have my horses worked out and exercised; I’d leave Frank agroomin’ his horses; and she and I would drive down to
town and sip soda and laugh and tell jokes and have fun. I sure thought I was doing awful good with her. I had traded her a horse, too. She had a Morgan stallion that was a little too much for these girls. He was a little rank and hard-mouthed, and they were too light-armed to be able to handle him; so she traded him to me for a nice dun gelding.

  Well, this dun gelding was quite a horse. He was only four teen-two hands high, and we called him Quickie. The girls thought that was a cute name for a horse, and they had all been aridin’ Quickie. But they got to using him in pole-bending contests, and he was pretty trigger-happy on that bridle rein. This pole-bending contest was something new for a cowboy. They never did bend a pole. That wasn’t the idea. It ought to have been called a horse-bending contest, because they would line these poles up and run a horse through them, reining him and bending him between the poles; and when they got to the end of the poles, they would turn the horse and run him back through this line of poles. Well, this dun horse was just so fast on the turns—that’s why we called him Quickie—that anytime you touched him you’d better be settin’ good and tight ’cause he was fixin’ to do something.

  Well, Quickie had spilled just about every gal up there that was trying to ride him on those flat saddles, and they were getting a little unhappy with him. But, still, my teach-filly had traded for him—and she got to asking me why he couldn’t be slowed down. I told her that cowboys spent a lifetime trying to put a rein on a horse, teaching him to be quick, and there wasn’t any point in trying to get him over it. This made sense to her, but she was not happy about that horse trade.

  Well, I wasn’t going to trade her back this Morgan stallion. The Morgan horse breed originated in Vermont from a little stud named Justin Morgan. A Vermonter by the name of Richard (Dick) Selman came to Texas in an early day and brought with him many pure Vermont Morgan horses. I worked on the Selman Ranch near Brady, Texas, as a boy—breaking weanling colts to lead at a time when there were more than four hundred Morgan horses on the Selman Ranch. Now I had a Morgan stud that was the start of a herd of Morgans for me—and I didn’t want to trade this stud for anything.

  One morning we had gone downtown to sip a little soda and be sociable, and she brought Quickie up again. She wished I would trade back for him. I had to tell her then how proud I was of this Morgan stud and that I hoped to trade for two or three Morgan mares to take back to Texas with me and start a little band of Morgan horses. This interested her. She smiled and said, “Then it is all right. We’ll do something else with Quickie.” And she got real nice and polite and just made me feel a little ashamed of myself for holding her to the horse trade.

  But she really wasn’t cheated. Her girls couldn’t ride old Quickie, that’s all. There was a lot of cowboys couldn’t ride him, either. Quickie could turn through himself and not get out of shape—which is quite an accomplishment for a good cow horse.

  Apache Frank and I were so busy having fun that we hadn’t paid too much attention to what the business situation was. We had four of the horses left that we had brought with us and this Morgan stud, which meant we were nearly out of the horse business. To stay in Vermont living in style just to show four horses—that didn’t make much sense. I told Frank that we were liable to be getting ready to ship out of that country. The first thing he did was to tell all these gals how they were going to miss him—he was an over-all ladies’ man, I tell you. They, of course, broke the news to that blue-eyed, black-lashed Vermont maid of mine. They didn’t want us to go back to Texas. Oh, they just took on and made us feel so good. They were even talking about how they would like to come to visit us some summer.

  We were all for that. We just let on like we had room for all of them. But in one of those little batchin’ shacks out on the ranch where we stayed, you couldn’t have got their saddles and clothes in it if they had all come to visit—but that didn’t worry us too much.

  I had one exceptionally good horse left—a blue roan horse, fifteen hands high, weighing eleven hundred, and six years old. He was one of the most useful horses I ever owned, and I thought that since I had sold several horses real high I could afford to keep the roan and ship him back to Texas. Well, this Vermont maid took quite a shine to this horse. I didn’t let Frank ride him. I kinda kept him to myself. I thought if I didn’t get him sold, I didn’t want any fresh teachin’ put on him that wouldn’t suit me.

  My Vermont maid went to telling me that if we were going to ship to Texas that she sure would like to buy or trade for that blue roan. I told her he would be awful high, even to her, and she could buy him cheaper than anybody. Of course that was good conversation.

  She said, “How would you trade him for some Morgan mares?”

  “Well, that would be about the only thing that would get this horse. I don’t think I’d swap him for United States money. I’ve already got a bunch of this Yankee money—more than I ever thought I’d get when I shipped up here—and I’d rather have some Yankee horses instead of more Yankee money.

  She thought this was kinda funny, and so did the three or four girls who were listening. This was all happening one night at the supper—excuse me—dinner table. She said that she had two or three Morgan mares in a pasture on the back side of her place, up on the mountain, and that she would bring them in so I could see them. She just felt that I would like them.

  I told her it would take about a pastureful to get this blue roan, because he was so good and I thought so much of him. The girls thought that was real funny. All these gals were always laughing at the way Frank and I expressed ourselves. They thought we talked real funny. We didn’t. They were the ones that talked funny.

  Of course these gals teased us a whole lot about how much horsemanship they had taught us Texas cowboys. We were always hurrahing them about how they wouldn’t have learned anything at that camp if we hadn’t come up there that summer. All that kind of stuff went on all the time. And once in a while I would tease them about not being able to ride old Quickie. I’d tell this Vermont maid that it was too bad she didn’t know how to trade horses as well as she knew how to teach young ladies to ride. This went on all the time—it got to where didn’t anybody pay too much attention to it. Just every now and then something would come up about horses that they had never heard of before, and either Frank or I would say, “Well, you just put that down as something else you learned from Texas cowboys.”

  About the middle of the week I let the news out that we would try to ship out Monday. I had already been down and told the railroad agent that we would want an immigrant car (that’s what you call a car that carries livestock, equipment, furniture, and so forth—instead of just straight livestock). He had to order one from somewhere; they didn’t ship any livestock up there by carloads. A carload of livestock going in or out of there was so unusual that you had to order a car several days ahead of time.

  So I had told the gals that I thought we ought to stay over one more Sunday. They were going to have another of those Sunday horse shows. I knew it would be fun, and I wasn’t worried about these last four horses we had. I knew I could sell them if I had or wanted to, and I was still kinda of the opinion that I would take this blue roan back to Texas with me.

  We rode up late one afternoon to watch the gals in their late afternoon class. We were figuring on getting an invitation to stay for supp—I mean—dinner and get some more of that female cooking and conversation. That all goes together, you know. This Vermont maid said she had her Morgan mares in the barn and if we would just wait out there by the riding ring, she would bring them out. I thought that would be all right, and directly she came out on a nice, brown, typical Morgan mare—good feet and legs, a beautiful head, and a nice, short back. She rode the mare and showed her, and this mare traveled nice. Of course, she was just out of the pasture and wasn’t in real good shape, but they had put the groom on her. She had every hair in place and was slick and bright and pretty. She had her fetlock trimmed and her mane and tail combed out, but other than that, she was a little out
of shape, just like a grass mare would be. But she was a real nice young mare and I liked her and liked the way she traveled, and thought, “Now that will be one to take home with that stud.”

  As the Vermont maid started to ride the mare to the barn, she told us, “The show is not over. Wait and I’ll bring out another one.”

  This second mare she brought out was a much better individual—a dark, dark seal brown with black feet and legs and not a white hair on her. She just traveled on and was the best mannered thing. Oh, she was nice to look at with this gal aridin’ her. They cantered and figured-eight, and it sure made a pretty picture. I just thought, “That’s the kind of mares I need to start a band of Morgans with. If I can just trade for them without that gal finding out how bad I want them.” So I said out loud, “She’s a nice mare. How old is she?”

  “She’s a little older than the other one.”

  Well, we weren’t too paper-minded in those days. We hadn’t learned a lot about registered horses—or I hadn’t. She told me the young mare had papers, and this one didn’t, but she was a true-blooded Morgan mare. That you could see at a glance. This was such a nice mare, and this favorite girl friend of mine was showing her—so I just didn’t think it would be polite to walk up and pop the mare’s mouth open to see how old she was. Anyway, she was a bright-headed mare that carried herself beautifully, and she couldn’t be too old; so I didn’t let it bother me.

  She put the mare back in the barn and came out and said, “How did you like my mares?”

  I said, “Well, they are sure nice. If you had about half a dozen more like that, I’d trade the blue roan horse for them.”

  The girls were all listening—seemed like they knew this horse trade was up—and they hooted me pretty bad when I said that. The Vermont maid rolled those big blue eyes at me and said, “You’ll be lucky if you get either one of them for the horse.”

  Of course I knew that wasn’t so, and I had a big haw-haw about that. We went in to eat, and as the evening wore on the girls were telling me how lucky I would be to get one of these mares. Everybody was trying to have a horse trade, and they were trying to trade me out of that blue roan horse for just one mare. I told them that just wouldn’t do at all. They worked on it so long and so hard that I finally said I would trade for both of them. They thought this was funny—that I would say my horse was worth both mares. Of course this was all light conversation, and it looked like I wasn’t getting very close to a horse trade.