Horse Tradin'

by Ben K. Green

  I thought a minute and told him: “Take him back and tie him to the rockcrusher!”

  Later that afternoon I traded this mule for two old wore-out, mossy-headed, buck-kneed, big-ankled, bog-hocked, cow horses—both worth about as much as the $10 boot that I had paid. And my almost-good little brown mare was gone, gone.

  Poor Heifers

  —The Judge

  —Wild Mules

  During the worst cold spell in the now historical depression that occurred during the thirties, I went into a country store a few miles out from Weatherford, Texas. I had a pasture leased nearby and had been out to feed my herd of heifers. I had gone broke in the big-steer business and had been buying, trading, and working for some little bitty, sorry, cross-bred, various-colored heifer calves and yearlings. I had about fifty of these little heifers; there were no two of them alike, their value was low, low, low, and I had a pretty low feeling every time I poured out feed to them. Money was scarce, and feed was hard to pay for.

  I had left my horse tied to the south side of the country store, come in the back door, and was hovered up against the stove when some fellows stopped in front of the store with a truckload of horses. The horses were saddled, had sweat dried all over them, and showed that they had been used on some kind of a hard drive. Two of the boys came in the store while the old man was filling up their truck with gasoline. They bought up some of the common things you could get in a country store to eat—canned pork and beans, crackers, canned salmon, a few cookies, and so forth. While they were poking around getting what they wanted, one of them saw me sitting over by the stove. He walked over, warmed his hands, and looked at my boots and spurs. I didn’t have on two-toned boots, wasn’t wearing double-seated britches, and my riggin’ didn’t give off much glamour; so this town cowboy had to ask: “I guess you’re one of the local cowboys?”

  Along about then was one of the few times in my life that I wasn’t necessarily proud of that fact. I answered: “I guess so. Looks like your horses have been stayed with pretty hard.”

  “Yeah. We came out from Fort Worth to pen that Fort Worth lawyer’s mules up in the mountains, but we didn’t have any luck.”

  I had vaguely heard of the lawyer’s wild mules, but I had never been given a firsthand report on them. With a little persuading, this town cowboy gave me a full report on how wild the mules were, how big the pasture was, how thick the cedar brush was, and how deep the canyons were. He added his personal opinion about what he thought of anybody who would let his livestock business get in the shape that the lawyer had by letting a bunch of wild mules take his ranch away from him. I listened carefully and culled this city cowboy’s conversation for what true facts there might have been in it. I walked out to the truck, humped up in the cold, and looked at the horses. They were a nice bunch of over-fat, wrongly shod, beautifully rigged, soft town horses that had been rode about half to death—and nobody had caught a mule.

  After they drove away, the old country storekeeper came back to the fire. He and I sat there watching the blaze through the open door of the potbellied stove. He finally broke the silence and asked: “Reckon that lawyer in Fort Worth will ever get them mules gathered so he can get his pasture back to where he can put cows in it?”

  “I don’t know. How come him with those wild mules?”

  Then my storekeeper friend related the story of how, about three years before, the Fort Worth lawyer had staked a would-be-rancher nephew to buy yearling and two-year-old mules to stock a section pasture—640 acres. After the mules were turned in the pasture, the nephew had lost interest in them and decided to be an automobile salesman or something in town. The mules had kept the grass bit down close, killed a few calves that had been put in the pasture—which mules will sometimes do—and the judge wasn’t too happy with his nephew or with the “stock” in his pasture.

  All of this time I had been sitting there peeling pecans and eating them and hitting the door of the stove with a few of the hulls. I closed my pocketknife, stood up and shook the pecan hulls off, and started toward the back door. The old storekeeper said: “You must have run out of conversation. Come back when you get recharged.”

  I got on my horse and jogged up the road. The weather was cold and the wind was high. My little heifers were pore, the grass was short, my spendin’ money was getting awful low, and I just thought to myself that from a promising young rancher—before those steers went down—to pouring out feed to those sorry, bad-colored heifers, I sure had slipped since I quit the horse and mule business. It was time for me to take a fresh start.

  It was thirty miles to Fort Worth, horseback or on the bus. You could ride horseback for nothing; it cost ninety cents to ride the bus, so before daylight next morning I counted my money and rode horseback. I left my horse over at the Burnett and Yount Horse and Mule Barn, rode the streetcar to town, and went way up in one of them tall buildings to this lawyer’s office.

  As I entered the stiff-looking legal establishment, a very precise, not too young lady glanced at my saddle-marked britches and unshined boots. As she sized me up, I took my hat off, and my head didn’t show that it had been exposed to a lot of brushin’ and curryin’, and I could tell by the tone of her voice that she didn’t think I was a client of the honorable attorney. In a crisp business voice she asked me who I wished to see. I told her I wanted to see the lawyer. She had her note pad in her hand, asked me my name, and said: “What do you wish to see him about?”

  “He may want to see me much worse than I do him, ’cause I might help him with his mule troubles.”

  I didn’t much more than get the word “mule” out of my mouth until the judge was standing in the doorway of the next office looking at me and saying: “Come in, come in.”

  We shook hands and I told him who I was. He smiled and said: “Have a seat over there.”

  He motioned to one of those big soft chairs, and I kind of sat on the edge of it rather uneasily as he said: “What do you know about my mule business?”

  “I know about your mules, but I wouldn’t call it business—the way you’ve been handling them,” I replied.

  He showed a weak smile, but he didn’t seem to think my remark was very funny. It was about noon, and he said: “You could probably talk better over some food.”

  I didn’t hear grub called food very often, and it took me a minute to answer; but anyway we went to a nice place that had linen tablecloths and napkins and real silver to eat some dinner. The judge ordered up a batch of stuff and along with the meal we discussed his mule business. He explained to me that he knew how to handle cattle and could hire people who could tend to them, and he would like to get rid of these mules. I told him I had a bunch of heifers I’d trade for his mules, and that I’d gather the mules and then deliver the heifers. This sounded real good to him, only I could tell he didn’t much think I could gather the mules.

  About that time somebody passed the table, slapped me on the back, and said: “Ben, what are you talking to the judge about? Are you in trouble?”

  As he reached across the table to shake hands with the judge, I was glad to recognize an old friend I had worked lots of steers with. He had some other people with him, and as he started back to join them he laughingly told the judge: “If you ever get to be as good a lawyer as Ben is a cowboy, I’ll take you on as my attorney.”

  That made me feel real good, and you could tell it wiped some of the doubt out of the judge’s mind about me gathering the mules. He began to show more interest in the heifers I had to trade, so he asked me about them. I told him they were mostly Jersey, Holstein, and mixed breeds of various colors, shapes, and sizes, and that they were all pretty pore.

  He laughed and said: “You don’t paint a very good picture of your heifers.”

  “No, but I know where they’re at, and I can gather them, too,” I replied.

  He asked me did I owe any money on these heifers. I told him I was pretty dumb, but I wasn’t dumb enough to borrow money to buy that kind of heifers. A
s an afterthought I said: “Judge, do you owe any money on them mules?”

  He laughed and said jokingly: “No, Ben. I never could get anybody close enough to them to make a loan on them.”

  He was already cheated, because he couldn’t gather his mules. He told me he would rather have that bunch of heifers that he could see—provided I could gather all the mules.

  We talked about the weather being bad; and it being the dead of winter, I agreed to feed the heifers until I delivered them. We decided that I ought to be able to finish the whole trade in not more than a month’s time.

  I went back to the stockyards, and it was too late to start riding back home, cold as it was, unless I had to; so I spent the night at Mrs. Brown’s boardinghouse. I saddled my horse and left for home early the next morning. By the time I was halfway home, various ideas had crossed my mind about trapping, setting snares, or getting enough men to relay the mules for two or three days in order to run them down; but everything I had thought of so far either would not work or would take too many horses and men.

  I was still pondering my problem when I crossed the Clear fork of the Trinity River, about ten o’clock in the morning. There was an old Frenchman who had a little house on one side of the road and a barn on the other side. As I came up, he was crossing the road afoot. We stopped and visited a few minutes. His horses had their heads stuck over the fence, looking like they wanted some more feed, and I noticed that one of them was a gray mare with all the hair gone off her back and the upper part of her shoulders and around the top part of her neck. There was some pink skin that anybody could tell was scar tissue. I asked the Frenchman what on earth had happened to that mare. He explained to me that he had gotten her out of the Fort Worth Horse and Mule Barns after the big fire which had occurred a few years before. He said that she was one of the many that were to be destroyed because there was no hope they would recover from their burns. They had given her to him, and he had brought her home and healed her burns; but the skin was so light where the collar and harness rubbed that he had never been able to work her. I said: “Sell her to me cheap and I might could use her for a broodmare.”

  The old Frenchman said in broken English that they had given her to him, and he would be glad to give her to me.

  As I led her away behind my saddle horse I noticed that her feet and legs were good, she was in fair flesh, and, in spite of the hideous scars on her body, in good condition. I put her in the back lot at home where my daddy happened to look over the fence and see her. He asked what I was going to do with her. I just grunted and told him I had my plans.

  In a few days the rumor got around that I had traded for the outlaw mules. All of the cowboys and old men had lots of advice to give me, but nobody wanted to go with me and help to gather those wild mules. The judge’s pasture was about twenty-seven miles from town. Friday afternoon I left when school was out with a little pack of grub on the back of my saddle, a small bedroll, and leading the gray mare. Everybody who heard about the mules and saw the gray mare had decided that I was not the promising young stockman they had thought me to be.

  I spent the night with a farmer friend of mine who lived about ten miles from the mule pasture. After supper when we were sitting around the fireplace visiting, he told me how come the mules were so wild. It seemed that all the teen-age boys for miles around had been gathering on Sunday afternoon, when the weather was pretty, and had been running the mules for fun. The corral at the pasture was on the north side, and you had to cross the canyon and go through the densest part of the cedar brakes. He said it was in this canyon and in the cedar brush that the Sunday cowboys always lost the mules, and nobody had ever been able to drive these wild mules through the dense brush.

  That night I slept in a nice warm feather bed at the farmer’s house and had a big country breakfast the next morning. After thanking the farmer’s wife for the night’s lodging and breakfast, I saddled my horse, caught the gray mare, and started on to the pasture.

  The south side of this pasture ran along a public road for about a quarter of a mile, and there was a little open prairie spot at the south end. I had wrapped a big bell with a leather strap on it in a tow sack and tied it to my saddle before I left town. After I got into the gate into the pasture, I buckled this bell around the old gray mare’s neck and took a piece of baling wire and tied the buckle where it wouldn’t come loose. Then I turned the old mare free and proceeded to drive her up into the cedar thicket.

  Mules will naturally come to a gray or spotted horse and will very readily take up with a gray mare. I left the mare in the thicket, grazing on the grass and ringing the bell, and took off to ride around the outside of the fence and try to get acquainted with the pasture. After several hours of riding, I had a pretty good idea as to how the pasture lay and had determined that most all the land joining the fence was in cultivation. Since there was no brush over the fence to graze or hide in, the mules had never tried to get out.

  About the middle of the afternoon I rode down in the canyon, got on the sunny side of the bank, built a small fire, fried some bacon, broke open a loaf of bread I had tied on my saddle, and had a feast. I had discovered on my round of the pasture that there had been a good many cedar posts cut on the back side, and there was quite a lot of dead cedar the judge probably didn’t know about. More than likely the post-choppers had helped themselves and told no one about it. I went on back to town and spent the next few days going to school and begrudgingly pouring out feed to that sorry bunch of little heifers.

  About two weeks went by and nothing much happened. On a Saturday afternoon late, I unsaddled my horse and went into the front room as the radio was giving out the weather. This “radio weather” was kind of new stuff and we didn’t set too much store by the report it gave; however, I stopped to listen. The announcer said there was a blizzard on the way, coming out of the Panhandle, that would be in Wichita Falls by midnight and would probably strike the Fort Worth area by two o’clock in the morning. The Fort Worth area was us.

  I went in my room and started to getting clothes. It wasn’t cold enough yet to put them on, but I wanted a batch to take with me. As I headed toward the barn with a batch of extra britches and leather jackets, my daddy drove in the driveway and called: “Where you fixin’ to spend the winter?”

  I told him I was fixin’ to have a little mule drive. He thought my mule trade was very foolish but had been too kind to say so. I knew he thought those heifers would be grown cows and have calves before I got the mules caught.

  I had two good horses in the barn—well fed and shod and drawn down hard from constant use. Old Beauty was my standby; I felt she had more sense than most of my schoolteachers at that time and understood me better than my family did. Charlie was a big bay horse with a scar on his forefoot that didn’t hurt him. He was a head-nodding fox trotter the same as Beauty and a big, stout, hard, using horse but not too trustworthy. I saddled him and started out leading Beauty. She didn’t need much leading, as she would travel right up even with your saddle horse and not even tighten the halter rope. As I rode out of the front yard, my dad stepped out on the porch. By this time it was nearly dark, and he hollered at me that if I got in trouble to turn that old mare loose. The reason he said this was because Beauty would come home—and in a way that would spread the alarm, and he would know to come and see about me.

  I sat pretty straight and tight in the saddle and kept old Charlie headed north. I wanted to make it to the pasture before the norther hit. It must have been about eleven o’clock at night when I reached the fence-line on the south side. I took my horseshoe nippers off my saddle, tore the barbwire off the posts, and laid the fence back for about two hundred yards in the southeast corner of the pasture. I tied old Beauty across the road on a loose rope where she could graze a little and poured some oats I had brought in a sack on the grass for her. Then I rode Charlie to the far north side of the pasture.

  I knew that the sound of burning wood and the smell of cedar smoke would str
ike terror to the heart of the old mare who had been in the barn fire. It was my plan to set fire to the dead cedar where the north wind would blow the smoke through the canyon, and the old mare would lead the mules to the south side of the pasture. A cold front always moves in with a lot of high wind which I needed to fan the flames, and when I heard on the radio that the norther was coming, I knew it was time for my mule roundup.

  I rode onto the spot where the dead cedar was, but I needed to pile it up some to where it would start a big fire. I slipped the bit out of Charlie’s mouth and poured the rest of the oats on the ground for him. I loosened the cinch so he could eat and rest while I piled the dead cedar and started a fire. When the flames began to jump about twenty feet, I knew I had a real brush fire started; so I tightened my cinch, rebridled Charlie, and got ready to ride.

  The wind was against the mules and the mare, and from where I sat I couldn’t hear her bell. There was a little trail around the fence toward the pens, and I brought Charlie out in a dead run. As I rode into the west side of the pasture, I could hear the bell a-clanging, and I heard the old mare nickering in a loud tone that was almost a scream. The mules were braying and the stampede was on.

  I found a clearing and rode to the southwest corner as fast as I could. There was a ditch at the road which I knew would slow the mules and the old mare up a little, and I wanted to beat them to the road to be sure I turned them toward town if I could. As I jumped my horse across the ditch, Beauty had her head up and began to nicker at all the excitement. I held her still until the old gray mare came into view—followed by the herd of mules with the flames behind them lighting up the northwest. I turned Beauty loose toward town and dropped back to make sure the mules didn’t go up the road in the wrong direction.

  After about three or four miles, the mules quit running. The old mare had begun to give out, and Beauty was in the lead in a long, swinging trot heading for home. When you handled wild mules, the thing to do when you started to drive them was to run them until they winded themselves; then they were easy to drive. By daylight, these mules drove like they were gentle. I jogged along slow behind them, let them graze, and gave my horse time to rest a little and water where a creek crossed the road.