by Ben K. Green
A few weeks later I rode by and saw a beautiful, fat pair of blood-bay horses standing under the shade tree back of the old man’s barn. I never asked him what he did with them—and he never told me. To my knowledge, I’ve never seen an “arsenic fiend” horse since.
Horse from
Round Rock
Round Rock, Texas, is known and remembered by most people because Sam Bass, early-day gunman and horseman who owned the Denton mare, was hemmed up and killed there during a robbery. But when I think of Round Rock, it reminds me of a horse trading experience that I am not likely to forget.
It was in the early fall, and I had driven a herd of mules and horses from West Texas down to Gonzales and Caldwell County, south of Austin. I had sold the herd to the native farmers, who were mostly of German descent, for cash and was riding a good seven-year-old horse named Tom, a blood-bay with black mane and tail. He was shod, hard fat, and a real good road horse.
I stopped in Round Rock a little before noon and found a feed and mercantile store, where I bought my horse some oats, led him out under a big live oak tree, took the saddle off of him, and poured his oats in a pasteboard box that I had got at the store. There was a Sam Bass Café in town, and I thought I’d go up and eat some dinner while my horse ate his oats and rested in the shade of that live oak tree.
When I came back to my horse, there were three or four men standing around looking at him and probably admiring him, but they didn’t say so to me. One of the men finally spoke up and said he had a mate for that horse—the same size, height, and color and ever bit as good a horse. Well, I was carrying a batch of tradin’ money and would always buy a horse as good as Tom, so I told him I would be interested in buying his horse. He said he’d rather trade him because he was hard to catch and a little mean to handle, and that he would give me some boot. I was a long ways from home and on a good horse, so I wasn’t going to be put afoot by that kind of a conversation. I told him I could use two horses, and I’d rather buy him than to swap mine off—if his horse was worth the money.
We got in a Model T Ford and drove out of town for about a mile to a creek-bottom pasture where there were several horses; and sure enough, the man had a good bay horse, rolling fat, with a few cockle burrs in his mane and tail. As we got close to him in the car, the man said to his friend, who was with us sitting in the back seat: “Those kids must have been down here riding those horses, and that bay horse has gotten away with one of their belts around his neck.”
Sure enough, this bay horse had a good leather belt around his neck at his throat latch. This fellow got out of the Model T with some ears of corn, shucked an ear or two, hollered a few times, and the horses came up to him. He eased around and caught ahold of the belt around the bay horse’s neck. He said: “I guess he broke loose from those kids, but that belt made it handy for me to catch him.”
I had brought my bridle and saddle along in the car and had left my horse tied with a rope. We saddled this horse, and he seemed to be gentle, but the owner warned me that he was a little spooky—which along about then didn’t make no never mind to me. He held the horse by the bridle and I stepped on. When he turned him loose, the horse humped a little bit but he didn’t really try to buck. He did show to be a nickel’s worth snorty, but I think back now and that could have been because he was rested. He was a good eight-year-old horse, with good feet and legs; he had a nice running walk, a good fox trot just like my horse Tom, and I thought how nice it would be to have two horses that good and that much alike. When I looked in his mouth I noticed his teeth were a little brown, but the man said it was because he had been running in the field eating cotton stalks. I didn’t know whether cotton stalks would turn a horse’s teeth brown or not, but it sounded reasonable.
The man asked me $125 in cash, or, he said, he’d pay me $25 difference between this horse and mine—just because he was a little afraid of this horse. I wasn’t in any bind for money, and I never did have enough good horses, so I offered him $100 for his horse. He hemmed and hawed a little bit, while he stood kicking the dirt around with the toe of his shoe and looked at the ground. Finally he looked up at me and said: “I’m going to sell him to you because I’m afeared of him.”
That made me feel awfully good because I could buy the horse cheap and because I wasn’t afeared of him.
I rode back to town, stopped at the blacksmith shop, and had my new horse shod. I picked the cockle burrs out of his mane and tail while the blacksmith shod him, and there never was a gentler horse. I remember now that the blacksmith said he knew the man was trying to sell the horse, but he didn’t know what his reason was.
As I rode out of town on my new horse, leading Tom, I heard somebody holler at the man I had bought the horse from: “I see you got rid of that cribber.”
Well, that didn’t disturb me any. I had heard horses called oaters and hay-burners, and I thought cribber was another name for horse feed. That night I made camp, staked Tom out on some tall grass, and told him how lucky he was that he had somebody to do part of his work.
Then I turned around to stake my new horse out. He had ahold of the top of a fence post with his teeth and was leaning back sucking air with all his strength. I hit him with the stake rope and said: “You old fool, there’s grass to eat on the ground. What are you trying to bite a post for?” I staked him out on a long rope, made down my bed, and went to sleep about halfway between my two horses.
There was an awful noise woke me up in the middle of the night, and I could see by the moonlight that this horse had ahold of the fence post, groaning and pulling. I squalled and threw rocks at him, then laid back down and went to sleep. He must have repeated the performance several times that night, because I saw the bark knocked off a stump and that post top was bit—which were about the only two things he could reach. His teeth and gums were sore in the front part of his mouth.
I saddled Tom, took up my camp, and led the other horse. Up in the morning, I stopped in the little town of Jarrell just to loaf and visit a little, drink a coke, and pass the time of day. I tied my horses to a hitch rack behind the grocery store. I was sitting in the back of the grocery store eating some ginger snaps and drinking a coke, when I looked out the back door and saw that my new horse had ahold of that wooden hitch rack with his teeth and was setting back groaning like he was going to tear that hitch rack down. The old gentleman running the grocery store looked at me and looked at the horse, and I asked him: “What makes that old fool do that?” Then I told him about the way the horse had acted the night before when I had made camp.
The old storekeeper laughed and said: “Young fellow, you’ve got a stump sucker.”
Then I remembered about the man hollering and using the word cribber; so I asked the old storekeeper what was the difference between a cribber and a stump sucker. He said: “There ain’t any difference in the vice—the difference is in the location. If he’s in Kentucky, he’s a cribber—and if he’s in Texas, he’s a stump sucker.”
The old gentleman went out and looked at his mouth and saw that his teeth and gums were bloody. He said: “You’d just as well buy you a leather strap and buckle it real tight around that horse’s neck at the throat latch, because then he can’t swell his neck to bite and suck wind. That will keep him from getting his mouth sore. Anytime you tie him or turn him out, you better have that strap good and tight around his neck.”
I sat down on a sack of salt at the back of the store. I was about half mad, but still it was funny about the man’s belt and his story about the kids letting the horse get away; so I told the old storekeeper, and we had a good laugh. When I got up to leave and started to pay for my coke and cookies, the man said: “Young fellow, the treats are on me!”
As I rode along that day, I wondered what I was going to do with that stump sucker. I was on the road several days, and I kept a tight leather strap around the horse’s neck every time I tied him or staked him to graze. Two or three days later I rode into Hillsboro and went to a livery stable with my
horses. Of course, I knew enough to take that strap off the horse’s neck before I got close to town. There were several horse traders around the livery stable, and I noticed a Fort Worth buyer with a big diamond horseshoe stickpin and a big diamond ring. He was highly dressed, was entertaining the crowd, and was buying a good many horses and mules. He immediately bannered me to sell him a horse.
I had ridden the stump sucker part of the day, so he had dried sweat on him which showed he was a saddle horse—and he was shod. I told the man I might sell him the horse I was leading ’cause I couldn’t ride both of them. He said: “Saddle him up and ride him for me.”
So I took my riggin’ off Tom and saddled the other horse up. He had a good fox trot; he reined good and was a nice-looking horse. This fancy horse and mule buyer didn’t want to get his hands too nasty mouthing a horse, so he just opened the horse’s lip at the corner and saw that he was open in the corners—which meant that he was eight years old. Another nice thing about it was that a stump sucker doesn’t damage his corner teeth as much as he does his front teeth.
After a short conversation with everybody listening, my dressed-up horse buyer offered me $110. Of course I had asked a lot more, but I remarked: “You ought to know more about what the horse market is than I do, so I’m going to sell him to you.” I unsaddled the horse, and he paid me and said: “Turn him in that lot back at the end of the hall of the barn.”
As I started to lead the horse off, he said: “Just a minute. Of course I’m going to resell this horse, and if he has any bad habits I’d like for you to tell me about them. I’ve already paid you for the horse, but I’d just like to know if there’s anything wrong with him.”
I didn’t answer the man. I just turned around, took a strap off my saddle, buckled it around the horse’s neck good and tight, and turned him in the lot. Nearly everybody in the livery stable knew what that strap was for, and they just about died laughing. The horse buyer took it good humoredly that he had been cheated by a kid.
Easter Lily
When I was a young man about sixteen or seventeen years old, Mineral Wells, Texas, was considered by many—and especially by the people in Mineral Wells—to be quite a health resort. People went to the Crazy Hotel to drink Crazy Water and take Crazy Baths and listen to the Crazy Hotel radio broadcast advertising Crazy Mineral Crystals and the Crazy Hotel, and maybe do some crazy things. It all may have helped their health some, but I think the principal good they got out of it was bolstering their ego, adding to their social prestige, and giving them something to talk about when they went back home: what they did when they were at the Crazy Hotel in Mineral Wells.
Of course, these people had to have a place to go horseback riding. There was a Mr. Cush Wise who had a very elaborate and elite public livery stable. He rented horses to people who were at Mineral Wells on vacation, and also stabled horses for people who lived there. Occasionally some real horse person would come from afar to the wonders of Mineral Wells and bring his own private saddle horse with him. And of course there was only one place where any horse could be kept with distinction and pride in Mineral Wells—Cush Wise’s livery stable, which was on the south end of the main street, down close to the trade square.
Mr. Wise had been some kind of higher-up in the cavalry of World War I, and it was hard for him to overcome it. He wouldn’t hesitate to mention to you what they did in the cavalry. He still wore the pantaloon cavalry britches and hard-top boots with low heels. He stayed well dressed and well groomed and had a military air about him, and in all respects was probably a good horseman. However, he led you to believe—in fact, he was ready to confess—that he was a gentleman of the highest order and horsemanship and horses were not a business with him, but a love; a part of his life that he couldn’t do without. That was the real reason for his being in the horse business, and not because of any money that might be connected with the running of a livery stable and the buying, selling, and trading of horses.
This kind of angle on things was sort of a new breed of animal with me. I thought horse people were in the horse business because they had to be or because they wanted to be, and since I was a small boy I’ve more or less considered the horse business not a business but a disease. The thing a horseman ought to do was to learn all he could about the disease, so he could live with it without its totally ruining him, financially and otherwise.
Anyhow, I rode into Mineral Wells one day on a nice dun horse with black mane and tail that weighed about eleven hundred pounds and had a nice way of carrying himself—a six-year-old, stylish enough, about as nice as western horses came. It was in the dead of winter and the usual tourist crowd had gone home, and the livery stable business was rather dull. Mr. Wise was having trouble passing the time of day. However, he always had a horse or two crosstied in the center of the hallway, with somebody brushing and currying them while he stood by with his hands in his pantaloon-britches pockets, waiting to tell them how it ought to be done and how it was done in the East and how far western horsemanship was behind eastern horsemanship. None of this ever made him too popular with the cowboys, but I guess it did make a hit with the people who came to Mineral Wells to enlighten themselves and build up their ego and ride a-horseback from a fancy stable.
I rode into the barn and stepped down off my horse, and Mr. Wise walked up and stuck his hand out and shook hands with me, and his hands were soft as a woman’s. He was shaved and smelled good, had a pretty little snapbrim hat on, and those hard-top, flat-heeled boots. He introduced himself and told me he was Cush Wise. Well, I’d met him before, but I didn’t see any use in embarrassing the man and embarrassing myself by making a point out of the fact that he didn’t remember me; after all, there wasn’t too much about me to remember. I hadn’t been in the cavalry and I hadn’t been East and I didn’t know all those things Mr. Wise professed to know above and beyond what a cowboy knew about a horse.
Finally he got around to asking me what he could do for me, and I told him I was going to be in town overnight—it was the middle of the afternoon then—and asked him if he could put my horse up for me. He very graciously said he’d be glad to. As I slipped my rigging off my horse, he commented that I was riding a nice horse that was well balanced and had a good back, and I must be one of the better kind of Texas cowboys since I didn’t have any cinch sores or kidney sores or saddle sores anywhere on the horse’s back. He also commented that my horse’s feet were properly shaped and properly shod, and that except for the fact that I, like all Texans, hadn’t brushed or curried his mane and tail, he showed he had been well cared for and properly fed, and there was a possibility that if I had the opportunity he had had I might make a horseman.
Well, I listened to all this, but I didn’t believe a whole batch of it. I picked up a bucket and got a little cool water and washed my horse’s back off while he began to eat his oats. Mr. Wise continued to entertain me with the finer points of horsemanship: the proper thing to have done was to have washed the whole horse off and then to have blanketed him; and, of course, never curry a wet horse but wait until he’s dried, then curry him and brush him. Well, he didn’t know how little of that was soaking in on me, but it looked like it was giving him a lot of relief to get it off his chest, and I figured somebody ought to listen to him once in a while. It wasn’t bothering me, so I didn’t talk back to him, I just let him talk on. I finished with my horse and Mr. Wise stepped out of the doorway of the stall, and I came out and closed the stall door and hung my bridle on the door. He had a nice, big, long barn with a brick floor in the hallway and lots of fancy tack rigging hanging up and down the sides of the wall. Of course, I didn’t see any lariat ropes or hackamores or halters or tiedowns or any walking W’s, things that would help a cowboy handle a rough bronc. Everything I saw there was for a horse that already had the rough took off him.
As we neared the back of the barn, I saw a great big stall, about twice as big as the other stalls, and a beautiful dapple-gray mare standing at the hay rack just sort of nib
bling at some hay that she didn’t want. She put her ears forward and looked at us like she might have some consideration for the human race, but not much. I mentioned that she sure was a pretty mare, and that was all it took to tap Mr. Wise off to tell me why that was a pretty mare. He went into a long rigmarole about her many illustrious ancestors, and called off names—Denmark, Rex Peavine, Stonewall, and a lot of others that sounded like he was describing people instead of horses. (I had owned a Denmard horse who was the grandmother of Beauty, the best horse I ever rode, and that had some Rex Peavine blood, but I didn’t tell him I knew what he was talking about.) These were all American saddle blood, and this was an American saddle-bred mare that had been shipped out of Kentucky by a very elegant horsewoman. I didn’t know what his “elegant” meant, but I could tell by the way he said it that this sure must have been quite a horsewoman he was talking about. He said that while she was in Mineral Wells she had ridden this mare around the streets some, but mostly in the small pasture behind the barn. She’d come down in the morning and ride the mare a few rounds and then go back to the hotel. He told all about how her people in Kentucky had fine horses and had bred this mare, and she had brought her to Mineral Wells with her while she enjoyed the vacation wonders of the Crazy Hotel.
I could tell at a glance that this mare hadn’t been ridden in a long time, so I asked: “Well, where’s the lady now? Evidently, the mare ain’t been rode in some time.”
He said the lady had gone back to Kentucky or to some other vacation resort, and that she’d left the mare there, and it would be a long time before spring and before there’d be anybody to ride the mare, and that the mare was for sale. Well, she was a beautiful mare with clean, straight legs and an intelligent eye and a handsome set of features, only I didn’t know what business I had with her. She was worth a lot of money to somebody; but it didn’t look to me like she could catch a yearling or drag a bronc horse or snub a wild mule for a man to harness, and I couldn’t think right off why I’d have any need for her.