by Ben K. Green
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.
I said: “That sure smells good. You must have got your training as a camp cook.”
He kinda laughed and said: “Well, it’ll do to fill up a hungry man.”
I told him I’d like to have a batch of that stuff. Up to now he never had said: “What’s it for you?” or “Can I help you?” or “Did you want to buy something?” You wouldn’t have known it was a commercial place of business from the way he was acting. He got a tin plate out from under the counter, went over to this barbeque pit, raised the iron lid off it, and took out a big chunk of meat. He chopped it up, and it filled up the plate. He slid it over to me, reached in a bread wrapper and pulled out a loaf of bread, and started to cut me a chunk of bread. That was before bakeries had learned how to slice bread and then wrap it—bread all came in one chunk.
I said: “I like the tailgate.”
He just cut off both ends of the loaf of bread and said: “There’s you two tailgates.”
I started in on this barbecue, and it sure was fittin’. I began to brag on it, and he said: “Reach over in that box behind you and get you an onion and peel it.”
Well, I thought that would help, too; so I reached over and got an onion and sliced it and peeled it and started out eating again. That made everything better. I was mighty hungry.
We were talking, and he looked up and saw all these horses standing on the courthouse square and wondered who owned them. “They’re mine,” I told him. I said I had been up in Kansas and I was going to Weatherford to winter. I never let on but what I had been working these horses all summer. I didn’t tell him I was trading on them. Then I added: “I’ll swear, this is good barbecue.”
He said: “Look around there in front of that glass counter and reach in that barrel and get you a pickle to go with it.”
Well, that set it off some more, and I just kept eating and visiting and talking. Nobody came in for a while—but directly here came a fellow. He came up and said his wife was washing and he thought he’d better take some barbecue home for dinner. They had small talk while he got fixed up with some barbecue in a little cardboard box with some gravy in it, and he went out.
The storekeeper turned around to me and said: “There’ll be four or five of them kind of fellers by here. There’s several different reasons besides washing, but t
hat’s just the one they tell you about.”
“One reason is,” I said right quick, “that their wives can’t make barbecue like this.”
Well, you could tell that didn’t make him mad. He said: “Yeah, and another reason is, some of these fellows don’t take no meat home for their wives to cook nohow.”
While I was sitting there eating, I was looking around this store. Back behind me—it was a kind of L-shaped building—on the back part of it he had some feed and some seed, some farm tools and some chain harness and collars were hanging on the wall. Up around on one side of the meat market there were some cases of canned goods, and stuff that wasn’t too common in just everybody’s store. You could look up the other side, toward the front, and there were about three big aisles going up through there. You could plainly tell which aisles belonged to the women’s kind of merchandise; the floor was swept, and there were bolts of goods up and down the counter and in the shelves. There were some fancy kinds of women’s shoes, some of them laced and some of them had bows on them. And there were even two or three pairs of right fancy ones with bows on them—sitting right out on top of the boxes.
Then on the men’s side there were good ducking britches, jackets, and work clothes—and Stetson hats. Any direction you looked there was something else that had to do with living in a ranch or farm country. You could just tell right off that this was a good general store. If anybody wanted something this store didn’t have, he sure was looking for luxuries, because the necessities were all here. I mentioned this to the proprietor—about how much stock of stuff he had in his store.
“Yeah,” he said, “I sure am proud. I try to keep everything that people need, but ever now and then I hear of somebody going off fifty or sixty miles to Fort Worth and buying something.”
I told him there would always be people hunting things that came from Paris, or something that didn’t have any practical use, but he had a right to be proud of a store like this—and this wasn’t any country store, the way I saw it. It was an up-to-date store.
He began to appreciate me pretty good by then. He reached over and got my tin plate and said: “Heah, young fellow like you—been a-drivin’ that bunch of horses a long way—can eat more beef that you’ve had.” So he loaded up my plate again.
I didn’t fight him any over it. I figured I could eat a bunch more of it, too. And besides that, I was going to have to make a camp supper somewhere down the road. It just might be I wouldn’t want much supper, the way he was feeding me.
In a minute he spoke up and said: “Surely you don’t need all those horses at home. You mighta needed ’em in the summer, but you ain’t gonna be doin’ anything this winter to take that many horses, are you?”
I said: “Well, I might be. I have the horses, and I pretty near have to do something if I keep them.”
He said: “There was somebody in here a few days back a-talkin’ about needin’ some big horses—some teams to dig dirt tanks with. I didn’t pay much mind to who it was. You don’t reckon you’d want to sell ’em, do you? I might try to think of who that was.”
I told him: “Oh, I’d keep my saddle horses and sell some of my work horses, if it would help a man out—but I’m not hankering too much.”
He didn’t know that was a piece of information I was waiting for—the name of somebody around there that might be needing work horses. I tried not to show much interest, and after all I was pretty much busy with that second plate of barbecue he had cut for me. About that time somebody else came in. I had finished eating, and he said: “Well, don’t run off. Come back ’fore you leave and I’ll try to think who that was that wanted some horses to work.”
I walked out on the sidewalk and kinda stretched and yawned and started over toward my wagon and horses. I saw a fellow coming out of the courthouse astepping pretty nice. It looked like he was either after something or running from something, and about that time I noticed he had a big star on the side of his chest. I decided he was probably the high sheriff. He got to my teams about the time, or a little before, I did. He was looking around, and he said: “Nice bunch of horses you got, kid. Who do they belong to?”
I said: “They belong to that kid you’re talking to.”
He kinda laughed and said: “Well, I guess they could. I just figured there was a grown man around somewhere.”
I kinda took that like it was an insult, but I thought since he was the high sheriff maybe I’d best not cuss him out—and he kinda laughed when he said it, anyhow. We got pretty well acquainted, and he was a good kind of a fellow. He was an old-time stocker, had been a cowboy and a teamster and a mule-skinner; then he got into politics. He was right likable, and his name was Abernathy if I remember right. And I thought it was a shame that a good fellow like that would take off to devious means of making a living—like being a sheriff—when he was a good stockman.
He brought up the matter of whether the horses were for sale. I told him that I guessed I’d sell some of them, but I wouldn’t want to run myself short. Of course he didn’t realize how many I could do without and still not be short. He said: “There’s a fellow down here in the south part of our county that runs a big land company: the T and P Land Company. There’s a lot of that old ranch country that they can’t get windmill water on, and they’re having to build some dirt pools in some of the pastures. It’s been a dry fall, and the manager down there has been wanting to get some dirt work contracted. I imagine you could get a job building some dirt pools and tanks through the winter.”
I let him on the fact that I didn’t think that would be a pleasant way to spend the winter—camped off there digging a bunch of dirt tanks. And that I’d started home and wouldn’t be interested in a job.
He said: “Well, in a case like that, would you sell some of these big, heavy, dirt-working kind of horses to my friend if he wanted to buy them?”
I could tell then I was sure about to have some more business. I said: “Well, I don’t know. It depends on what your friend knows about what good horses are worth.”
He said: “It’s Mr. Cox, and he runs that T and P Land Company out there. He’ll know more about horses than you or me either one.”
It’s always nice to do business with a fellow who knows, or thinks he knows, so I told this high sheriff that I would be interested in talking about selling some of my horses if Mr. Cox was really interested in paying what horses like mine were worth.
He said: “Mr. Cox has a phone. I’ll go over to the office and see if I can ring him. It’s about dinnertime and he ought to be at the house. If he lets on like he could use these horses, I’ll come back and tell you.”
I said: “That would be just fine. I’ll appreciate it. Maybe we’ll have some business, and you’ll be doing us both a favor. It doesn’t hurt a man in politics to be doing people favors, even if they are strangers.”
He kinda smiled and said: “That’s a fact.” And I learned later that’s how he had been in office pretty near all of his life.
He came back out of the courthouse after a while and said sure enough that Mr. Cox would be here in a little while. If I could stay around, he just knew that we would have some business. I told him it was an awful nice time of day for me to be getting on down the road, but I appreciated his trying to help, and I would wait a while on Mr. Cox.
In about thirty or forty minutes, here came this man Cox, and he was another nice gentleman—well spoken, wasn’t insulting, knew a lot about horses and a lot about people. He and this Sheriff Abernathy sure were big friends. We visited, and they talked about the size of the teams and how good they could work and what all they could do, and how it might be smarter to buy them and do the dirt work than to contract and have it done. I thought that was a lot of favorable conversation, and I just felt like I was going to have some business with this Mr. Cox.
He finally got around to asking what I would take for a team, but before I answered him he said: “No, I mean two teams.”
I asked him $300 a pair for them. H
e said that was a little high, but that he would try to buy them if I would try to sell them. I thought that was a pretty good attitude, and I said: “Well, it seems like you know more about the horse business than I do. What do you reckon you’d give for them?”
He decided that he would give $250 a pair for two pairs, but I told him I couldn’t quite take that. So he said: “Well, supposin’ I bought them all?”
“Then I’d be out of teams!” I said it just like I’d be ruined, but he didn’t have any idea how well that would have suited me. “I don’t know. If you bought the eight head, I might take off a little.”
“How much is a little?”
I said: “$25 a pair.”
“You’re trying to split the difference with me. I offered $250 and you wanted $300—but I just got to thinking, what am I going to hook these big horses up with? If you had some harness, I’d try to buy them.”
I said: “That wagon is full of harness, but I can’t put that in at no such price.”
About that time the high sheriff raised the wagon sheet and saw that, sure enough, there was a lot of heavy harness in there. Then this Mr. Cox, he stuck his head in there. You could hear them talking low to each other about how good that harness was. Then Mr. Cox asked me what I was doing with my ponies along. He didn’t know it, but these were my cow horses and I wouldn’t have given them for all these big horses at any time.