Village Horse Doctor

by Ben K. Green

  I hadn’t been able to isolate any toxic substance in the blood samples I had been collecting. One night I took a 100-cc. vial of blood from a cow that was dying, drove to the airport at Midland, and shipped it packed in ice to my good friend in New York City who was recognized as an outstanding analytical chemist. I knew my limitations in chemical research and had always thought it was smart to know people who knew things I didn’t and I developed good contacts in all fields of research.

  By noon the next day I had a wire from my friend telling me that there were five hundred times more nitrates in the blood than is normal for any domestic animal.

  I drove out to Alton’s and showed him the wire. We walked the field out in sections and didn’t find anything of a foreign nature that could possibly have any agricultural or industrial nitrogens. As we came to the irrigated ditch on the east side of the field, I noticed Alton had moved his fence before the last cutting of alfalfa. There was a strip across the ditch that had been hard to get to with machinery, and he had neglected cutting it the last time he baled hay.

  This alfalfa was tall and ragged because the cattle had tromped through. It was not as tender as the alfalfa that had been cut, and probably only a few head would graze across the ditch. The blooms were completely gone and the seed pods on this alfalfa were almost mature.

  I started stripping the seed off the stalk by hand and told Alton that I needed several ounces to use for laboratory testing. We gathered more than enough and put it in our coat pockets. When we got to the car, we emptied it into a paper sack and I went to my laboratory.

  By now it was night and I started to work on the samples we had gathered. This almost mature alfalfa seed that was slightly soft was hot with nitric acids that when fully matured would become various forms of nitrate sulfates. I woke Alton up about midnight and showed him what I had found, and we moved the cattle to another pasture in the night until he could cut and destroy that strip of alfalfa that had gone to seed.

  When I got back to town I stopped at the Hollywood Café, the only all-night café. It was a pretty tough place and you were taking chances with your health if you ordered anything that was more open than a bottle drink or a hard-boiled egg. However, since it was the only all-night place, I would go in occasionally.

  As I went in, I noticed a rough-looking character asleep with his head on the table. Sometime earlier in the night he had ordered a combination salad, and the waitress had brought it out and put it on the table. By the time he woke up, he was probably a little closer to being sober than when he came in.

  During the lapse of time, this combination salad had wilted down to where it had come apart, and the oil had dropped out of the dressing. He called the waitress over and pointed to the salad and in a whisky tone of voice said, “Have I or should I?”

  As I left, I realized that the human race might also get poisoned on bad green feed.

  On my way back to my laboratory, I wondered why such alfalfa seed had never been suspected of being poisonous before. Later in conversation with people who raised alfalfa seed to be used for planting, I learned that rats would not eat them and would rarely ever cut a seed sack. I couldn’t get rabbits or guinea pigs to eat the matured seed in any mixture that I tried. The only creature I ever found that would readily eat alfalfa seed were baby chicks that had not been hatched more than a few days before, and they would fall over dead in the matter of an hour or less if they filled up on them.

  There are several medical agents that can counteract the effects of nitrates, and there are medical and chemical properties that can neutralize nitrates when they are present in the digestive tract, so the search for treatment was neither a serious nor a time-consuming matter. Dr. Udall of Cornell University had described nitrate poisoning from other vegetable sources and especially from wilted green-cut oats as early as 1925, but to the best of my knowledge, up until the case of Alton Simmons’s cows, alfalfa seed had never been thought of as containing poison substances.

  Back in the summer, Hart Johnson, one of the town’s native sons and a prominent lawyer, had taken his wife and daughter, Robin, on vacation. Mrs. Rose, their neighbor, whose house faced east on the street opposite them, kept Robin’s little female dog while they were gone.

  Mrs. Rose had taught school for fifty years or so, ran a village newspaper for another fifty or so, and this last fifty she spent tending to other people’s business. She was a little bitty sharp-tongued old woman, and she thought how nice it would be for me to spay Robin’s dog while she was gone.

  I wasn’t particularly interested in performing any small-animal surgery, but being the village horse doctor and the only one for a hundred miles or more, I inherited this kind of practice. There was no talking Mrs. Rose out of doing the little dog’s operation, so I performed it in the back of my office and delivered the little dog to Mrs. Rose wrapped in a blanket before she came out from under the influence of anesthesia.

  I explained to Mrs. Rose in detail that I had made a lateral incision in the skin only and had parted the muscles of the abdominal cavity with my fingers and there had been no muscles severed. The purpose of this explanation was to show the old woman that there was no real strain on the four stitches I had taken to close the incision in the skin of the little dog’s belly, and if the dog tore the stitches out or when they rotted and came loose, there was no serious damage and she should not worry about the incision opening up.

  About four or five days after that, I stopped by the drugstore and I was told that Mrs. Rose had called for me. I went on up to the café to eat dinner, and they told me Mrs. Rose had called. Call her. At Dee Walker’s filling station, they said Mrs. Rose had been by and said for me to call her!

  When I got to my office, I thought it best to get Mrs. Rose out of the way so I called her and after fifteen minutes of constant flow of the English language from her, I gathered that one stitch had broken and she was seriously requesting that I come by and look, so I said I would. There was no damage done and the little dog was healing nicely. I again explained to her the unimportance of these stitches and told her if the rest broke to think nothing about it.

  The next day from nine to five wherever I stopped in town, somebody would say, “Oh, yes, Mrs. Rose wants you to come by.” This procedure went on for four stitches and two weeks until I gave the old woman a gentlemanly sort of cussin’. The dog, other than the anxiety of Mrs. Rose, had an uneventful recovery and Robin came home and went to playing with her little dog without knowin’ that she had ever been operated on.

  Mr. Rose was a fine old gentleman, very obedient, cowed, subdued, and sometimes, I imagine, fearful of existence, who was always well dressed and well spoken. He was the haybarn manager for the Alfalfa Growers’ Association. On the first cold morning that fall, Mr. Rose stopped me on the street. He was tall and dignified and wore a long overcoat which made him look even taller. After he had spoken very gentlemanly, he said, “Doctor, there is a very serious matter that I must confront you with.”

  I said in an unconcerned tone of voice, “Mr. Rose, life can’t always be pleasant. What’s the trouble?”

  He was trying to fill his pipe with one finger and was nervously stuffing the tobacco in the bowl. He gazed across the street and said in a broken voice, “I regret to have to take this matter up with you.”

  I insisted that he get it off his chest and tell me what his trouble was, so maybe I could help. He momentarily stopped packing his pipe and glanced at me and said in a very shaky voice, “I am told that you have made disparaging remarks about Mrs. Rose.”

  “Well, Mr. Rose, I’ll tell you verbatim what I said, if that would help.”

  After a moment of silence, he said, “Doctor, that might be the proper beginning.”

  “Mr. Rose, I don’t know that you would call it disparaging but the statement I made back in the summer was, ‘Mrs. Rose would provoke Jesus Christ to use profanity.’ ”

  He turned his pipe over and started tryin’ to beat some of the tobacco out
where it would light, and after a long silence he said, in a very relaxed tone, “I hardly feel that I can take exception to that statement. Good day, Doctor.”

  The acreage in the valleys around Fort Stockton that was irrigated from natural springs was planted mostly with alfalfa. This year had been a good hay year and most of the farmers had gotten five cuttings of good leafy alfalfa and the farmers’ co-op haybarns in Fort Stockton were full. Since it was early winter, hay had begun to move, and the manager, Mr. Rose, was doing a good job of moving the year’s production.

  I was called to the Iron Mountain Ranch that was operated by Buck Pyle as a part of the West-Pyle Livestock Company. The foreman there was a fellow by the name of Carter, a good rancher who took an interest in taking the best care of his horses. When I got there, I was confronted with a horse that had just died and there were several sick in the corral.

  I did a post-mortem on the horse and examined the rest of the horses that were affected. It was a very simple case of arsenic poisoning. Since these horses were only being fed alfalfa hay, it would be readily suspected of carrying some arsenic poisoning. The most common form of this sort of agricultural poisoning would be the presence of Paris green, which was used in dusting and spraying cotton and other crops to protect them against insects.

  Carter took the horses off this hay and put them on other feed, and no more of them died or got sick. I carried a bale of the hay back with me to my laboratory and washed out and identified by laboratory processes the presence of arsenic. I called Carter and told him what I had found, and the news spread fast that there was some poison in some of the Fort Stockton hay.

  Within a matter of a day, Mr. Rose had had several people refuse to take delivery on hay, and Mr. Rhodes, the banker, and I were discussing the damage that my diagnosis had done to the Fort Stockton hay market. They called the county agent in for a consultation. He in turn came and questioned me about the accuracy of my laboratory techniques in finding the arsenic. He wasn’t a bad fellow and had the banker and the farmers on him, and, of course, he was definitely on their side—if there were to be sides.

  The next day Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Rose called me into the bank to explain to me what the hay crop meant to the economy of Pecos County and to the bank deposits of Fort Stockton.

  By now I had been there several years and had lots of practice and at this particular season I was overworked, short of rest, and short of patience, so without sittin’ down in that mahogany chair, I proceeded to give them all a pretty quick, fair cussin’ by telling them that I wasn’t runnin’ the bank, I didn’t have a hay crop, I wasn’t runnin’ the co-op haybarn, and I damn sure didn’t aspire to be the county agent, and there would be no retraction from me as to the content of the poison in the hay that I analyzed, which was the cause of the death of the horse that I did the post-mortem on. I told them if they were particularly interested in clearin’ the matter up in order to best represent the interest of the hay growers, it would be well to determine which farmer’s hay had been delivered to the Iron Mountain Ranch and his lot of hay should be examined and if necessary destroyed, and I respectfully reminded them that I did not say all the hay in the haybarn was poisoned, but that the hay fed the horses of the West-Pyle Livestock Company was damn sure poisoned. I told them in clear, clean language that before I changed my diagnosis, the flames of hell would be as cold as a strawberry popsicle. With that closing remark, I stormed out of the bank.

  After this session was over, they determined that the hay belonged to the Hayes Brothers. The county agent and Mr. Rose from the haybarn asked them whether or not they had used any poison on their farm that could have gotten into the hay. They strongly denied having had any crops poisoned or dusted and decided that they ought to sue me. Well, this brought up the possibility that whoever had gotten poisoned hay might be ready to sue them and make the hay company a part to the suit. So in a few days Mr. Rhodes, the banker, asked me what my testimony would be in the case of a law suit. He was being very smooth about it and tried hard not to upset my disposition. Well, my disposition was already upset, and I told him to file suit and find out.

  I thought at the time that if there were any more poisoned horses on some other ranch that a suit might develop, but Buck Pyle was prominent in political affairs and fair in ’most all matters and I’m sure didn’t want the publicity nor the unpleasantness of a law suit. This kind of stuff was talked around up and down the street and some of the hay farmers threatened to do without my services, which didn’t bother me a damn bit, and these rumors and unpleasant conversation went on most of the winter.

  It is characteristic of the Trans-Pecos Region of Texas to have high, hard winds especially in February and March. At this time there was an airfield for flight training at Fort Stockton and there was a gathering of flight instructors from several other points. Among the social events that were staged to entertain the visiting instructors, some of the townspeople had a big barbecue in Rooney Park.

  All the single gals in town had a date with a visiting flight instructor, and me and my gal friend were invited to the affair. She was a secretary for an oil company in Fort Stockton, and it happened in conversation over the barbecue that night that there was a fellow in the group that she had known in high school. We were at the same table visitin’ and eatin’ and they were reminiscing about their school days. It was a very relaxed atmosphere and I supposed that caused him to make the comment, “I won’t forget the last time I was in Fort Stockton.”

  Of course she asked him, “Why?” and he went into detail and in the presence of a female audience I’m sure dressed up the story some and began to tell us about his experience as a crop duster the year before. He said the Hayes Brothers had hired him to come in to dust their cotton crop with arsenic dust.

  We were eating outside on benches in the park and the wind was high and he said that was what reminded him of the story. When he got up in the air that day, as he tripped his equipment to release the dust on the cotton crop, there had been a big downwind and blew the poison way off course from where he had intended to put it.

  Up to now I had done nothing but listen and eat barbecue, but when this flyer mentioned turning that arsenic dust loose, I throwed my head up and turned an ear. I whispered to my gal friend to question him a little further, and he very readily gave out with all the information. We invited him and his date to come to my office with us and finish out the festivities.

  I had some good Scotch whisky, which was rare during the war years and which I never drank, and I felt that this might be the right place to pour it out. I poured the Scotch into 500-cc. glass beakers and they didn’t water it down too much while I watched them and asked him more questions. Nobody got drunk, but Mr. Flyer got willin’ after I told my story and asked him to stay over next morning and meet with me, the banker, and Mr. Rose.

  He evidently didn’t have any ill effects from the evening before and true to his word showed up at my office at nine o’clock. We went to the bank, and I introduced him to Mr. Rhodes and asked him if he would call Mr. Rose to come down. In a few minutes I presented my evidence to them as to where the Paris green arsenic came from and who employed this cropduster, which put Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Rose into quite a state of shock as to the honor and integrity of the Hayes Brothers.

  The possibility of law suits and the question of my diagnosis suddenly died. The Hayes Brothers and others began to be awful nice to me in hopes I might forget about the whole incident, and there was a greater respect for my professional opinion that suddenly prevailed around the damn bank.

  STRONG MEDICINE

  Early in April I was in Pecos, Texas, tending to some land business and I dropped by the lobby of the Brandon Hotel to visit with Buck Jackson in his office, which was the gathering ground for loafin’ stockmen. After a few “Hidy’s” and light conversation, I told Buck that I needed to get back to Fort Stockton. Maybe somebody had some trouble with their livestock while I was gone and I could take up the slack in the money I
’d been spending during the day.

  As I was about to leave, Old Man Sanhill, who stuttered pretty bad, came up and we shook hands. After a polite remark or two, he started changin’ feet and stompin’ the tile lobby floor tryin’ to get around to quizzin’ me about a horse he had. When he finally came to the question he said, “I-I got a c-c-olt that’s s-s-she-ddin’ his two-year-old t-t-t-eeth t-too early, and I-I’m a-a-fra-id it might s-s-s-tunt his growth. I wonder i-i-if there is s-s-s-ome-t-thin’ you could give him that would k-k-k-eep them front baby t-t-t-eeth from comin’ out s-so s-s-s-oon.”

  “Mr. Sanhill, I never heard of any colt shedding his first teeth before he was two years and six months old. This means that those two front permanent teeth will be grown at three years old.”

  This made him nervous and as he stomped and stuttered, he explained to me that he knowed when the colt was born that the old mare had had a colt once before that shed its teeth too soon, and he was afraid that this would stunt this colt’s growth.

  I said, “No, when any horse gets part of his permanent teeth, he can bite off grass and chew feed better and he’ll grow faster, and if that old mare always has a colt that sheds its teeth too early, you better keep her. However, in my years in the horse business and in general practice, I’ve never seen a case like this.”

  He insisted that what he was telling me was the facts and since he lived on the road between there and Fort Stockton, he wished I’d stop on the way back and look at the colt’s mouth. He was figurin’ that this wouldn’t be a call, and I would give him some information free. I don’t know what his real plans were for the day, but he said, “I-I’m goin’ home right now, and I-I-’ll be t-t-here when you s-s-s-stop.”

  I drove up in front of Old Stutter’s shack and it was a typical camp for an oldtime race-horseman who raced on the brush tracks. There were half a dozen single stalls built wide apart from each other with separate corrals around each one and a little half-mile training track scraped off in the pasture behind the two-room shack and the stalls.