Horse Tradin' (22 page)

He came back in about thirty minutes with a tin suitcase loaded up with his life's belongings, a pair of old spurs on his boots—old-timey kind of loose-rowel spurs that wouldn't cut a horse—and said he was ready to change his range. I told him to get in and shake the lines and get used to the rig. I was going up to the sheet-iron shed to pay the man for his stock, and we'd be on our way.

I had the money on me, and I paid the man in United States cash. He seemed awful glad to get it, but at the same time he kept whining and complaining about how I had cheated him. I told him if he really felt that way, it looked like he would change his way of making a living.

We started out of town about one o'clock. We drove down to a crossroads about eight or ten miles out of Liberal. Where the roads forked, there was a wide place where the fences didn't come together and there was lots
of tall grass. Our stock had watered good before we started out, so we pulled out to the side and made camp for the night. I'd bought a wagon sheet and some bows up at the hardware store, so we could cover the wagon in case the weather got bad.

This old misplaced cowboy that I had picked up wasn't too bad a fellow. He'd just got misled to working on those farms. He was a good teamster, and he knew how to stake out horses. He tied the mates out together where they wouldn't be nickering for each other in the night. He was good to help make camp, and we just gathered up wood and built a nice enough fire to cook supper—and sure enough, he turned out to be a real good cook. In a few days we passed through Perryman, Oklahoma, and stocked up on pots, Dutch ovens, and stuff. That old boy could make sourdough biscuits that would raise the lid off a Dutch oven.

That little strip of Oklahoma that separates Kansas and Texas isn't very wide, and we were in Texas in a few days. These horses were all sound and good travelers. I rode along and he drove the wagon; then we would take time about and let him feel a horse between his legs. It looked like that was doing him more good than the money he was going to be paid for the trip.

It was nice kind of cool fall weather when we rode in close to Canadian, Texas, early one afternoon, and stopped by the river out north of town to make camp. I rode in to town to see if there was any conversation around about the horse business—and if anybody might be interested in some good big draft horses. I visited around Canadian in the local cafés and up and down the street. I saw cowboys loading a bunch of cattle at the stockyards, so I went
down by there and talked a while. Didn't arouse any interest in my horses. Nobody seemed to want to farm, and if they did—they wanted to do it with tractors.

Anyhow, it wasn't very popular conversation, so I came back to camp pretty late in the afternoon, and my old horse-wrangling friend had made a big pot of stew. This was sure good cowboy stew. I ate a batch of it and went to bed and didn't let the horse market bear on my mind too much.

For the next few days we were passing through farming country, headed south, and I began to inquire around if anybody would want to buy some good big horses. I began to build my sales talk up pretty good, because every time I brought it up, anybody I was talking to had three or four good reasons why they didn't want a great big horse. Some of them would tell me they ate too much. The next ones would tell me they didn't need that big a horse to work in sandy land. Then the thing that was always a thorn in my side—they were constantly telling me that they thought maybe the country was going to tractors. None of this increased my feeling for the farming industry. I was proud of my big horses and the good harness and the trade that I had made. I knew my horses should bring a lot of money, but I was having a hard time finding anybody else that thought so.

We didn't try to travel too fast. We grazed along the road and our horses stayed in good shape. We fed them a little grain at night. When we would come through a town and find a feed store, we'd buy a few sacks of oats and maybe a few bales of hay—just for the horses that we were going to keep up for night horses.

In about ten days we got down to Childress, Texas.
By now I had begun to try hard to sell some horses. I had even gotten to where I would suggest if they had something to trade … but nobody wanted to talk to me very long. They would just kinda brush me off, or tell me they had plenty of horses, or say they weren't going to buy any more horses—they were going to buy a tractor. I began to worry a little bit about my horses. In fact. once in a while I'd wake up at night. In cowboy conversation: “They was gittin' on my piller with me.” I'd had these horses two weeks—nearly three weeks—and hadn't sold one. It looked to me like people didn't realize what a good proposition it was to have a big draft horse.

We made camp on the outskirts of Childress. I was going to circulate around the next morning and see if I couldn't find somebody that needed some big stout work horses. In the meantime, I'd nicknamed my traveling partner “Cookie,” and we weren't having a bad trip. He was such a good cook, and the horses followed the wagon good, and the weather was nice and fallish. But we weren't having any business, and this began to get on my mind.

I saddled up a good horse the next morning and rode up into town, around the edges and down the square. I saw four or five pens of horses and mules that farm implement and tractor dealers had been accumulating in trade for those noise-making, iron-wheeled machines. I rode back to camp to take on a batch of chuck and ponder my next move.

Cookie was a nice kind of man who didn't burden you with his troubles, and he didn't have much to say. But that afternoon he said that if I was going to stay around the wagon and look after the stock, he believed he would mosey up town and get a haircut and visit a little while—
see what the town was like. Well, he had been awful good help, and I didn't see why he shouldn't go up and look this town over and maybe daub a little red paint on it somewhere. It would have been all right with me if he had, but he came back about four o'clock in the afternoon. His conversation had brightened up considerably, and he had gotten a fresh haircut and a shave and bought a new shirt.

He told me he had been in a place to eat somebody else's grub—a nice little chile and stew and short-order place, he said. It was just off the edge of the square, and the farmers kinda hung out there along with the working people and the cotton pickers. He had got into conversation with the man that owned the place. This fellow had a hankering to get out of the chile-joint business and had bought a little piece of land out in the edge of town. He saw that my friend Cookie might be a prospect, so he set out to sell him this café. Well, Cookie was looking for a place to squat. He wanted to settle down some good place to make the winter, and running that good café sounded like an awful easy thing to him. It was a way to make money and not have to work too hard for a living. There was a little batching quarters in the back of the café where he could sleep.

He came back to the wagon telling me all of this, and I was waiting for him to tell me how much it cost, but he didn't get to that. Directly I said, “Well Cookie, why didn't you buy the joint?”

He said: “I didn't have any way to pay for the café—but I shore b'lieve I could make a go of it.”

It kind of dawned on me that this might be the place to start a man who wanted to farm with a team of horses; so I told Cookie to go back the next morning and see if
he could swap a team of horses for that café. I would just put him in the chile business.

Well, Cookie got the night's dishes done up and the fire chunked up, and reached over and got his jacket and put it on, and said: “I b'lieve I'll go back up there and talk to that bird tonight.”

He took off in a storm, and he came back a little after bedtime—but he couldn't lie down and go to sleep. He chunked up the fire again, cleared up his throat and coughed around, and lit a cigarette. I knew I was going to have to get up and listen to him. I rolled out of my bedroll and pulled on my boots—moved over by the fire and said: “Well, let's get it off your mind so we can get a little rest.”

Cookie said he had sat around and watched business—and that old boy was doing pretty good, according to the way Cookie saw it. He finally got around to talking to him about buying him out. Seems this fellow was a country boy at heart, and he wanted to sell out pretty bad. He was tired of waiting on people, and he didn't much like the café business. Cookie had got him to make a price to him—$300 for the whole café.

I asked: “Did you offer to swap him a pair of horses?”

“No,” he answered, “I'm not much of a trader. I thought we'd just wait till morning and go by there, and you could do the tradin' with him. If you'd trade with him for me,” he said, “you could be full pardners with me till I got you paid back, and then I'd pay you for the horses and have the place to myself—if that'd be all right with you.”

Well, that was all right with me because I never had any aspirations to fry hamburgers all day. So we went to bed. Cookie I don't guess slept very much, but it didn't
bother me a whole lot. I rolled back up in my warm bedroll and waited for sunrise.

We got our camp broke up and our horses rigged up and hitched, and drove out. We had our horses all tied together and tied to the wagon, going into town. We didn't want them running loose up and down the streets. We pulled up in front of, and across the street from, this little café that Cookie had on his mind, stopped our horses, tied up our lines, and went across the street to the eating joint.

The old boy was just opening up. He had the fire going and was ready to start business. We ordered breakfast. Didn't anybody come in for a little while, and we had quite a talk with him. I told him that Cookie had told me that he wanted to sell out and go back to the farm. I told him the first thing he would need on a farm was a good team of big, stout horses and a good set of harness, and that I had plenty of horses out there in front. We'd pick him out a good team and sell them to him for $450. We'd take the café in on the trade.

I saw Cookie turn a little pale, but the café fellow didn't flinch too much. He looked across the street at our teams, and he commented that we sure had some good horses. I could tell right off that he had been so busy frying hamburgers and stirring stew that he hadn't heard about those tractors. It looked like we might do some business.

We finished eating our breakfast and he rolled his apron up. He stepped out across the street and walked around our teams and looked and looked and talked and talked. He picked out a pair that kinda suited him. They weren't the best and they weren't the worst we had, but he sure bragged on them. He was a country boy at heart,
and he just thought how wonderful it would be to have a team of horses like this out there on this piece of land he owned, out on the edge of town.

I had begun to wonder if he had enough land to raise enough feed to fill that pair of horses—whether he made a living at it or not. But that wasn't any of my business, so I didn't bring it up. Somebody went in the café, but he just glanced over that way and never did quit talking. He said that he couldn't afford to give $150 boot between the team of horses with a set of harness and his café—but he went on to tell how good a business he had going.

I told him I never had swapped a team of horses for a bunch of chile bowls and a stove, but that if he would give some boot, I would try to trade with him. Cookie never had opened his mouth. Maybe he thought I was trying to drive too hard a bargain and that there wasn't a chance.

I went on to ask him if he owed any bills. He said no, that he paid for his groceries and did his cooking himself. The rent for the building was $12 a month, but that was paid up for the rest of the month—which wasn't but another week or ten days. It seemed like his business was in order. Finally, he said that he would give the café even—for the team he had picked out with the harness that was on them.

I looked over and saw that Cookie was getting a little weak and had to lean against the wagon wheel and look off in the other direction. Maybe he thought we had it done—but I told this café operator that this sounded like a pretty good proposition for Cookie, but it wasn't much for me. I asked how much cash was in the cashbox.

“Enough,” he said, “to make change with—probably about twenty dollars.”

I told him if he would just hand Cookie the keys and leave the cash in the cashbox, he could go in there and get his hat and his coat, along with whatever personal belongings he had there in that back room. I would hitch that team of horses to the post there, right in front of the café. He could drive them home.

He smiled a big smile and said: “Well, I shore am glad to git that done. I just been afraid you wasn't gonna trade with me.”

I looked over at Cookie, and he was all smiles. When we walked back into the café, two customers were sitting at the counter. They both seemed to know this ex-café operator, and they said: “Joe, where you been? You can't make a living out there looking at them stock.”

Joe said: “You just think I can't. I've got a team of horses hitched to that post out there in front. You'd better give your orders to the new proprietor.” And he waved his hand toward Cookie.

Cookie threw his hat under the counter, reached over and washed his hands under the hydrant, and said: “Gentlemen, whatcha have?”

Cookie was a man that fate predestined to be born of lowly station. Mother Nature had not laid a kindly hand on him to give his stature or his features a pleasing appearance. Dame Fortune had never dealt him a winning hand in this life's game. But for all this, Cookie was glad to be alive and have any kind of a chance at survival. He stood in the presence of men without bitterness or complaint of
his lot, said nothing unkind of his fellow man, and never abused a dumb animal. This breed of man would do for a friend when the trail was rough. You could bet that he would pay back favor or money—and he did, many times over. I was always glad I swapped that team of horses for that bunch of chile bowls and that cookstove.