Some More Horse Tradin' (14 page)

It was first Monday and I decided I'd buy a work team for this winter feeding job. There were plenty of teams around on the trade square either harnessed and hitched to wagons or standin' tied to traders' wagons waitin' for somebody to want to see 'em hooked. There was a pair of well-matched bay horses about the right size, six and seven years old, full brothers, that a well-dressed old man was drivin' around hitched to an empty wagon. He was puttin' on right smart of a spiel about how good a team they were.

There was another fellow that had about as good a pair of horses but had a little better-lookin' harness on 'em. He had been tryin' to sell his team at about the same price as the old gentleman, and there was little or no difference in the manner and appearance of these two horse owners and teams. I guess the reason that I had looked at these two teams the most was that they were already hitched to wagons and were being driven
around, where most of the other traders' stock were tied to wagons and you had to pick out what you wanted and get 'em hooked up. It was early in the day and I thought as the sun got lower that the price might go down, so I didn't hurry to give either of these old gentlemen $165 for their team of horses.

I rode uptown to a chili joint and ate dinner and stopped back by at the wagonyard and was tellin' three or four fellows about needin' a team and about the two teams I had found and how little difference there seemed to be between them. Mr. Nix spoke up to say if one team suited me as well as the other, he believed he would buy the team that the best man had because more dependence could be put on his word about their pullin' quality and disposition. Then, Cat Medford said he had looked at both teams and felt like he ought to tell me that the lighter-colored pair was owned by an old retired preacher and the other team was owned by a sin gin' school teacher and he didn't believe he'd put any store by either of 'em's word.

Mr. Nix shamed him for such a remark and said in that case either team would probably be all right. Clint Hardin spoke up and said that if he was goin' to have to listen very much to either one of them, he'd rather listen to the singin' school teacher than the preacher and we all had a big laugh about that.

I wasn't offerin' nothing in trade and I wasn't buyin' these horses for tradin' purposes, so I was being a little more careful than I normally would have been just swappin' and sellin'. I rode back down to the trade square and looked around at some of the other horses but didn't find any matched teams that looked as good in harness as these that I had in mind. I rode around and made loose conversation till past the middle of the afternoon. That's when more people begin to tend to business and there was a chance that these two teams might both get away, so I decided I'd better make up my mind.

I offered the preacher $150 for his team and he gave me a little talkin' to about honesty; he said he hadn't put a false price on his horses and he didn't intend to take off anything. Well, that kind of a speech didn't sound good to a young horse trader, so I rode over to the wagonyard.

The singin' school teacher looked like he had a prospect and I didn't say anything until this would-be buyer walked off. I offered him $150 for his team and he hemmed and hawed and changed feet and talked about what a good team they were. He said he thought they were worth more than he had 'em priced at and he hesitated to take less. I asked him about sellin' me the harness with 'em (I didn't really need the harness), and I put in a little conversation that it looked to me like the harness was pretty small and tight for horses of this size. He said that he wanted to keep his harness because it
just
fit a pair of mules he was workin' and that it was awful tight on these good big horses.

One horse seemed to be a little uncomfortable. His britchin' was taken up real short to the tongue and you could tell by lookin' at the ground where he stood that he had moved his hind feet around a lot. Well, I had watched this music man drive this team during the day and they drove nice and were well matched and walked good with each other. After a little more light conversation I walked off, but not off so far that he couldn't come hunt me up on the other side of the trade square.

About an hour before sundown, he found me and said he hadn't had a better bid and if I would split the difference with him, he would sell me the horses. Well, I thought the daylight was in my favor and I'd just outstay him for that other $7.50 and told him I had bid all I wanted to give for 'em. He said, “Well, pay me, and I'll unharness them and you can have them.”

I counted out $150 in bills, and it seemed to me that he was awfully anxious to get that money jobbed down in his pocket before he started unhookin' the team.

When you unhook a team from a wagon, you usually unhitch the traces from one horse and step behind him and reach over the tongue and unhook the traces on the other horse. But this wasn't the way he did it. He completely unhooked and unharnessed one horse and put my halter on him. I was sittin' horseback and he handed me the halter rope. I thought this was odd, but I just said to myself, “That's just another man's way of unhookin' horses.” He took the bridle off the other horse and put my halter on him and handed me the halter rope with the horse still hooked to the wagon. He had a hard time pullin' the britchin' straps off and gettin' enough slack from the rein. Then he unhooked the breast yoke and slipped the harness and collar off the horse and slapped him on the rump so he would move up and I could lead them off. When he did, this last horse walked straight with his front end but his hind end kind of trailed off sideways, so much so that it was very noticeable, and directly his hind end changed sides and bumped into the other horse, then I knew for sure I was in real trouble. I thought to myself, “That old boy's probably hittin' High C for the cheatin' he's given me.”

I started to the wagonyard with 'em and the right-hand horse with the loose rear end had to brace himself against the other horse to walk since he didn't have all that tight harness and wasn't strapped to the wagon tongue. As my luck would have it, I met John Barber as I started toward the wagonyard gate and he laughed in his best voice and said, “Benny, what are you goin' to do with that ‘bobby'?”

I had heard of “bobbies” but I'd never seen one. A horse that has been injured in the coupling in the hindquarters and the loin and doesn't have good control of his hindquarters is referred to as a “bobby,” and he is worthless unless you want to drive him in a tight harness to an empty wagon. About this time I remembered what Cat Medford had said about buyin' horses from a singin' school teacher.

Jess Manus had a pen of horses and mules in the wagonyard
next to where I put my team and later in the afternoon he bought the preacher's horses. The preacher had backslid a little bit on that speech about price and had sold 'em to Jess for $140. The next morning I came down to the wagonyard before Jess got there, I heard an awful noise and glanced over in his pen. There was the explanation for the preacher changin' his mind about the price: the best lookin' of the two horses—if there was any difference in 'em—was standin' over the water trough tryin' to suck a little water and was roarin' with an awful case of the heaves. There was a faint smell of turpentine that the old preacher had used to shut the heaves down for a few hours.

Cat Medford walked up and looked over the fence at 'em and had a good laughin' spell. He put a fresh dip of snuff in his mouth and turned like he was leavin' in a hurry, so I asked, “Cat, where you goin'?”

As he blew a little cloud of dry snuff, he said, “I'm goin' to hunt Mr. Nix and find out who's the best man in this case.”

T
he Texas Cowboys' Reunion at Stamford, Texas, when it was first begun was a real western, enjoyable holiday. Cowboys gathered from far and near—working cowboys along with old-timers that had been good cowboys—all gathered at Stamford and had a two- or three-day rodeo. The chuck wagons from Swenson's, SMS, the Four Sixes, the Pitchfork—and I don't know who-all—would come in and feed all the visitin' cowboys. It was an unorganized kind of free-for-all rodeo held strictly for working cowboys before there were too many professionals in the business. The only rules that these rodeos were governed by were the unwritten rules of fair play that range cowboys of that day had worked by all their lives. Of course, the area boss, Scandalous John Selman, an old-time ranch foreman, had the final say if there was a tie in any of the contests.

Well, I was standin' out a way from the SMS chuck wagon—oh, just a little distance under the lacy shade of a mesquite tree by my horse—eatin' dinner. And when I say dinner, I mean it was high noon and I was eatin' barbecued beef and beans and potatoes and sourdough biscuits—the stuff that cowboys could do a day's work on—and it was sure good. Behind me was a pair of big dun chuck-wagon mules that would attract anybody's attention. I looked up, and Will Rogers was walkin' over toward me and these mules.

He looked at the mules, then he turned and started by me and 'course stopped and said “Howdy.” He said, “You're ridin' a good horse.”

I said, “Yessir, I've got some good horses. I've had some horses that you wound up with in years past.”

He stuck out his hand and said, “I'm Will Rogers. What's your name?”

“I'm Ben Green. You bought some polo horses from some Texas shippers out in California a few years back that I trained.”

He turned all smiles, and we went to talkin'. Sure enough, he'd had a Rollie Bred horse that Rollie White from Brady, Texas, had bred, called Big Enough. I'd put the schoolin' on 'im. He had liked Big Enough and remembered all about him and how good he had handled, so we were big friends in just a few minutes. I didn't waste any time in tellin' him that my ranch was covered with good young horses that were sound and clean and ready to do anything that you wanted to do on horseback—and that the market was awful bad—and what did he think about me shippin' a load of them out to California?

“Well, Ben,” he said, “don't do that. The West Coast is
covered with good horses. There's a whole lot of people out there in show business that ain't eatin too regular. Their horses suffer ‘fore they do. You know them manicured cowboys that we got around these show places, the first thing they can do without when times gits hard is a horse. To begin with, they just wanted him 'cause somebody else had one. If you was to give me another horse, I don't know what I'd do with him. I'm gonna have to bob the tails on the ones I got now to make room to shut the corral gate.”

We talked on about how the polo market had got bad since people had run out of spendin' money. And when I said “spendin' money,” he said, “What other kind of money is they?”

We kinda laughed about that, and I told him that the government wasn't buying any remount horses and that I had spent all winter abreakin' a good bunch of horses that had slicked off in the spring—and they was shod—and I wasn't ahavin' any buyers. I had begun to hurt. He asked, “Are they as good as this horse you're aridin'?”

I said, “Yeah, I've got two more with me as good as him—and some more at the ranch.”

Along about then I wasn't to impressed with Will Rogers as a national figure. I thought of him as a good cowboy that had made his way into pictures, show business, and radio—and was a good polo player and a good fellow. After all, I lived in the brush and didn't have a radio and didn't hear him very often and didn't see much about him except in a picture show or somethin'—but Will Rogers was highly regarded by all cowboys and horsemen; so after a few minutes of conversation it seemed like I had known him all my life. And the fact that he had had some horses I'd schooled made him have a good feelin' toward me, I guess.

About that time he brightened up and said, “You know, there ain't but one place that these Texas horses might sell. They're having a little flare of polo in the New England states, up around Boston and on the Eastern Seaboard. If you had
the nerve to git that far from home, you might take a carload of horses up there and do pretty good with them. Outside of that, I don't know of anyplace right now where good horses of this kind are in demand—that is, by anybody that's got the money to pay for 'em.”

I told Will I'd never been that far from home; I didn't know if I could stand the expense with a load of cow horses. I said I guessed I could scuffle up the money, but supposin' I didn't sell 'em and started into one of them hard New England winters. It would be a bad place to make a winter camp, wouldn't it?

He laughed and said that was something to think about. And about that time Walt Cousins, one of the men who started the Cowboys' Reunion, hollered at Will and waved him to come on. As Will left he said, “Ben, if you decide to ship up into that country and it looks like you ain't gonna git out 'fore the snow flies, git me word. I'll try to git yore horses out. I'd hate to lose a bunch of good Texas horses in one of them Yankee winters.”