Some More Horse Tradin' (6 page)

Directly he gazed off past my shoulder out the window like he didn't even see me and said, “One of the boys said that you were a horse buyer.”

I said, “Well, I'd like to be—only I haven't found any horses to buy on this trip. They've all been too old, or too poor, or too something or another. I haven't found any horses that I thought I could sell to the cavalry—or to anybody else, for that matter.”

“A lot of horses,” he said, “have been sold here during
the drouth, and there are not many good horses left in the country. Most of what's left are yearlings and twos and unbroke horses and broodmares.”

I knew all of that—and of course those were the classes of horses that weren't worth much money. There wasn't much demand for them. He went on to comment that he had a lot of yearlings, twos, and threes, enough to last the ranch several years without raising any more.

I thought to myself, this is going to be easier than I intended for it to be; he is already offering to sell me what I came after, and I haven't had to show my hand. So I told him that since I hadn't been able to buy anything else, I might ought to try to buy some broodmares instead of going back to the north part of the country without any horses at all.

He said he had about thirty broodmares in the canyon pasture which wasn't more than a mile from headquarters. We could see some of them from an automobile if I wanted to drive down there with him and have a look. Well, this showing you horses from an automobile was kind of a new fandangle way of doing things, but you could tell alookin' at him that he wasn't too anxious to go showing them to you horseback; so I told him I guessed that would be all right.

He had a Mexican boy get in the back seat of this big automobile with the top laid back and several spare tires mounted on the rear. It was sure a long, fancy rig. We went down and dropped off the rimrock, went through a gate, and drove into the canyon pasture. He drove kinda slow down in through some great big boulders and greasewood, prickly pear, and mesquite—there wasn't any grass in this pasture to speak of—and we found a few mares standing in the shade down in the lower part of the canyon. Sure enough, they had the shield on them, and they were those kind of solid-color mares with good feet and legs, clean heads, nice keen necks, and beautiful backs. He said they were the old
Shield mares, that they had bred them pure for many years, and they were a pretty good kind of horse.

I could tell right off he didn't really know how good they were. He's just had good horses all his life, and he hadn't had any experience trying to work stock ahorseback on a sorry horse or he'd never have been willing to sell these deep-bodied, ribby kind of good mares. We saw about eighteen or nineteen head of them before we got to the other end of the pasture, and right at the gate there were five more,—made twenty-four altogether. He told me he thought there were twenty-eight in the pasture, that he didn't remember, but that he could ask somebody (he called his name) at the headquarters when we got back. These mares were mixed ages. There were a few old mares in them; there were also some nice, bright-headed young mares. There weren't any colts left on these mares—evidently they had been weaned and taken off to some other pasture, and these mares had been put in the canyon pasture to make the winter. All the mares I saw showed to be bred and would drop foals in the early spring. We had not seen a stud; so I asked what sort of a stud they were bred to. He said the stud was an old horse of the same type as the mares, but he had died because at his age he could not stand the drouth.

As we went out the gate at the lower end of the pasture, I noticed there was a good set of working corrals, plenty big and tall with good swing gates, that would be a nice place to pen a bunch of horses and look at them—or do whatever you wanted to with them. We drove on back toward the house, and he didn't say much more about the mares.

We got to the cook shack where I had left my horse, got out, and went in and sat down at the table. He asked one of the older cowboys how many mares there were. This cowboy said there were twenty-eight head. I asked how many old mares there were. He said there were four old mares and the rest were either middle-aged or young mares. He talked about this mare and that mare being just a four-year
old, and another one that was seven, and so on. This kinda tallied out with what I had observed when I was looking at them. They were all solid colors. They weren't great big, but they were very typy and carrying lots of balance and body and good bone structure. And they were sound, clean-legged kind of mares, having plenty of substance without being coarse. I had secretly thought to myself that with mares like this, I'd never be afoot the rest of my life.

Still no mention had been made about price, but, after all, there wasn't really much demand or much sale for mares, especially in a drouth. I thought surely they wouldn't be very high. When he finally got around to pricing these mares, he said that they were going to go out of the mare business and that mare buyers were pretty scarce. He would price them to me where I would try to buy them.

I asked, “What would that be?”

He said he would take $30 a head for them. Well, along about then the average run of good ranch mares were bringing $10 to $12 apiece. Young, broke mares sometimes would bring twenty, but $30 for broodmares was sort of unheard of. I didn't flinch. I didn't show much weakness. I wanted those mares worse than anyone else would ever have wanted them; so I just sat there a few minutes and didn't answer.

He said, “What's the matter? Did that chill your blood?”

I said, “No, not exactly, but that's an awful lot of money for mares.”

“Well, then,” he said, “what do you think you would give for them?”

I said, “I might give $25 a head for twenty-eight head, if they're all just like the ones we saw.”

Of course he said they were. And the old ranch foreman said the mares were all of the same breeding and all close kin. You could tell this young Collin wasn't too interested in their breeding, but he said that since this was Friday, it would be Monday before he could get them up and deliver
them in the pens to me—for $25 a head. If I wanted to buy them, I could pay him half of it in cash now and the other half when I got the mares.

Well, I tried to set like I was worrying about it. Of course I had long since known I was going to buy the mares, but I didn't want to seem too anxious. I might scare this young blade a little bit about that being a pretty high-price for horses. I walked over by the stove and tore a piece of sourdough bread out of a pan and chewed around on it. Finally I said, “Well, I don't know what they're worth, and I don't believe anybody else does. But I believe if you'll take it, I'll give it and we'll have ourselves a horse trade.”

He said he hoped I would take the mares plumb out of the country. I told him I would, I'd take them back up into northwest Texas. So I gave him $350 in cash. I had about that much in one pocket, and I could pay him that without showing whether I had any more money or not.

In the conversation he had mentioned twice that I could come back Monday after the mares. I thought it was a little peculiar that he didn't invite me to just stay until they could get the mares in the corral for me Saturday or Sunday. He could furnish me some help, and I could drive them out from there. That would kind of be the custom of the West, but I wasn't going to let any little customs interfere with a good horse trade; so I told him that I would ride on over to La Rio, which was a little town over about another twenty miles, and that I would be back Monday to get my horses.

He counted the money. The cook and the cowboys sat and listened and watched, and nobody made any comment about the trade atall.

My horse had got his breath, and I had eaten a batch of that ranch grub around there. Beans, beef, and potatoes—that was the common diet about that time on ranches. There wasn't any refrigeration to speak of, and nobody bought any canned grub to feed cowboys. So I'd made out a big dinner on what I was used to, and told him that I guessed I'd water
my horse at the windmill over there and drift into town. I thanked the cook for fixing me some chuck, said good-bye to the boys, shook hands with the Señor Capitan, Mr. Collin, and got on my horse and rode away.

As I stepped on my dun horse, young Collin mentioned that he was a good stout horse but didn't look like he would have much speed. I said that I hadn't had him long and hadn't tried him—he might not, I didn't know. I did notice that when the young Collin commented about my horse, one of those cowboys had just a little bit of a smile on one side of his face. Of course, everybody said something about one another's horses, and I didn't think much about it.

I rode into the little town of La Rio on the banks of the Rio Grande, way up high on the bluff and looking over into Old Mexico—a typical little bitty old border town. You wondered how it got built there and how it survived. But there were some people, and some business—a country store, a few other little buildings. Wasn't anybody around much it was nearly sundown, but dusk lingers in the dessert regions of the Southwest and it would be a good while before dark. At the back of this country store was a set of corrals to be used by anybody that rode in to spend a day or two in town. Whatever you might buy at the store, your horse or your team was handy there for you. Everybody just generally understood this, and a newcomer knew at a glance that this was the place to leave his horse. At the back side of the corrals there were some little old low sheds, and a few snarled old mesquite trees were in the middle of the corrals. The trees gnarled and you could tell by the bark on them that they had been rope-burned by broncs and that all kinds of horses had been tied to them. The leaves were picked off pretty high, like some old pony had stood there waiting for a rider that was spending a little too much time in town and had left him there to pick at the mesquite or starve. I tied my horse to one of these old trees.

Nobody was in sight. The door to the country store was
open, so I walked in to ask if it was all right to leave my horse there. A nice-looking, squatty old Mexican fellow said, “
Sí, señor,
you are welcome.”

Then I said, “I guess I'll spend the night. I wonder if it would be all right if I make my camp there in the back of the corrals?”

“
Sí, señor,
'most everybody that comes in horseback stays here. You are welcome.”

I walked up the street a little piece to one of the few buildings on the same side of the street—facing north with the back of the buildings toward the bluff that overlooked the Rio Grande—and into the little café. It was a plain, dingy kind of place, but a nice-looking middle-aged man behind the counter said, “Come in. What's it for you?”

I asked him what he had, and he named a thing or two. He could cook me some steak, or he had some chili all ready to serve. Eating there at the counter was a nice-looking white-haired old gentleman sitting straight and erect on a stool. He was slight of stature, but he had a very impressive profile. As I glanced at the food he was eating, I couldn't help but notice that his hands didn't look near as old as his body. To a cowboy, this would mean that there was a man who, even though he had spent his life in the saddle as a rancher and a stockman, hadn't been given to any menial chores. His hands weren't knotted or gnarled up by post-hole digging, moving rock, or the common labor that boogers up a man's hands as time goes on.

I sat down next to him and ordered a bowl of chili. On the wall was a sign that said, “Water, 5c a Glass.” The drouth had robbed the little town of its water supply, and what water that was being used had to be hauled in quite a distance from some wells. There were wells, possibly, in the town that the natives shared with each other, but for water that had to be hauled to serve to a passer-by there was a charge. I glanced at the sign and said, “I'll need some water.”

The café man put a goblet down—one of those heavy, old-timey kind that stand up on a stem—and poured it full of water. I noticed the old gentleman that I had sat down by, his glass was empty. I said, “And my friend would like another glass of water.”

The old gentleman gave a quick sort of glance at me and said, “I thank you, sir,” in the clearest, best English speech that I had heard in a long time.

I finished my supper and walked out on the street and back down to put my horse away. I realized then that I was going to have to figure out some way to water my horse. The mercantile store had turned on a dim light, so I walked in and asked if I could buy some feed for my horse, and where could I water him. The man said he had some oats and alfalfa, but that water was precious. At the back of the store he had a tank of water hauled up from the river. It wasn't quite fit for a man to drink but it was all right for horses. It was a quarter a tubful.

I said, “Well, I know my horse will drink a tubful.”

He went to the back of the store to dip me some oats, and he got me two small chips of alfalfa hay from a couple of bales in a little lean- to on the back of the store. With the drouth, feed was scarce and money was scarce, and few people fed their livestock. They just changed horses and rode them on whatever they could find to eat—so, naturally, he didn't have a lot of feed on hand. Then he reached over and turned an old wheel on a pipe at the back wall of the store, and a tub on the outside began to fill with water. When I looked outside, the tub turned out to be a great big old wood tub made of hand-hewn wood stays bound by two wagon tires.

I unsaddled my horse and slipped the bit out of his mouth and just left one rein to go around his neck to lead him around to his tub of water. He drank about half of it, and I heard a sort of half-nicker from a horse in the small corral behind me. I looked up. The old gentleman that I had eaten
beside at the café was walking out to his horse, which was an unusual individual, just like the man who owned him. This was a horse of much substance with a good topline and good legs, heavily muscled hindquarters, and gathering muscles along his back and his belly that you might say were overdeveloped. He was a horse that showed to have had much use—and much care, too. His feet were in good condition, his mane and tail combed. He had been ridden hard. The hair was short over his loins where the saddle rubbed. The hair had been worn off on the side where his cinch fit him. No sores, no scars, no blemishes—just the hair cut away by constant use of the cinch. I couldn't help but admire such a useful-looking horse—neither young nor old, but a horse in his best using years, something like ten or twelve years old.