Some More Horse Tradin' by Ben K. Green Read Free Book Online

the drouth was widespread, and we talked about all the cattle and horses that had been shipped and sold, and so on. But they were still fishing around, trying to find out who I was and what business I had in the country without asking.
    After a while I told them that I bought horses, and that I needed some that would make good polo horses or military horses (the government in those days was always buying horses for the cavalry), but everything I found had been too poor or too old or too something—that I hadn’t had any luck, and I guessed that I’d head out through the west and go toward Del Rio and turn north and come into San Angelo in the next ten or fifteen days.
    One of these cowboys eased up from astraddle the bench he was settin’ on and started out the door that went toward the headquarters. Nobody noticed him, and he didn’t say he was aleavin’, or acomin’ back, or make any mention he had been there. I noticed this but made no comment about it. Pretty soon he comes back following a nice-dressed, soft young man that you could tell had been staying in the shade and out of the dirt. His boots had a shine on, and his britches had a crease in them. And you could tell that his boots weren’t spur-marked, and that he didn’t have too much sign of chap leather on his britches either. I noticed all this right quick. He was clean-shaved and his hands were smooth, fingernails kinda long for a ranch hand.
    In the West, a man never grew a fingernail. He had themtorn off by lariat ropes or reins, or chewed them off because the weather was bad, or something. When you saw a man with nice-kept hands, long fingernails, creases in his britches, and shine on his boots, you would know that he was either the owner of the outfit or was the boss’s son or had married his daughter, that he wasn’t a common cowboy.
    This young man walked in and stuck out his hand and introduced himself. He was the young Mr. Collin that was running the Shield. And, of course, for the first time, I told my name and told him that I was drifting by and just stopped to take on a little of his hospitality. He said, “Fine. I hope the cook fed you, and you are welcome …,” and all that kind of stuff that went with the passing of the day in the old Southwest.
    Everybody else got up and got their own coffee, but the cook brought him a cup. He lit a cigarette, sipped his coffee, looked out the window, and talked about how dry it was and how they’d had to sell their cattle, cut down on their livestock, and it looked like some of the cowboys were going to have to leave and find work somewhere else. He said he’d just almost have to quit running the ranch until it rained and the place could be put back on a profitable basis. He made all this conversation sound awful high-class. He said it in a nice, cultured tone of voice without any pain or chagrin or regret; it seemed like he was kinda looking forward to shutting the outfit down and going to town and spending the winter.
    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.”
    â€œA lot of horses,” he said, “have been sold here duringthe 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