Horse of a Different Color (15 page)

“Hummff!” she snorted. “If I know the folks in this township as well as I think I do, you’d be crazy to have a barbecue, and I’ll bet a cookie you get the biggest auction crowd there’s been anywheres in western Kansas since you sold your horses. Now get on down there and go to cleanin’ up your place. I’ve got work to do.”

When I started for home again I was surprised to find that the Oberlin-McCook road across Beaver Valley was already being rebuilt. More than a dozen of my neighbors with plows and scrapers were raising the level of the old roadway, and a crew was pouring concrete foundations for a new and sturdier bridge. They’d heard of my losing the suit, and gathered around the Maxwell, but dropped the subject quickly when they found that I didn’t want to talk about it. Instead they told me to let them know if they could lend me a hand in any way. I pointed at the bunkhouse perched atop the barn, grinned, and told them, “As puny as I’m feeling right now, I might have a little trouble getting that bunkhouse down alone. If you’d like to give me a hand with it at quitting time I’d sure appreciate it.”

All the windows in the house were broken, the doors had swollen so tightly into the jambs that they couldn’t be budged, the paper was soaked off the walls and ceilings, and the floors were six inches deep in a gruel of slimy mud. When I climbed to the barn roof it wasn’t difficult to see why the bunkhouse had floated, even though all my furniture was in it. Four big cottonwood logs had been used as a foundation for the sills, the floor was tongue-and-grove fir planking two inches thick, and the cracks between the upright 1-by-10 wall boards were covered by wide batten strips. The two small windows were four feet above the floor, and the heavy plank door was hung to swing outward.

I doubt that Noah’s Ark was much more seaworthy than that bunkhouse. No more than three inches of water had leaked into it before the planking and door swelled tight, so the furniture had been damaged very little. When the men came from work they brought four long, heavy timbers salvaged from the old bridge abutment. We made a slideway of them, and had no trouble in skidding the solid little building down.

Fortunately, I had a few hand tools in the bunkhouse when the flood struck. Aside from those, there wasn’t a tool, a piece of equipment, a particle of burnable fuel, or a bit of food for either Kitten or me on the place. As soon as the men had gone I drove up to Joe’s store for salmon, sauerkraut, eggs, a can of coal oil, and a lantern. Then I went over to the Miners’ for dry corn cobs and a few forkfuls of hay, and to ask George if he’d do the auctioneering for me next afternoon.

It was the first chance I’d had to talk with George since the judgment had been rendered, but he left no doubt that Bones had told him every detail of the meeting in Mr. Frickey’s office, and of the agreement I’d made with the receiver. He seemed particularly pleased that I’d decided not to file a petition in bankruptcy. As we loaded the Maxwell he told me, “Irregardless of what the doctors down east had to say, if I don’t miss my guess you’ve got a lot more years ahead of you, and when you get along to my age the road you took today will be a heap of comfort to you. I’m not blamin’ them that’s gone the other route, you understand—them with families of little children and the likes. Sure I’ll auction off the cows if you want me to. That’s about the least a man could do for a neighbor that’s run into the string of bad luck you’ve struck lately. Come on in and have a bite of supper with us. Irene’ll have it on the table in next to no time.”

I was anxious to start fixing a place to live in until the house could be put into shape, so thanked George for his kindness but told him I’d have to hurry along. To get into the bunkhouse I had to break a window; then I set to work scooping out and mopping up the bilge water. Next I set up the cook stove, put several pans of water on to heat, and cooked supper. After I’d eaten I scrubbed every inch of the 12-by-20-foot room—floor, walls, and ceiling—arranged the furniture, and set up a double bunk with clean bedding and corn-shuck mattresses. By two o’clock in the morning I had myself a snug little home. I’d had to crawl in and out through the window a dozen or more times for cobs, but kept a roaring fire going, and though the heat made me sweat like a harvest hand it dried the door enough that it would open before I went to bed.

Early next morning I drove to Oberlin for needed tools that Joe didn’t carry in stock. When I got home three divide farmers were waiting for me. They’d not only brought back the borrowed cows, but knowing that we on the valley floor had lost all our feed and fuel, each man had brought whatever he could spare—not as rental for the cows, but in neighborliness and appreciation of the loan. One man had brought fully half a ton of good prairie hay, another twenty bushels of nubbin corn, and the third a heaping wagonload of corn cobs for fuel.

All forenoon there was a steady stream of farmers bringing back milch cows, together with the calves they’d borne while on loan, and no man came without a wagonload of hay, corn, or cobs. There was no possible doubt that the whole thing had been planned, or that Effie had been the planner, though she’d never admit it. When the last wagon had been unloaded I had not only thirty-nine cows, but nineteen calves, a crib of feed corn higher than my head, a stack of hay as big as the barn, and a pile of cobs the size of the bunkhouse.

By noon both sides of the road, from the depot to the temporary bridge across the creek, were lined with wagons, carriages, and automobiles—some of them from as far as twenty miles up or down Beaver Valley. The dooryard was crowded, and a hundred or more men and their wives were looking over the cows and calves. I didn’t have to be very bright to know that George and Effie had been in collusion, for at each cow’s head stood the man to whom she’d been on loan, telling prospective buyers how good a milker she was. The sad part of it was that no one of those men would be able to buy the cow himself. The terms of my agreement with the bank receiver required that all sales be for cash, and only the more prosperous farmers had any.

George was no spellbinder as an auctioneer, but no other man could have done so fine a job for me. At one o’clock he climbed onto a wagon in the middle of the dooryard and told the crowd the story of the cows: that they were the best among all those taken by the Cedar Bluffs bank through foreclosure, and that they’d been on loan since January, most of them to their former owners. After explaining that all sales would have to be for cash, and why, he had a circle cleared and a cow led in. Certainly not by accident, she was one of the best in the lot, and her month-old heifer calf was at her side. The bidding started at $55, moved quickly to $65, and slowed down as it moved up a half-dollar at a time. At $69.50 it appeared to have reached the limit, and George had called out, “Going, going . . . ” when the last bidder shouted that he’d make it $70 even.

With the livestock market demoralized, and so soon after a disastrous flood, that was a tremendous price for an unregistered cow and calf to bring. Since they’d done so well, George put all the calves up for sale with their mothers, and though no other pair brought $70, none brought less than $65. One or two of the cows without calves went for as little as $40, and a few brought $53 or $54. The bidding moved along so rapidly that the last cow was gone by four o’clock, and I had checks for more than two thousand dollars, well above twice what the cows had originally cost me. That evening I drove to Oberlin and turned the checks over to the bank receiver. I’ve seldom seen a man more surprised, and he seemed as pleased as I was at the amount. There was still a long way to go, but on the first day after the trial I had more than 20 per cent of my debt behind me.

Sunday morning I started work on the house by scooping up the muck and slime on the floors and shoveling it out the nearest window. Then I set to work scrubbing ceilings, walls, woodwork, and floors with water as hot as my hands would endure, using brick after brick of Irene Miner’s home-made lye soap. For the next week my hands were kept so parboiled with hot soapsuds that they looked like hanks of tripe, but by Saturday night the inside of the house was as clean as if it were brand new.

I spent Sunday, the third in June, setting window glass and repairing damage to the outside of the house. And as I worked I did considerable thinking and planning. The hog market was still in the doldrums, but I felt confident enough that the upward cycle would set in by early July that I decided to speculate on it to the limit of my trading fund. With long stretches of the railroad through Beaver Valley washed out, I’d have to ship from Oberlin, and it would still be on Saturdays.

Stock shipped on the first Saturday of the month would reach Kansas City on Fourth of July morning, there’d be no auctions, and I’d have to pay yardage and feeding bills to hold the stock over until Tuesday. To save the extra expense, I decided to put off any shipping until July 9, then remembered that the demand for bacon hogs had—for the first time in three months—been greater than the supply on the first market day after Christmas. The reason had been that most feeders and traders had held off from shipping on Christmas Day, so they’d probably avoid having stock arrive at the yards on Fourth of July. If so, it seemed to me that the demand on the fifth might again be greater than the supply, and that it could easily be the turning point that would start the hog cycle on an upward swing. Before the afternoon was over, I’d made up my mind to put 90 per cent of my trading funds into the best 225-pound bacon hogs I could find, and to ship them on July second.

Monday morning I set out on my first buying trip since the flood, but decided to call only upon the most prosperous farmers in Beaver Valley, so as to keep away from the red tape of trying to buy mortgaged stock. When I could pay a reasonable percentage in cash, it was always easier to dicker with a man whose stock was mortgaged than with one who had money in the bank; and I planned to drive close deals, so I knew it would be no easy buying job. The last quotation on bacon hogs to come over the air had been $7.85 at Kansas City, but I made up my mind not to pay over six dollars for top grade hogs delivered to the shipping pens in Oberlin. It took me five days from dawn till dusk, but by Friday evening I’d made deals for two hundred hogs of just the size and type I wanted, all to be delivered, weighed in, and paid for at Oberlin on July second.

16

Horse of a Different Color

A
LTHOUGH
the house was ready to move into, I was comfortable in the bunkhouse, so stayed there and spent the next week repairing fences, cleaning the platform scales, and getting the place back into working order. On Friday I went to Dr. DeMay for my first checkup since the flood, then had lunch at the hotel and tried to sell a few hogs to the McCook butchers. I was talking to Rudy Schneider when the depot agent came into the shop, fairly bubbling with excitement.

“Here’s your chance to make a heap of money,” he told Rudy. “The Q is putting its whole construction crew into Beaver Valley at the end of the month. They’re going to rebuild the washed-out line and raise the grade of the tracks three feet above the highest flood level. The job’ll take four months, and they’re inviting bids on a contract for upwards of five hundred pounds of meat a day to feed the crew. You’ll have to mail your bid to the chief of commissary operations at Omaha no later than the tenth of July, and there’s only three items to bid on: beef steak, pork chops, and pork sausage.”

“I wouldn’t waste postage on it,” Rudy told him. “Every butcher within fifty miles of that job will be asked to bid, and on a contract of that size they’ll all try to undercut the competition. I wouldn’t take that contract at less than thirty cents a pound, but I’d make a bet that leastways half the bids will be no higher than twenty.”

After the agent had gone I said, “I’ll sell you overweight sows and canner cows at a nickel a pound. Can’t contracts for construction-crew meat be filled with cow beef and sow pork?”

“Sure they can,” he told me, “and that’s where the butchers will make their big mistake. They’ll think about a dressed-meat cost of eight to ten cents a pound, and overlook that the bid is mostly for steak and chops. That crew will get sausage and eggs for breakfast, chops for dinner, and steak for supper, so there’ll be no more than fifty pounds of sausage to five hundred of chops and steak. If a man gets twenty pounds of chops out of a three-hundred-pound sow he’s doing good, and out of an eight-hundred-pound canner cow he can’t cut more than a hundred and twenty pounds of steak that’s not too tough to chew. To fill that contract a man will have to butcher two cows and a dozen hogs a day, and he’ll have about a ton and a half of fat sow pork and tough cow beef left over that he’ll be lucky to get rid of at a nickel a pound. Now do you see why a butcher has to get high prices on a meat contract like that one?”

I told him that I saw, but not what I saw, then got out of there and drove to the Miner place as fast as I could make it over the roads, still in bad shape from the spring rains. The temperature was well above 100 degrees, and when I pulled into the dooryard George was sitting on the vine-covered porch. “Goin’ to be a scorcher,” he called out. “Come on in and sit a spell. I just fetched some ice and lemons home from Oberlin, and Irene’s whackin’ up a pitcher of cold lemonade.”

“Can’t think of anything that would go better on a day like this,” I called back as I climbed out of the old Maxwell and started up the walk, “It sure won’t be a very good weekend for shipping if this hot spell holds.”

“Still aimin’ to ship out them two carloads of bacon hogs tomorrow?” he asked.

“I’ll just about have to,” I told him; “they were all bought for delivery at Oberlin on July second.”

“Don’t reckon you’re makin’ no mis——Sit over here in the shade, son. Irene, she’ll fetch another chair. Irregardless of the hot spell, I have a notion you’re on the right track. I wouldn’t doubt me that the day-after-the-Fourth hog market will be good enough to more’n make up the extra cost and shrinkage. But if I was in your boots I believe I’d go along with my hogs, and I’d put a water barrel in each deck of both cars, so I could heave a bucket or two over their backs whenever I got a chance. A wet hog won’t shrink in hot weather half as much as a dry one.”

“I was planning to go along with them,” I said, “but I sure wouldn’t have thought about putting water barrels in the cars. I’ll do it, and I’m much obliged to you for the idea.”

“I can’t claim much credit for it,” he told me. “It used to be in the old days that a man wouldn’t think of shippin’ hogs in the summertime without he went along to market with ’em and took a barrel or two of . . . ”

He was interrupted by Irene’s coming out of the house, carrying a napkin-covered tray with three or four tall glasses and a big pitcher of lemonade—chunks of ice and slices of lemon floating on top. George held a brimming glassful out to me, lifted his own, and said, “Here’s lookin’ at you,” took a big swallow, and sang out, “Good gosh a’mighty! That stuff’s sour enough to make a pig squeal! You didn’t make it that way a-purpose, did you Irene?”

“Of course I made it that way a-purpose,” she told him. “You know Ralph can’t have sugar, but if you’ll hold your horses a minute I’ll fetch the bowl.” As she went for it she sputtered, “My lands, I never seen a man with such a sweet tooth!”

With a wink at me George sputtered back, “Sweet tooth! By jingo, there ain’t a tooth in my head—exceptin’ only the bought ones—that ain’t stingin’ like a frost-bit ear.”

Then, as he stirred two spoonfuls of sugar into his lemonade, he asked, “Well, son, what did Doc DeMay tell you this mornin’?”

“That sugar’s down a bit from what it was a couple of weeks ago,” I said, “but he still thinks I’m cheating on my diet. I haven’t been, though it doesn’t seem to make much difference. But I heard some really good news. On August first the CB&Q is sending its whole construction crew to rebuild the track through Beaver Valley and raise the grade high enough that floods won’t wash it out again. They’re asking bids for five hundred pounds of meat a day to feed the crew through November.”

“Where’d you get hold of that?” he asked. “Over the radio?”

“No,” I said. “I was trying to sell Rudy Schneider some hogs when the McCook depot agent came in and told us about it.”

“Did Rudy let on what price he aims to bid?” George asked.

“He isn’t going to bid,” I told him. “He said he wouldn’t waste postage to Omaha on it.”

George’s head came up with a jerk and he demanded, “What’s the matter with that bullheaded Dutchman? Five hundred pounds of meat a day for four months is a lot of business to talk about wastin’ two cents’ worth of postage on.”

“He said he’d bet that every other butcher within fifty miles would bid no more than twenty cents a pound, but that he wouldn’t touch the contract for less than thirty cents.”

“What’s wrong with a twenty-cent price when butchers can buy old sows and canner cows for a nickel a pound? That kind of meat’s good enough for fillin’ a railroad-crew contract.”

“The bids are to be for nothing but beefsteak, pork chops, and pork sausage,” I told him. “Rudy says that whoever takes the contract will have to butcher a dozen hogs and two cows a day, and will have a ton and a half of leftovers that he’ll be lucky to get rid of it any price.”

“Well,” George said slowly, “that does make it a horse of a different color, don’t it?”

“I think the butchers are figuring on the wrong grade of hogs and cattle,” I told him. “I kept books on every animal Bob and I butchered last winter; that’s how we found out which grades paid out best. Toward the last we used nothing but eight-hundred-pound hay-fat heifers and top-grade two-hundred-and-a-quarter-pound bacon hogs. The heifers cost only two dollars a hundredweight more than canner cows would have, and the hogs only two and a half more than lardy old sows. Out of the average heifer we got four hundred and forty pounds of beef; three hundred of them good juicy steak, most of it as tender as steer beef. The hogs dressed out to a hundred and forty-five pounds apiece, and out of the shoulders, hams, and loins we could cut seventy pounds of cutlets that were a whale of a lot better eating than sow pork chops. The rest of the carcass was about twenty-five pounds each of lard, sidemeat, and fatback—besides the by-products—but the fatback in those lightweight bacon hogs was lean enough that people were glad to take it as sidemeat.

“If a man used that grade of butchering stock for this contract and could get pork cutlets included, he’d have to kill only one beef and three hogs a day, and he’d have only seventy-five pounds of lard and three hundred of leftovers to get rid of. Don’t you think that a butcher with a shop in a city as big as McCook or Oberlin could easily sell that much good-quality stew beef, hamburger, sidemeat, and sausage a day at no less than two pounds for a quarter?”

“I don’t reckon he’d have too much trouble,” George told me, “leastways not in the summertime when it’s too hot for farmers to do their own butcherin’. Why? What you drivin’ at, son?”

“Most farmer folks like fresh sidemeat better’n smoked bacon,” Irene cut in, “and they use a heap of lard in harvest and thrashing time. Besides that, if there’s going to be men enough on that railroad job to eat five hundred pounds of meat, it’ll take leastways a hundred pounds of lard a day for making biscuits and pie crusts, and frying patatas and doughnuts and the likes of that.”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t have thought about that,” George told her, “but let’s hold on a minute till we hear what kind of a bee the boy’s got buzzin’ in his bonnet.”

“This may sound crazy,” I told them, “but I’ve been thinking I might try to get some butcher to send in a bid on supplying top-grade pork cutlets and heifer steak, and to give me a quarter of the net profit—if he got the contract—for showing him what kind of butchering stock would make the most money, and for selling it to him at cost. All I could lose would be a little feed and the time it took to buy and handle the stock. If he could get close to twenty cents a pound, I’m sure a lot of money could be made on the contract—that is, if his overhead wasn’t too high and there’s no big rise in the price of cattle and hogs between now and fall. What would you think about it?”

“Ain’t you about fed up on partnerships?” George asked.

“This wouldn’t be a partnership,” I told him. “The business would be entirely the butcher’s; I’d just be getting a quarter of the net profit for the idea and finding him the right kind of butchering livestock.”

“How do you reckon a butcher with enough shop trade to get rid of that much leftovers could keep the income and outgo on the railroad contract separate from the rest of his business?”

“He could keep books on it,” I said, “the way I did when Bob and I were butchering.”

“Butchers ain’t bookkeepers,” he told me. “Most of ’em does well to keep track of what they owe and what’s owed to ’em, and net profit is a tricky figure to get down to. I’d bet a hat you couldn’t figure out what the net profit was on that butcherin’ you and Bob done.”

“No, I couldn’t,” I told him, “but only because most of the meat was traded for corn, chickens, butter, and eggs. I don’t know how much Bivans allowed on the butter and eggs that were turned in on the grocery bill, and we gave the same amount of meat for every bushel of corn brought in, though the best of it was worth as much as a dime a bushel more than the poorest. But I can tell you what the net profit would have been if we’d sold the steak and cutlets for twenty cents a pound and the rest at two pounds for a quarter. The heifers cost us thirty-five dollars apiece, and the meat would have brought in eighty-seven dollars and a half. A bacon hog cost thirteen-fifty, and the meat would have sold for twenty-three and a half. We didn’t have any overhead expenses, except about fifty cents for paper and twine, so the net profit would have been . . . ”

“Gosh a’mighty!” George exploded. “That would be eighty-two dollars a day if a man was to butcher one heifer and three hogs, and his overhead hadn’t ought to run more’n half that much. By jingo, if I was in your boots, son, I believe I’d mail in a bid on that contract my own self. No I wouldn’t neither! I’d go right on down there to Omaha where I could talk to the head man in the buyin’ department, and I’d take along some cutlet samples out of a nice lean young bacon hog to show him. They’d keep all right if you packed ’em in a tub of ice. And come to think about it, I have a notion you’d be better to ship your hogs to Omaha anyways. The hog market up there’s been runnin’ a nickel or more above Kansas City the last few days, and bein’ further north the weather hadn’t ought to be so hot, so you’d prob’ly have less shrinkage.”

“I think you’re right about shipping to Omaha,” I told him, “but what would I do with the meat contract if I got it? I’m not only broke but up to my ears in debt, and all I know about meat cutting is what little I learned from Bob. To handle a job like that railroad contract a man would need to be a first-class butcher and have a well-equipped shop with a walk-in icebox, and in a city big enough that he could get rid of his leftovers.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” George told me. “Around McCook and Oberlin I have a notion you could hire all the meat cutters you’d have any use for, and at not over five dollars a day. As for you bein’ broke, if you was to talk to Charley Frickey like you just talked to Irene and me—tellin’ him the railroad was askin’ for bids on a big meat contract here in the valley, and what Rudy Schneider had to say about leftovers, and about the kind of heifers and hogs you and Bob butchered along towards the last of it, and you keepin’ book on ’em, and what you’d have made at twenty-cent and two-for-a-quarter prices—it wouldn’t surprise me none if he’d lend you enough so’s you could set up to handle the railroad business; that is, of course, if you was to get the contract at a price anywheres near twenty cents a pound and it called for pork cutlets instead of chops.”

“Big as the contract will be, it’s only a four-months’ job,” I said. “Wouldn’t it cost too much to build and equip a new butcher shop for that short a time, and after the job is done would either McCook or Oberlin support another . . . ”

“Hold your horse a minute,” George broke in. “Why in tunket would you put a shop in McCook or Oberlin? The job’s goin’ to be right here in Beaver Valley, ain’t it?”

“Sure it is,” I said, “but when it’s finished there wouldn’t be enough butcher business in Cedar Bluffs to . . . ”

“How much trouble did you and Bob have in gettin’ rid of meat last winter?” he asked.