Some More Horse Tradin' (23 page)

He thought this would be a real good job, and while we were leanin' on the corral fence lookin' at the horses and him pickin' out the pair of mules that he thought he ought to drive, he told me of an Indian boy that was originally from Oklahoma that sure did want to go home, and since I was going that way he thought I could hire the boy to help with
the horses and the three of us would make a pretty good crew. I told Old Friole to put out the smoke signals and get his Indian boy—I was ready to deal with him.

He came back in about thirty minutes with what turned out to be a half-breed Choctaw Indian about twenty-three years old, a good cowboy, good-natured, and a good hand. He said, “I'll do twice as much work as Friole.” Then he started politickin' and said, “Nearly as much as you, and I think I ought to have $2.50 a day.”

I told him he didn't have as many years and as much brain as Old Friole. That made the old man laugh. Then I told him he didn't have as many horses as me so I would pay him $2 like I would Friole. He laughed pretty big and reset his hat and said I couldn't blame him for tryin' and he would be glad to have the job.

Me and Old Friole spent the rest of the day around the hardware and grocery stores gettin' some wagon bows and wagon sheets and iron skillets and Dutch ovens and other stuff that we would need for a camp. Choctaw helped Friole rig up the wagon bows and the wagon sheet and went to get his saddle and a small bag of clothes and a blanket.

By the next morning we had a new camp outfit and I had unpacked Charlie and threw all my riggin' in the wagon and Choctaw had started out by riding one of the old gentle horses. I paid the wagonyard man for feed and camp and we left town about ten o'clock for our first day on the road.

Unbroken horses drive a lot better down a road than gentle horses because they are sufficiently afraid of things not to be turning off and they haven't learned to turn down side roads to hunt for open gates the way gentle horses will do. There were plenty of young horses that took the lead and the gentler old horses and mules were mixed up in the herd and by the time we were four or five miles out of town, they had all settled down to walkin' and grazin' along the side of the road and it seemed that we had started out on a
carefree horse drive that would end wherever we ran out of horses, which would probably be several hundred miles further and several months later.

Choc changed horses two or three times that day and none of the old horses showed any sign of being shod and were really pretty good mounts since they were fat and fresh. My personal horses were shod, but I didn't think we would shoe any of the others—we would just ride and drive and change them as soon as they showed signs of being tenderfooted.

We camped that night on the creek close to Talpa and I told Choc that we needed to start catchin' some of these older unbroke horses and let them drag a lead rope tied to a halter for a day. As they stepped on the lead rope in travelin', they would jerk and pull themselves until they got the tops of their heads and noses sore. Then when we started to ridin' them, they wouldn't pull on us as hard and we would be able to do a better job of holdin' them up and keepin' them from buckin'.

Choc was bigger and tougher than me and could do a better job of holdin' a bad horse's head up to where he couldn't buck, but anybody knows to cheat a big stout unbroke horse any way you can withont hurtin' him and when you think about breaking about a hundred head of 'em, you sure do want to go to saving your arms and legs and all the hide you can.

We made camp a little early, so we rigged out four extra halters, using all the extra rope we had besides our lariat ropes. While Friole was fixin' supper, I told Choc that while me and him was both pretty fresh on this drive, we had better catch some of those bigger horses and he thought that was all right too.

I eased around among the horses on Beauty, and without spinnin' my rope in the air, I sneakingly pitched it on one of the bigger bay horses that I was guessin' to be about five years old. As I eased the slack out of the rope and it took up
around his throat, he came undone and bawled like nothin'—but a scared horse will bawl—ran to the end of the rope, and went to pullin' back until he choked down.

Choc had been showing signs of being a good hand in the little time we had been on the road and, sure enough, when that old pony gave out of air and lunged forward and hit the ground, Choc covered his head like a settin' hen, and when they got up the big bay had a halter on. On the side of the hill in the glade where we were camping there was a big rock that I didn't think the bay could run off with, so me and Choc wrapped the halter rope around this rock and tied it so it couldn't come loose.

When staking an unbroke horse for the first time, it's good to tie his halter rope to a log or a big rock or something that he can drag just a little bit but can't run away with. This lessens the danger of a horse injuring his neck at the withers while pulling back and it keeps him from winding up with a strained neck, commonly referred to as having his head pulled down.

I roped three more big horses—two more bays and a blue roan and we staked them out in about the same manner that we did the first one. They had about twenty feet of rope apiece that they could get tangled up in and rope-burn their legs maybe during the night, all of which would make them have a little more respect for that head rope when we untied them the next morning.

During this horse scuffle, Old Friole couldn't keep his eyes off of the fun, and like all top hands that have aged out, he hollered lots of advice and funny conversation but never did quit chunkin' up the fire around supper.

I guess this glade where we had camped on the side of the road was about four or five acres and there was plenty of room for the horses to scatter out and graze. When we moved horses down a public road and camped at night, we didn't worry too much about them driftin' in the direction we were drivin' them because horses that have been driven far
enough will be tired and won't drift too far, and we would be able to pick them up the next morning when we broke camp.

All livestock, especially horses, are bad to try to turn back at night the way you brought them during the day, so after supper me and Choc backed up away from camp where the road was a little narrow. We both took a night horse and a little feed with us and tied our horse up kind of short on a stake rope. One of us got on each side of the public road, so that if any of 'em turned back in the night maybe we could booger 'em with a blanket afoot or, if we had to, we could saddle a night horse and take after 'em. The grass was good and fresh and there was water in the road ditch, so we didn't have any trouble that night.

While Friole fried some meat and made some biscuits for breakfast, me and Choc untied our wild horses. They all had been up and down during the night from being tangled up in the rope, and you could tell that this roan horse was going to be boogery and hard to ride because he had been nervous all night and had pulled his big rock about fifty feet and had managed to rope-burn every leg from a little to a whole lot.

As we untied these horses, Choc would help hold them. Anybody that knows anything about horses never walks up to a bronc and tries to rub him on the nose or between the eyes because that is a horse's blind spot and he can't see your hand and you will be nearly or directly in front of him where he could put a front foot in your shirt pocket or maybe drive your hat down tighter on your head. So as I worked up to each one's head, I stood a little to the side and worked my hand around to the outside of his jaw where I would be in view of his eye on that side, then I very gently scratched his jaw and under his chin until I could get my fingers in the corner of his mouth. I worked my fingers on the gum along and in front of his jaw teeth until he began to relax a little. As I tickled his gums and scratched the top of his
mouth, he would open his mouth and lick his lips and work his tongue and while he was doing that I would be lookin' at his teeth to see how old he was.

Well, the three bays were four and five years old. The roan didn't think I smelt good and we backed him all over that glade trying to get up to his head. When I did manage to get my hand on the side of his jaw, he was snortin' a trombone tune that sounded like a declaration of war. He thought my hand tasted bad, but his nervousness caused him to work his mouth a lot quicker than any of the others had. Not much to my surprise but very much to my dislike, I found out that he was a smooth-mouthed horse and must have been about ten years old and had never done his part by packin' a man around in his lifetime, and whatever I was doin' or had in mind for him, he had already decided wasn't goin' to suit him.

As we broke camp and Friole drove his mule team out into the road behind the herd, we caught up with a few horses scattered up the road in front of us for maybe a couple of miles. These grass-fed soft horses were a little sore from the beginning of the drive and moved out in a walk and gave us no trouble to speak of during the day's drive. The horses draggin' halter ropes stepped on them a lot and pulled their heads a lot the first half a day. Then, as all horses will do, they went to walkin' holdin' their heads just a little sideways of the drag rope so that it would be to one side of where they were walkin'. This is just one of the ways horses will begin to smarten up when you start handling them.

We drove through Coleman that day and camped early in the afternoon at the edge of town by the side of the road where a little creek crossed. By now these horses were gettin' road-broke and stayed together good, and anytime we would let them stop, they would graze and rest and stay together. We caught the horses that we had haltered the night before and tied them hard and solid to mesquite trees. We thought
we would leave them on a stout old tree during the night and let them find out that they couldn't break that batch of nuisance that they had on their heads.

Nobody had bantered us along the road to trade or buy horses, but some people had asked if we was takin' them to Brownwood. There was a horse and mule market at Brownwood that held an auction on Friday, which was two days and twenty-five miles away.

When I was restin' in the shade of the tree by the mercantile at Paint Rock waitin' for the ranch foreman to come in, I had dug down in my saddle bag and counted my money. I had had $1,004 besides a little change and I had spent $840 for the horses, which left me $164. By the time I paid for feed and camp at the wagonyard and bought the wagon and rigged it out to use, I was down to $80; then we bought a little stuff along the way for the next couple of days, which left me a little over $60. Friole and Choc wasn't worryin' about my money trouble and I hadn't discussed it with them, but I thought that if there was a horse and mule sale at Brownwood, I had better sell a few head before I went to runnin' low on travelin' money.

We drove into Brownwood the next day without too much happenin' along the way and drove our herd of horses past the Brownwood Horse and Mule Market and down to the railroad, where the stock pens were. I thought that we needed to be there all the next day and let our horses and mules fill up and maybe use the railroad stock pens to rope out and take what I wanted to sell up to the Brownwood Horse and Mule Barn the afternoon before the sale the next day.

While we were loafin' around the day before the sale and lettin' our horses graze along the road and along the railroad right of way, Friole took about half a day off and went into town and bought a few things that we needed in camp. Me and Choc saddled the horses that we had put a drag rope on and I snubbed them on old Beauty and Choc rode them.

They were pretty snuffy and tried to buck and did most of the layin' down and gettin' up that wild horses do when you are saddlin' them, but they didn't booger Beauty none and if they boogered me I didn't let Choc find out. He did a pretty fair job of sackin' and sweatin' out the first three. We ate a big dinner and laid around camp until middle of the afternoon and I brought up the little matter of that roan horse. Choc said, “Well, he's old enough now, and we'd better try him 'fore he puts some more age on.”

I cinched old Beauty up pretty tight and rode in and picked up the halter rope and managed to draw him up to my saddle horn. I had three wraps on the saddle horn with the lead rope when he rared up to get away and found out that Beauty had different ideas about it. He decided if he couldn't go back'ards, he'd go for'ards, and when I saw his forefeet comin' where I was sittin, I swung out of the saddle and hung in one stirrup and held on to the snub rope and hid my head behind old Beauty's neck. Well, she wasn't goin' to put up with that, so she ducked out from under him real handy-like and I rolled back up in the saddle. Choc said, “I don't think he likes us, especially you.”

And I said, “Well, no closer than you're gettin' to him, he couldn't have anything against you.”

He was holding his saddle in one hand and a blanket in the other and this complimentary conversation from me braved him up some. As he started into that old roan, Roany hit the saddle with one foot and the blanket with the other and Choc fell about ten feet away with the blanket over his head like he was goin' to try to fake a dead instead of tryin' to ride that horse.

We didn't have any onlookers, so we didn't care too much about the show Roany was puttin' on. I didn't want his front feet and his open mouth in the saddle with me, so I worked Beauty closer to him until I had his head snubbed against the saddle. His mouth was open and slobber was runnin' from him and he may have had it on his mind to bite somebody or
something. I stuck the halter rope under my left knee so I could squeeze it against the saddle and then threw my reins down on Beauty's neck and reached over with both hands and twisted both ears until I settled his nerves and he stood still for Choc to saddle him.

It was Choc's saddle and I asked him if he minded just turnin' him loose in the stock pen with it on. He said, “That saddle might save me some hide that way, so let's let him wear it awhile.”