Some More Horse Tradin' (5 page)

They had already assigned me three different pens for the different classes of mules that I was buyin', and as the auctioneer dropped the hammer on each mule, a messenger boy would bring me a copy of the ticket. It was the custom of the trade that sometime during the day, you would go down the alley to where your mules were penned and inspect each mule against the description on its ticket. If a mule's age had been misrepresented or if there were scars or blemishes that had not been called and written on the ticket, the bidder had the privilege of rejecting that mule. Rejects were then sold after all the fresh stock were sold and naturally brought less money than they had in the first go-around.

Denny was helping me with my mules, and as he turned the pen of Georgia cotton mules out on the plank-floored alley for us to catch and look at, I realized that it was a good deal darker in the barn alley than it had been in the auction ring. Since I wasn't used to glasses, I was catchin' some shadows and reflections, so I reached up and pulled off my glasses. I leaned up against the fence and watched these mules for a few minutes; they suddenly lost half a hand in height and about a hundred and fifty pounds in weight from what they had appeared to be in the auction ring. I knew my judgment hadn't slipped that much and it began to dawn on me that I had raised the market from $15 to $25 a head on the classes that I was buyin' and that was why Wad was watchin' the tickets so closely. As a nervous gesture, I put my glasses back on and them damn mules suddenly gained their height and weight that they had lost when I took my glasses off!

My lumber mules would do for sugarcane mules, my sugarcane mules were about the right size for my Georgia cotton mules, and my Georgia cotton mules were about the right
size for a clown or mine mules, but I didn't have any orders for either one. And my new glasses that Strick had been so reasonable on had suddenly cost me about a $1,000.

O
ld man Charlie Krinskey came through the barn at the San Antonio Horse and Mule Market just before the auction sale was to start and said, “Yeah, Ben, I see that you're lookin' at those fine old horses. The Shield horses, you know, have been famous for many years in this country.”

The two horses that I was looking at were branded with a shield on the left hind leg about the level of the point of the flank, and I remembered that I had seen horses with this brand before. I saw that the legs of these horses showed signs of much abuse, but when you looked at their withers and their backs and their beautiful loins and their good hindquarters, when you noticed the set of their ears and the width between their eyes, you couldn't help but wish that you'd had a horse like this when he was a four-year-old.

Now a man that spends his life horseback—and starts at a tender age—develops a keen eye for a good horse. He is ever in search of one that is better than the horse he has under him, or even better than the ones he is trying to breed at home. When the clothes he wears and the very meat and bread that go into his mouth are earned with, by, or from a horse, a man gets pretty sharp about horses. And I've been in tight spots with wild cattle and bad horses, spots where what my horse could do within the next few seconds would determine how well I would enjoy the next gasp of breath. So with such a background, I asked, “Mr. Krinskey, where do these horses come from, and why don't we see more of them?”

Down on the Rio Grande, he told me, there was a family that had bred these horses for many generations. They branded a shield on the shoulder of the mares and a shield on the hindquarter of the horses, and he had never seen a sorry one. But he had heard that the breed was running out, the old horse-members of the family had passed on and it would just be a matter of time until the Southwest would lose another strain of fine horses.

There was a severe drouth in the Southwest, it had been hanging on for several years. Cattle and horses had been sold off in great droves, and there wasn't too much livestock left in the country. There had been no demand for broodmares. All men that were working livestock rode geldings. All the remudas at chuck wagons were geldings, and mares were seldom used for anything but to raise colts. Charlie and I talked about that, too.

He said, “Yeah, not much attention is gittin' paid to 'em,
and the broodmares of the country are gittin' sorrier as automobiles are gittin' more plentiful.”

Of course, when he mentioned automobiles it was just kind of a passing word. They hadn't cut too deep into the horse business; no such thing as a tractor existed to my knowledge; and nobody was too much worried about the future of the horse. We just assumed that we'd always have to have thousands of them and that they would be with us forever.

I stood looking over the fence as Charlie walked on down through the barn, and it just kinda occurred to me that if some young man had taken over the Shield that wasn't too interested in the horse business, this might be the place for me to get some broodmares better than I had ever owned. I thought about this all morning, made further inquiry, and learned a little about the way to get to the Shield Ranch. The best I could gather, it must be about two hundred miles—and I thought it would be a worthwhile trip to see if there were any Shield mares with all the many generations of good breeding in them that I could own at a reasonable figure and maybe keep myself mounted for the rest of my life. Horsemen are inclined to ramble like this in their thinking. Had it not been so, there would not have been developed such great breeds of horses as mankind has enjoyed through the years.

Next morning I loaded my saddle and the rest of my riggin' on a passenger train to Uvalde, Texas. This was gettin' pretty far down in the big steer and brush country—ranches got bigger and fences got fewer. I got off the train in Uvalde and went up to a fine old hotel of the west on the square where I stood around a little while and visited. I found out there was a man who had a trading yard down close to the stock pens by the railroad track. I moseyed off down there afoot and saw he had some good saddle horses—and some others, too. I picked out a good dun horse that had clean feet and legs and a good, stout, hard body. He was
shod. You could tell he had been used and was hard on grain and would be able to carry a man a long ways.

When I asked the fellow that had the horses about buying a saddle horse, he pointed out two or three different horses to me and made me a talk about each one of them. I looked over at the dun horse and asked about him. “Well,” this fellow said, “yes, he's a good horse, but he's a horse I use myself, and he wouldn't come too cheap.”

He didn't know it, but I wasn't looking for one too cheap. I was looking for one that could go deep into the brush country and give a man a fair chance of getting back on the same horse he left on. We didn't haggle much. He priced the horse too cheap, so I bought it.

This fellow took me up to the hotel in a little Ford roadster and went back down to his pens. I saddled my horse and started off. The horse moved out nice and had a good, long, flat running walk. He had a good short back and carried me easy and felt stout under me. I could tell he was what I needed for the trip I had in mind. He was about fifteen hands high, weighed a thousand and fifty pounds, and had a smooth way of carrying himself. He stepped over the ground with a fair overreach and nodded his head a little bit. You could tell he was a good road horse.

I went by Swartz's General Mercantile and bought a stake rope, a yellow slicker, and some grub to wrap up in my slicker and tie on the back of my saddle. I headed out south and a little west of Uvalde, following on the east side of the Anacacho Mountains a narrow country road that I thought would get me to the Shield Ranch. The first night out I camped in the foothills of the mountains by a little creek. My horse staked out good—behaved himself and went to grazing. I made a little fire and fried some meat on the end of a stick, then I made my bed and went to sleep.

It was the fall of the year and a little chilly—good sleeping weather—however, I waked up before daylight. My horse was full and rested, standing asleep on three legs at
the end of his stake rope. He still had plenty of grass within reach. I fixed a little breakfast, got an early start, and headed out over the divide—still going toward the Rio Grande country. This country was awfully dry. I had seen very little livestock, very few cattle and hardly no horses atall. A little after noon on this second day, I rode on the site of a great big wide gate with high gateposts and an arch between them over the top of the gate. On this arch was a wide slab of oakwood with a huge shield burned into it and the name “Broquel,” the word for shield in Spanish, burned beneath the shield.

I turned in and rode several miles before I came in sight of the headquarters of the Shield Ranch. There were a number of houses and corrals and improvements, and some of the big old trees like an old, old headquarters would have. You could see the house had thick 'dobe walls and was tile-roofed, and the outbuildings around it were of similar construction. It had been a ranch headquarters for many, many years.

Of course, a man that had lived his life in the West and had been around lots of cow outfits would readily detect which one of those buildings was the cook shack. I rode up to the cook shack, tied my horse to the hitch rack, and about the time I stepped on the ground somebody from inside hollered, “Git down, tie yore horse, and come in”—all of which I did.

There was a great big old long dining room with a great big long table running down through the middle of it, benches on both sides, and a chair at the end of the table. The cook was one of those old-timey ranch cooks, old and fat and happy about it all. Some cowboys were working in the corrals down below the headquarters. They saw me ride up, and of course they kinda got their work caught up—whatever they were doing—and moseyed up to the cook shack to get a cup of coffee and some conversation and find out who the newcomer was.

The West was pretty polite in those days. Nobody asked
you too many questions. If you wanted to tell them, they listened—but if you didn't, they didn't ask you. Three cowboys came in and got big tin cups of coffee and sat down on a long bench and talked and visited and told about the drouth—it looked like it was going to be a hard winter. I told them how much of the country it covered, and some other things they hadn't heard. In those days, there was not too much communication, very few radios, and not too many ways of getting news from the outside. They had heard, though, that 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 them
torn 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.