Horse Tradin' by Ben K. Green Page B

sounded real good to him, only I could tell he didn’t much think I could gather the mules.
    About that time somebody passed the table, slappedme on the back, and said: “Ben, what are you talking to the judge about? Are you in trouble?”
    As he reached across the table to shake hands with the judge, I was glad to recognize an old friend I had worked lots of steers with. He had some other people with him, and as he started back to join them he laughingly told the judge: “If you ever get to be as good a lawyer as Ben is a cowboy, I’ll take you on as my attorney.”
    That made me feel real good, and you could tell it wiped some of the doubt out of the judge’s mind about me gathering the mules. He began to show more interest in the heifers I had to trade, so he asked me about them. I told him they were mostly Jersey, Holstein, and mixed breeds of various colors, shapes, and sizes, and that they were all pretty
pore
.
    He laughed and said: “You don’t paint a very good picture of your heifers.”
    â€œNo, but I know where they’re at, and I can gather them, too,” I replied.
    He asked me did I owe any money on these heifers. I told him I was pretty dumb, but I wasn’t dumb enough to borrow money to buy that kind of heifers. As an afterthought I said: “Judge, do you owe any money on them mules?”
    He laughed and said jokingly: “No, Ben. I never could get anybody close enough to them to make a loan on them.”
    He was already cheated, because he couldn’t gather his mules. He told me he would rather have that bunch of heifers that he could see—provided I could gather
all
the mules.
    We talked about the weather being bad; and it beingthe dead of winter, I agreed to feed the heifers until I delivered them. We decided that I ought to be able to finish the whole trade in not more than a month’s time.
    I went back to the stockyards, and it was too late to start riding back home, cold as it was, unless I had to; so I spent the night at Mrs. Brown’s boardinghouse. I saddled my horse and left for home early the next morning. By the time I was halfway home, various ideas had crossed my mind about trapping, setting snares, or getting enough men to relay the mules for two or three days in order to run them down; but everything I had thought of so far either would not work or would take too many horses and men.
    I was still pondering my problem when I crossed the Clear fork of the Trinity River, about ten o’clock in the morning. There was an old Frenchman who had a little house on one side of the road and a barn on the other side. As I came up, he was crossing the road afoot. We stopped and visited a few minutes. His horses had their heads stuck over the fence, looking like they wanted some more feed, and I noticed that one of them was a gray mare with all the hair gone off her back and the upper part of her shoulders and around the top part of her neck. There was some pink skin that anybody could tell was scar tissue. I asked the Frenchman what on earth had happened to that mare. He explained to me that he had gotten her out of the Fort Worth Horse and Mule Barns after the big fire which had occurred a few years before. He said that she was one of the many that were to be destroyed because there was no hope they would recover from their burns. They had given her to him, and he had brought her home and healed her burns; but the skin was so light where the collar andharness rubbed that he had never been able to work her. I said: “Sell her to me cheap and I might could use her for a broodmare.”
    The old Frenchman said in broken English that they had given her to him, and he would be glad to give her to me.
    As I led her away behind my saddle horse I noticed that her feet and legs were good, she was in fair flesh, and, in spite of the hideous scars on her body, in good condition. I put her in the back lot at home where my daddy happened to