Horse of a Different Color Read Online Free PDF Page A

he’s always worked under an owner who ran the business, and that he hasn’t yet learned to be his own boss.”
    “Hmmff!” Bones snorted. “I’ve got no time to watch over him, and it sounds like the longer I let him keep that stock the more money he’ll lose for me. I was doubtful of him from the start, so never let him have anything but call loans. He ought to be here any minute now, and I want you to stay.”
    Bob had evidently scented trouble, for he was barely inside the bank when he began bragging about the weight he was putting on his stock. Bones let him go for a couple of minutes, then broke in, “I’ll take your word for that, but I can’t afford any more of the slipshod way you’re letting things go around there—loose stock running all over the place and scattering feed from Dan to Beersheba while you waste your help’s time and your own at the scales. I want you to order cars and ship every head of that stock to market next Saturday.”
    “Now wait a minute!” Bob shouted. “It’s no fault of mine that some of that stock’s so puny I have to leave it run loose. Don’t forget that you shoved half of it onto me without no chance to say if I wanted it or not, or even to dicker over the price. Some of them cattle ain’t been on corn thirty days yet, and it takes that long just to get their insides fat. If I was to ship now they wouldn’t bring no more than pasture cattle, and I’d lose all the feed and labor I’ve put into ’em.”
    Bones was often hot tempered, but he waited quietly for Bob to finish, then told him, “Part of what you say is true, and I want to be fair with you. If you’ll ship that stock Saturday and sign over what’s left of the feed, I’ll cancel the balance of your notes. That way you can’t lose anything. You’ve had a year’s living for your family, and you’ll be left with three good horses, harness, a wagon or two, and a couple of milch cows.”
    Considering the amount of feed Bob had let go to ruin and that hog prices had dropped 40 per cent since he’d bought, the offer was more than fair, but he refused it. “Right at the beginning I told you them steers wouldn’t be ready to ship till January,” he blustered, “and you said that would be okay. The way I’m putting weight onto ’em now, and the way the fat cattle market’s going up, by January I’d have leastways a ten-thousand-dollar profit, and I don’t aim to settle for a dime less.”
    That was too much for Bones. “There’s no sense in wasting time with a man who won’t talk reason,” he shouted. “I’ll get a court foreclosure and let the sheriff do the talking.” Then he turned to me and said, “Order cars enough to ship that stock Saturday, and I’ll pay you at the same rate as before.”
    Whether or not it was a bluff, it got results. “I didn’t aim to be unreasonable,” Bob said meekly, “and there’s no need of you getting a court order. If you’ll leave it up to George Miner, whatever he says will be all right with me.”
    We found George mending a corral fence, and after listening to the arguments on both sides he said, “The way I see it, neither one of you comes with clean hands. Bob, your claim that you had stock and feed shoved onto you that you didn’t want don’t hold water. It wouldn’t have been shoved onto you if you hadn’t been willin’ to sign notes for it. A lender has the right to call in his loan, irregardless of due date, if the borrower is heedless or wasteful or mismanages his business, and I’d say you’ve been guilty of all three.”
    Then he told Bones, “Harry, I’d say you’ve been negligent if you’ve just found out what’s been goin’ on over to Bob’s place. If you’d called his loans two weeks ago, nobody could of blamed you for it. But now that you’ve had a tip-off about the bank examiners comin’ this way it’s unreasonable to foreclose or make him ship half-fat stock. Like he says, the last steers put into that lot