Some More Horse Tradin' Read Online Free PDF Page B

started toward the drugstore. Ihadn’t got to the soda fountain when Mr. Undertaker called my name in a very harsh tone. When I glanced around, several of my friends were standin’ around lookin’ and listenin’ and deathly silent.
    Mr. Undertaker’s neck swelled and his face turned red, his voice was tuned high and sounded full of mad when he started in. “That mare has stood in one place and kicked all the spokes out of my hack, broke the shafts out of it, and tore up the harness. And you guaranteed her to work. What are you going to do about having my hack repaired and bringing me a horse to work?”
    I smiled and reached over to the fountain for a drink of water the soda skeet had set out and very slowly turned around and said, “Mr. Undertaker, I guaranteed the mare not to run away!”

FAST
MULE BUYER
    I t was midwinter and the horse and mule market was at its most active best. I had been shippin’ several carloads of mules a week to my customers over in the Mississippi Delta and in the southern states and had taken the time with this last shipment to get in my car and beat the train to its points of destination and help my customers unload their mules and do a little socializin’ and public relations in order to keep more orders comin’.
    I got orders from customers in Georgia for three carloads of good-aged, good-fleshed, small cotton mules to weigh from eight to nine hundred pounds each, which was the kind of mule that it took for the sandy land of Georgia.
    Then on my way back, I stopped in the Louisiana sugarcane country and got an order from an old customer for a load of sugar mules. A sugar mule was one of the better class of nice well-turned-out mules that would weigh about eleven hundred pounds and show a good deal of style and quality.
    On up in Arkansas some sawmill operators gave me an order for a carload of big, young, sound mules that were to be used in the lumber camps around the sawmill. Any mule buyer with orders for five carloads of mules is very much in business, so I was anxious to get back to Fort Worth for the Monday opening market.
    I stopped in Cumby on Thursday night and stayed with my folks. I hadn’t been to bed very much in several months and my eyes were givin’ me some trouble, mostly from night driving I guess, so Friday I went in to Greenville and my old friend Dr. Strickland tested my eyes. He told me he would send off the prescription and if I would wait until Monday morning, I could pick up my new glasses. There wasn’t a whole lot I could do in Fort Worth over the weekend, so I thought I would visit with my folks, get some rest, and wait for my glasses.

    I was up in Strick’s office Monday morning when he brought in his mail and, sure enough, he had my glasses. He put ’em on me and I made some right smart horse-tradin’ remarks about them windshields and he said, “They’ll feel so good that you’ll get to like ’em.”
    I paid him and broke off for Fort Worth. I sat up straight and spurred hard and got there just after the market opened and the auction was in full swing. I walked into the auction and shook hands and said my howdies with a few friends, but was careful not to wave my hand or nod my head in view of the auctioneer.
    I watched thirty or forty mules sell. Wad Ross was sittin’ in the auction box as he usually did. Jim Sheldon and old Bill Rogers were the auctioneers and they were taking time about selling the mules. It seemed to me that the morning’s stock was pretty good in quality, flesh, and age, with not too many blemishes, and the market was about $15 to $20 a head cheaper than it had been two weeks before, so I set in to buyin’ mules.
    I bought about a half a carload of the Georgia cotton mules almost without competition and I noticed Wad gettin’ real careful about callin’ blemishes and ages and havin’ them written on the ticket. Parker Jamison was