Some More Horse Tradin'
Page 22
I went into the depot and bought a ticket to Greenville and I announced to the ticket agent and to the people in the waiting room that I was fixin’ to sell a young grey horse at auction at the depot platform. I had had such good luck at my horse auction that I knew I could sell this good horse just before I got on the train.
I took Concho’s lead rope and stood up on the depot platform and bellered a few times to where they could have heard me back to Bossier City, and all those people in the waiting room or in hearin’ distance must have thought I was jokin’ ’cause didn’t nobody show up for the horse sale. The people in the waitin’ room was just like me—they was fixin’ to catch a train and didn’t need to buy a horse! After I had made a speech about this horse that I thought would have been good enough to have sold a jackass, nobody bid. The station agent raised the window to his office and hollered, “I’ll give $10.”
About that time I heard the train whistle and hollered, “SOLD!”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben K. Green, whose Horse Tradin’ and Wild Cow Tales and The Village Horse Doctor: West of the Pecos are already minor classics, at the very least, in a rich assemblage of Western Americana, was the kind of Westerner who almost crawled out of the cradle and into a saddle, spending his childhood, adolescence, and young manhood on horseback. He studied veterinary medicine in the United States and abroad and practiced in the Far Southwest in one of the last big horse countries in North America. When he eventually gave up his practice and research, he returned to his home town, Cumby, Texas, where until his death in 1974, he raised good horses and cattle.