Horse of a Different Color

by Ralph Moody

  As soon as Mr. Noble had finished I told the group, “I have rent to the end of the year paid in advance, thirty-nine fine milch cows, and a little more than thirty-six hundred dollars in the bank. If I could work out a deal with the receiver to let me stay on the place, and not to attach my bank account, I’d much rather pay off the judgment than take bankruptcy. Except for a bad loss when the hog market broke so sharply last October, I’ve been able to do fairly well as a livestock dealer. If I’m left enough capital to carry on the business unhampered, and if I’m not eaten up with interest, I think I could pay that thirteen thousand off in a couple of years. But if I’m stripped right down to the hide, and interest is piling up at the rate of ten per cent, taking bankruptcy would seem the only sensible thing to do.”

  Then I looked around at Mr. Frickey and added, “. . . unless the Farmers National Bank makes loans to paupers.”

  I intended it as a joke, but Mr. Frickey asked seriously, “How much working capital would you require to carry on your livestock dealing business unhampered?”

  “Three thousand dollars,” I told him.

  “Could you handle six per cent interest on the judgment?” “Yes, sir, if I had a three-thousand-dollar working fund.”

  Mr. Frickey looked toward Mr. Noble and said, “You’ve had some dealings with the receiver of that bank and found him a rather reasonable man, haven’t you, Jake?”

  “Just and reasonable,” Mr. Noble answered.

  “I presume he’s still in town,” Mr. Frickey said. “Let’s see if we can get him over here to discuss this matter.”

  Then he told me, “Bankers can sometimes work these matters out better among themselves. We’ll try to have a talk with the receiver, and will get in touch with you through the Cedar Bluffs telephone exchange when there’s anything to report.”

  When I left the bank I intended going straight home, but news of the judgment had spread, and so many people stopped me on the street that it was an hour before I got out of Oberlin. Until those people told me how badly I’d been wronged I hadn’t thought about being sorry for myself. But I made up for it on the way back to Cedar Bluffs, and was still enjoying my sorrow when Effie called from the door of her office, “Good lands! Where have you been for the last hour? I’ve like to wore out every line in the township trying to run you down. Bones wants you over to his house as quick as ever you can get there.”

  Bones showed me into his parlor, where the receiver for the Cedar Bluffs bank was waiting. He rose, and as Bones introduced us he put out his hand to shake, saying, “I don’t believe we’re going to have much trouble doing business together, but your friends have been giving me a rough time this afternoon. Sit down, and let’s talk things over.”

  Within five minutes I knew exactly where I stood with him and the defunct bank, and I liked it. Half an hour later we’d agreed that I would sell my milch cows as soon as practicable and turn the entire receipts over to apply against the judgment. I’d turn over at once all cash in excess of three thousand dollars, and could keep a working fund of that amount in cash or other assets. At the end of each month I was to turn over to the receiver my net earnings, less living expenses. In exchange, interest on the unpaid balance would be 6 per cent, I would continue in possession of the place, and there would be no attachments or interference of any kind in my affairs.

  When I left Bones Kennedy’s house I couldn’t have felt sorry for myself if I’d tried to, and was anxious to put my place back in condition for handling stock as quickly as possible. I drove around to Simons’s corral, tossed my saddle and what few clothes I had into the back of the Maxwell, tied Kitten to a door handle, and set out for home. As we passed the telephone office, Effie again called to me, and that time she demanded that I stop and come in. She’d not only found out that I’d lost the case but about the Topeka lawyer trapping Bones, George, and me with catch questions. She was furious, and after storming that the trial had been an outrage to justice from beginning to end, she told me, “I’m going to phone that justice of the peace right now and give him a piece of my mind.”

  “Don’t do it,” I told her; “the fault is mine, not his. I got careless after the big profit Bob and I made on the second lot of stock we fed, and maybe we did come pretty close to partnership on the last one. Anyway, it was close enough that Mr. Noble says there would be little chance of winning a reversal if the case were appealed.”

  After telling her about my meeting with the receiver and the agreement we’d reached, I said, “You know who has each of those milch cows, Effie. It would be a big help if you’d call up and tell them I’m sorry, but that I’ll have to have the cows back tomorrow morning. And I’d appreciate it if you’d put out line calls saying that I’ll put all thirty-nine cows, along with any calves they’ve had, up for auction in the afternoon. Tell the folks, will you, that because of the flood there won’t be any barbecue at the auction.”

  “Hummff!” she snorted. “If I know the folks in this township as well as I think I do, you’d be crazy to have a barbecue, and I’ll bet a cookie you get the biggest auction crowd there’s been anywheres in western Kansas since you sold your horses. Now get on down there and go to cleanin’ up your place. I’ve got work to do.”

  When I started for home again I was surprised to find that the Oberlin-McCook road across Beaver Valley was already being rebuilt. More than a dozen of my neighbors with plows and scrapers were raising the level of the old roadway, and a crew was pouring concrete foundations for a new and sturdier bridge. They’d heard of my losing the suit, and gathered around the Maxwell, but dropped the subject quickly when they found that I didn’t want to talk about it. Instead they told me to let them know if they could lend me a hand in any way. I pointed at the bunkhouse perched atop the barn, grinned, and told them, “As puny as I’m feeling right now, I might have a little trouble getting that bunkhouse down alone. If you’d like to give me a hand with it at quitting time I’d sure appreciate it.”

  All the windows in the house were broken, the doors had swollen so tightly into the jambs that they couldn’t be budged, the paper was soaked off the walls and ceilings, and the floors were six inches deep in a gruel of slimy mud. When I climbed to the barn roof it wasn’t difficult to see why the bunkhouse had floated, even though all my furniture was in it. Four big cottonwood logs had been used as a foundation for the sills, the floor was tongue-and-grove fir planking two inches thick, and the cracks between the upright 1-by-10 wall boards were covered by wide batten strips. The two small windows were four feet above the floor, and the heavy plank door was hung to swing outward.

  I doubt that Noah’s Ark was much more seaworthy than that bunkhouse. No more than three inches of water had leaked into it before the planking and door swelled tight, so the furniture had been damaged very little. When the men came from work they brought four long, heavy timbers salvaged from the old bridge abutment. We made a slideway of them, and had no trouble in skidding the solid little building down.

  Fortunately, I had a few hand tools in the bunkhouse when the flood struck. Aside from those, there wasn’t a tool, a piece of equipment, a particle of burnable fuel, or a bit of food for either Kitten or me on the place. As soon as the men had gone I drove up to Joe’s store for salmon, sauerkraut, eggs, a can of coal oil, and a lantern. Then I went over to the Miners’ for dry corn cobs and a few forkfuls of hay, and to ask George if he’d do the auctioneering for me next afternoon.

  It was the first chance I’d had to talk with George since the judgment had been rendered, but he left no doubt that Bones had told him every detail of the meeting in Mr. Frickey’s office, and of the agreement I’d made with the receiver. He seemed particularly pleased that I’d decided not to file a petition in bankruptcy. As we loaded the Maxwell he told me, “Irregardless of what the doctors down east had to say, if I don’t miss my guess you’ve got a lot more years ahead of you, and when you get along to my age the road you took today will be a heap of comfort to you. I’m not blamin’ them
that’s gone the other route, you understand—them with families of little children and the likes. Sure I’ll auction off the cows if you want me to. That’s about the least a man could do for a neighbor that’s run into the string of bad luck you’ve struck lately. Come on in and have a bite of supper with us. Irene’ll have it on the table in next to no time.”

  I was anxious to start fixing a place to live in until the house could be put into shape, so thanked George for his kindness but told him I’d have to hurry along. To get into the bunkhouse I had to break a window; then I set to work scooping out and mopping up the bilge water. Next I set up the cook stove, put several pans of water on to heat, and cooked supper. After I’d eaten I scrubbed every inch of the 12-by-20-foot room—floor, walls, and ceiling—arranged the furniture, and set up a double bunk with clean bedding and corn-shuck mattresses. By two o’clock in the morning I had myself a snug little home. I’d had to crawl in and out through the window a dozen or more times for cobs, but kept a roaring fire going, and though the heat made me sweat like a harvest hand it dried the door enough that it would open before I went to bed.

  Early next morning I drove to Oberlin for needed tools that Joe didn’t carry in stock. When I got home three divide farmers were waiting for me. They’d not only brought back the borrowed cows, but knowing that we on the valley floor had lost all our feed and fuel, each man had brought whatever he could spare—not as rental for the cows, but in neighborliness and appreciation of the loan. One man had brought fully half a ton of good prairie hay, another twenty bushels of nubbin corn, and the third a heaping wagonload of corn cobs for fuel.

  All forenoon there was a steady stream of farmers bringing back milch cows, together with the calves they’d borne while on loan, and no man came without a wagonload of hay, corn, or cobs. There was no possible doubt that the whole thing had been planned, or that Effie had been the planner, though she’d never admit it. When the last wagon had been unloaded I had not only thirty-nine cows, but nineteen calves, a crib of feed corn higher than my head, a stack of hay as big as the barn, and a pile of cobs the size of the bunkhouse.

  By noon both sides of the road, from the depot to the temporary bridge across the creek, were lined with wagons, carriages, and automobiles—some of them from as far as twenty miles up or down Beaver Valley. The dooryard was crowded, and a hundred or more men and their wives were looking over the cows and calves. I didn’t have to be very bright to know that George and Effie had been in collusion, for at each cow’s head stood the man to whom she’d been on loan, telling prospective buyers how good a milker she was. The sad part of it was that no one of those men would be able to buy the cow himself. The terms of my agreement with the bank receiver required that all sales be for cash, and only the more prosperous farmers had any.

  George was no spellbinder as an auctioneer, but no other man could have done so fine a job for me. At one o’clock he climbed onto a wagon in the middle of the dooryard and told the crowd the story of the cows: that they were the best among all those taken by the Cedar Bluffs bank through foreclosure, and that they’d been on loan since January, most of them to their former owners. After explaining that all sales would have to be for cash, and why, he had a circle cleared and a cow led in. Certainly not by accident, she was one of the best in the lot, and her month-old heifer calf was at her side. The bidding started at $55, moved quickly to $65, and slowed down as it moved up a half-dollar at a time. At $69.50 it appeared to have reached the limit, and George had called out, “Going, going . . . ” when the last bidder shouted that he’d make it $70 even.

  With the livestock market demoralized, and so soon after a disastrous flood, that was a tremendous price for an unregistered cow and calf to bring. Since they’d done so well, George put all the calves up for sale with their mothers, and though no other pair brought $70, none brought less than $65. One or two of the cows without calves went for as little as $40, and a few brought $53 or $54. The bidding moved along so rapidly that the last cow was gone by four o’clock, and I had checks for more than two thousand dollars, well above twice what the cows had originally cost me. That evening I drove to Oberlin and turned the checks over to the bank receiver. I’ve seldom seen a man more surprised, and he seemed as pleased as I was at the amount. There was still a long way to go, but on the first day after the trial I had more than 20 per cent of my debt behind me.

  Sunday morning I started work on the house by scooping up the muck and slime on the floors and shoveling it out the nearest window. Then I set to work scrubbing ceilings, walls, woodwork, and floors with water as hot as my hands would endure, using brick after brick of Irene Miner’s home-made lye soap. For the next week my hands were kept so parboiled with hot soapsuds that they looked like hanks of tripe, but by Saturday night the inside of the house was as clean as if it were brand new.

  I spent Sunday, the third in June, setting window glass and repairing damage to the outside of the house. And as I worked I did considerable thinking and planning. The hog market was still in the doldrums, but I felt confident enough that the upward cycle would set in by early July that I decided to speculate on it to the limit of my trading fund. With long stretches of the railroad through Beaver Valley washed out, I’d have to ship from Oberlin, and it would still be on Saturdays.

  Stock shipped on the first Saturday of the month would reach Kansas City on Fourth of July morning, there’d be no auctions, and I’d have to pay yardage and feeding bills to hold the stock over until Tuesday. To save the extra expense, I decided to put off any shipping until July 9, then remembered that the demand for bacon hogs had—for the first time in three months—been greater than the supply on the first market day after Christmas. The reason had been that most feeders and traders had held off from shipping on Christmas Day, so they’d probably avoid having stock arrive at the yards on Fourth of July. If so, it seemed to me that the demand on the fifth might again be greater than the supply, and that it could easily be the turning point that would start the hog cycle on an upward swing. Before the afternoon was over, I’d made up my mind to put 90 per cent of my trading funds into the best 225-pound bacon hogs I could find, and to ship them on July second.

  Monday morning I set out on my first buying trip since the flood, but decided to call only upon the most prosperous farmers in Beaver Valley, so as to keep away from the red tape of trying to buy mortgaged stock. When I could pay a reasonable percentage in cash, it was always easier to dicker with a man whose stock was mortgaged than with one who had money in the bank; and I planned to drive close deals, so I knew it would be no easy buying job. The last quotation on bacon hogs to come over the air had been $7.85 at Kansas City, but I made up my mind not to pay over six dollars for top grade hogs delivered to the shipping pens in Oberlin. It took me five days from dawn till dusk, but by Friday evening I’d made deals for two hundred hogs of just the size and type I wanted, all to be delivered, weighed in, and paid for at Oberlin on July second.

  16

  Horse of a Different Color

  ALTHOUGH the house was ready to move into, I was comfortable in the bunkhouse, so stayed there and spent the next week repairing fences, cleaning the platform scales, and getting the place back into working order. On Friday I went to Dr. DeMay for my first checkup since the flood, then had lunch at the hotel and tried to sell a few hogs to the McCook butchers. I was talking to Rudy Schneider when the depot agent came into the shop, fairly bubbling with excitement.

  “Here’s your chance to make a heap of money,” he told Rudy. “The Q is putting its whole construction crew into Beaver Valley at the end of the month. They’re going to rebuild the washed-out line and raise the grade of the tracks three feet above the highest flood level. The job’ll take four months, and they’re inviting bids on a contract for upwards of five hundred pounds of meat a day to feed the crew. You’ll have to mail your bid to the chief of commissary operations at Omaha no later than the tenth of July, and there’s only three items to bid on: beef steak, pork chop
s, and pork sausage.”

  “I wouldn’t waste postage on it,” Rudy told him. “Every butcher within fifty miles of that job will be asked to bid, and on a contract of that size they’ll all try to undercut the competition. I wouldn’t take that contract at less than thirty cents a pound, but I’d make a bet that leastways half the bids will be no higher than twenty.”

  After the agent had gone I said, “I’ll sell you overweight sows and canner cows at a nickel a pound. Can’t contracts for construction-crew meat be filled with cow beef and sow pork?”

  “Sure they can,” he told me, “and that’s where the butchers will make their big mistake. They’ll think about a dressed-meat cost of eight to ten cents a pound, and overlook that the bid is mostly for steak and chops. That crew will get sausage and eggs for breakfast, chops for dinner, and steak for supper, so there’ll be no more than fifty pounds of sausage to five hundred of chops and steak. If a man gets twenty pounds of chops out of a three-hundred-pound sow he’s doing good, and out of an eight-hundred-pound canner cow he can’t cut more than a hundred and twenty pounds of steak that’s not too tough to chew. To fill that contract a man will have to butcher two cows and a dozen hogs a day, and he’ll have about a ton and a half of fat sow pork and tough cow beef left over that he’ll be lucky to get rid of at a nickel a pound. Now do you see why a butcher has to get high prices on a meat contract like that one?”