Free Horse of a Different Color by Ralph Moody Page A

did their Christmas shopping. I don’t believe we missed a toy, notions, or candy counter in the department store, and I had fully as much fun as they. I mailed trinkets to my brothers and sisters at home, and sent my mother a check. Then before we left town I bought Effie the biggest box of candy I could find.
    I spent all day Sunday cleaning the trampled hay and corn from around the stacks and piles in the stackyard. Then at daylight Monday morning Bob and I saddled up and set out for the south end of the township on our first buying trip. On the way we laid our plans for making deals. Top grade feeder steers were bringing eleven dollars and a half a hundredweight at Kansas City, and shipping costs from Beaver Township were a dollar fifty, so we decided to buy only the best and to pay about a dime a pound. But livestock was almost never bought from farmers by weight, because no farmer was happy with a sale unless he’d dickered the buyer up a few dollars above his original offer. To provide for it we made our original offers three to five dollars below the actual value of each animal, then let the seller dicker us upward.
    By noon word had spread that we were in the neighborhood, and we seldom rode into a yard that we didn’t find the farmer waiting for us with the stock he wanted to sell corralled for inspection. If a man had steers for sale that were of the size and quality we wanted we always bargained for them first. Then Bob stood aside while I dealt alone for the shipping stock. I’d expected to do a fairly good business, but was unprepared for the deluge of stock offered me on our first day out. Some of it was because farmers wanted to get rid of surplus stock before severe weather set in. But, particularly among the tenants, I think it was mainly because the wives wanted some Christmas spending money. Whatever the reason, I was offered well over a hundred cattle and hogs that day, and bought every one on which I thought I could make a reasonable shipping profit.
    As the animals were bought, whether for feeding or shipping, we marked their faces with a line of identification dye, and told the farmer to deliver them on the Saturday after Christmas. Since Bob would never bother to fill out stubs, I wrote all the checks: against my trading account if for shipping stock, and against my feeding account if for steers bought jointly. I made the checks for whatever percentage of the purchase was allowed by Bones’s list. On the back of each one I wrote out, as I’d done on Mr. Macey’s check, a bill of sale describing the stock, and a statement of the balance to be paid to the bank for the seller’s account. Then, for our own records, I entered the same information on the check stub.
    The divide farmers were wheat growers, so their cattle were mostly milch stock, and they raised few more hogs than were needed for the family meat supply. Bob and I found only sixty feeder steers of the size and quality we wanted, though I bought more than three carloads of shipping stock, largely dry cows and veal calves. But in Beaver Valley, where corn and alfalfa were the chief crops, many of the hog herds were large and most of the cattle were beef stock.
    Our first call in the valley was on Alfred Ashton, one of the most prosperous farmers in the township. He led the way to the corrals and showed us sixteen white-faced steers of exactly the type we wanted. As we climbed the fence he looked me squarely in the eyes and said, “According to what Grandpaw Macey’s been telling around the valley, there’s no need of you and me wasting time at haggling, so name your best bid right off the bat.”
    “If you put it that way,” I said, “I’ll have to say seventy dollars a head, all the way around.”
    “It’s a deal,” he said. “That’s right where I had ’em pegged. Want to make me an offer on about forty shipping hogs?”
    The hogs were of excellent quality and weighed about 275 pounds apiece. Top grade bacon hogs were