After the couple of incidents Dennis, Guy and I had with the two mares (Remembering a Friend / She Bucked for Half Mile and Really Honestly....She Never Bucks With Me), the gentleman that owned the ranched decided they would not make a stagecoach team.
On a side note, this guy would buy 100 head of corriente steers and charge people to trail drive them into Cheyenne, for Cheyenne Frontier Days. He supplied horses, saddles and food for 20 people to be cowboys for a week. Made about $1000 a man to do this. He would then sell the steers and bring horses and saddles back to Lamar. One year he had planned to have a stagecoach and do day rides for people to watch. That was our year.
Anyway, after he decided that the bay mare would not make a stage team horse (should have sent her to Cheyenne as a bucking horse, might have done pretty good at that!), he had Dennis and I haul her to the sale barn. He said, "Boys, bring her home if she doesn't bring $700" So off we went. Woohoo! Someone else was buying dinner, what a deal!
It started at the sale barn. I was driving and turned to sharp for the goose neck trailer we were pulling, peeled the fender off of someone's trailer! Dang! But, being the upstanding citizens we were at that time....we told no one! No one saw it, so it didn't happen! (kinda like the "if a tree falls in the forest" thing). We really thought that would be the worst of it.....
Dennis rode the mare through and the scale in the sale ring was jiggleing and shaking. Due (I would like to think, anyway) to our superior horsemanship skills, so she wanted to keep her feet on the ground. She only brought $400. Man, couldn't these people see that the snorting, twitching, bug eyed mess in the sale ring was a fine piece of horse flesh? Dennis even got brave (stupid?) enough to take the bridle off and ride her in the ring! There were no takers to go higher than $400. So, we loaded her into the trailer and headed off to supper.....at the Hogs Head.....
We "ate" supper for about 2 hours and met some gentlemen that were wanting to make a horse trade! After much haggling, argueing and "toasting"....we decided on the mare and my spurs for a 58 Ford pickup. First thing we did was go to their house and drive the truck around, man it was a cherry! Completely refurbished and ready to roll! While Dennis and I drove around, the fellas went inside and invited thier wives to come down to the Hogs Head and look at thier new horse. (probably should have stopped that little item from happening). After we got back, Dennis pulled me aside and said he thought he could come up with half of the $700 for the mare. Well, being the semi-intelligent young man that I was...I figured that left me with $350 to raise. I think we both thought we had enough friends and family that we could pull this off! We toasted the deal and shook hands! I really believe the guys were pretty excited about thier new horse. Heck, I knew Dennis and I were pretty excited about our new truck! Then the party died, their wives showed up! Probably decided they needed to stop the two idiots that lived in town from trading with two idiots that had a horse! Boy, they really kiboshed the deal....we were bummed!
But, beings how the deal had taken 2 hours and a fair amount of alcohol was ingested....we got over it! We loaded back into our truck and headed back to Lamar (the Lord was with us because neither of had any business behind the wheel. I apologize for that now!) Once we had delivered the mare back to her pen, we did what any normal collge kids(well normal for our group, anyway) would do after a night like that.....we headed back to another party at the dorm! Looking back at this and looking forward to the fact that I will have kids in college in a few years, I DO NOT CONDONE THIS TYPE OF BEHAVIOR! It was just two wild cowboys, who didn't have a lick of sense! And since I will have girls in college I will just say......boys have cooties, girls....just stay away from them!
No comments:
Post a Comment