Some More Horse Tradin' (25 page)

With this batch of braggin' he kind of backed off and didn't say anything more about us havin' trouble with horses, but I could sure tell by lookin' at him that he didn't believe we could drive them half through Dallas without any trouble. I asked him again about payin' him and he said that this was the best breakfast he had since he moved to town twenty years ago and we didn't owe him nothin' for spending the night.

When he got in his car and drove off, he said, “I sure wish you luck on gettin' through town, but if I were you I would wait a little while till all these people going to work get out of the way.”

I waved at him and hollered “Much obliged” as he drove off. Choc turned to me and said, “That feller thinks me and you are green hands at drivin' horses, don't he?”

I said, “I guess so, but this ain't a big enough bunch of horses to get away from me and you in just one town no bigger'n Dallas.”

He kind of grinned at that and we went to saddlin' up and Friole had already broke camp and was harnessing up his mules. We hollered a few times and boogered these horses together and turned them into the road with Friole trottin' his mules to the camp wagon as he whistled some kind of Mexican tune.

We headed them east several miles on Davis Street. Sometimes we had as many cars mixed up in the herd as we had horses, but the cars that were meetin' us could pull over to one side and we would pass them. The cars that were goin' the same way we were were tryin' to work their way through the herd, but traffic wasn't really causin' us any particular trouble. When we came to Zangs Boulevard, we turned them north, and after we passed a park on the east side of the boulevard, this street made a curve and there was a down hill slope towards the Oak Cliff Viaduct. It's easy to get a herd of horses to move faster on a down slope, so we gave 'em a pretty fast push, intendin' to get them on the viaduct between the concrete banisters before they had time to think about it.

Now, the Oak Cliff Viaduct is about a mile long and was the first big viaduct crossing the Trinity River bottom ahookin' Oak Cliff and points west across to main Dallas and all points east. I don't know how far up in the air it is, but it's plenty high because lookin' down from the top of it at a railroad car below, the railroad car don't look much bigger than a Studebaker wagon.

There was a lot of cars meetin' us and goin' on by and there had begun to be a few cars behind us that had to slow up, but we were ridin' in a lope and the herd was movin' in
a long, swift trot when we met a new T Model truck full of crates of somethin' with a wagon sheet tied to the front of the bed and afloppin' in the breeze at the back, and that floppin' and poppin' wagon sheet stopped the herd. As they pulled to turn back, me and Choc built a fence around them ahorseback.

We had lost Friole and the camp wagon, but I could see him back toward the end of the bridge with cars all around that ball of little snorty West Texas mules and there wasn't a chance for them to run away because there was no place for them to go.

We had the traffic stopped goin' both ways and these horses were millin' in the middle of the bridge and of all the honkin' and hollerin' and help we were gettin' from them people sittin' behind steerin' wheels, you never saw the like.

We were just about over the middle of the river channel, and after about ten minutes of this horse fright, there was motorcycle policemen comin' from every direction. One of 'em rode up kind of close to me and went to hollerin', askin' where the man was that owned these horses. Between fightin' horses and wavin' and hollerin', I told him he was talkin' to him. He said, “Kid, you don't own much more than the shirt on your back. Where's the man that owns these horses? Is he back there in that wagon?”

I said, “You can go see.” I thought that would be a way to get one of these motorcycles out of the way.

He rode back and by now Old Friole was scared to death and couldn't speak a word of English, but he waved and made signs and pointed back to me. Another one of them motorcycle policemen was explainin' to me the traffic law and that I had the bridge blocked and I would have to move the horses. I was cowboy'n' all the time, hollerin' and squallin' and workin', and hollered back, “If you would move some cars, I could move some horses.”

By now you could see cars stacked back to the west on Zangs Boulevard and you could see cars stacked back to the
east past the depot. About that time, a train engine ran under the bridge somewhere and blowed the whistle. This bunch of West Texas ranch horses didn't know what that noise was, nor where it came from, but if they could have gone straight up, they would sure have got away from it.

The concrete banister on the viaduct was about three or four feet high and when that train whistle blew a second time, one of them wild, bald-faced, stocking-legged chestnut horses came out of the mill and cleared that railing. I stood in my stirrups and looked over the banister. She was fallin' through the air so fast that her mane and tail was stickin' straight up. I hollered at Choc, “I guess we had one too many, anyhow.”

At quick glance I saw several more horses comin' across the bridge that was fixin' to follow suit and go over the rail. I spurred old Beauty right into 'em and squalled right loud, and when I did, I pushed three head onto the footbackers' sidewalk which was built along the concrete banister. When they started threadin' down that sidewalk that gave me an idea. As I started down the sidewalk, I hollered and pushed these three to keep them goin' and squalled at Choc to pour the rest of them in behind me.

A motorcycle policeman was meetin' them and I squalled at him to get out of the way. He didn't have time to turn that thing around so he pulled it out of the way while we pushed a hundred head of horses by him.

There was a park about a block big east of the depot and south of the Jefferson Hotel. I broke my horse into a run when I hit that grass and headed off the horses in front of me and threw them into a mill and held them there while Choc brought the rest of them down the sidewalk.

Range or gentle horses chum up in small bunches and graze and stay together and when one gets away from the others, they start nickerin' back and forth to locate one another. Now while these horses were in the excitement and milling in a bunch on the viaduct, they weren't making any
extra noise, but when they got strung out single file for a half mile comin' down that footwalk off the viaduct, a lot of them got separated from one another and began to nicker in almost plaintive tones of excitement for their runnin' mates.

While all of this was goin' on, the bald-faced horse that went over the banister must have fallen in deep water because she had heard the nickerin' and had come up the side. As the rest of the herd came off of the bridge, she came out from under it and joined the herd. She was covered with a thin, nasty kind of water and mud and her mane and tail was soppin' wet.

I noticed a big water fountain sprayin' in the air but I didn't think these old ponies needed to stay there to drink, so I rode into them and broke the mill and turned them to drive off the park. Choc had worked around and was in front and he took the lead.

As we turned them off the park onto Houston Street, one of the motorcycle policemen was gonna hurry the drive and he rushed in close and raced his motor. When he did, the muddy-tailed horse swatted him across the face and knocked his cap off and plastered him with mud. His motorcycle threw him and ran wild into the horses before it fell over on its side. As I rode past it, I hollered back, “That's all right, Mr. Officer. I don't believe that thing hurt any of 'em.”

When the leaders got to Pacific, I hollered and waved to Choc to point 'em east. People were tryin' to cross the street and cars were comin' and goin' and we had a few human stock mixed up in the drive once in a while but they managed not to get hurt. I didn't know exactly what was happening with the rest of the traffic at the stoplights because that bunch of ranch horses didn't seem to know the signals and they just kept goin' at a pretty high lope.

Somebody or something kind of broke the herd into where all that bunch of streets cross at St. Paul Street and some of the horses were about to turn south. I saw a man that
was a friend of my daddy's that was in some kind of electric power business in Dallas named John W. Carpenter. I stood in my stirrups and squalled loud enough to shake the bricks on some of the tops of those buildings and hollered, “Mr. Carpenter, head them damn horses and don't let them go down that street!”

I glanced up and saw people's heads stickin' out of every window in them tall buildings awatchin' the last trail drive through downtown Dallas.

Old Man Carpenter grabbed his hat and squalled and hollered and turned them horses, and the way he was working at it, you would have thought they were his own. About the time I got even with him, three or four fellows was slappin' him on the back and braggin' on him, and I hollered, “Much obliged!” As I waved at him, I said, “You would've made a good hand if you'd stayed in the country.”

I don't know whether traffic was gettin' normal behind us or not but it was gettin' thin and wasn't causin' the horses too much trouble in front of us. I squalled at Choc and he began to holler and fight them back with his hat to slow up the drive. I dropped back enough to give them a little air without gettin' to where I couldn't move in if I needed to.

As we drove up Gaston Avenue where there were big fine homes on both sides, these horses were wringin' wet with sweat and latherin' and blowin' and they slowed down to a walk and none of 'em tried to cross the sidewalk and get up into anyone's yard. By now ‘most everybody we met in cars were stoppin' and lettin' us drive past them. We were hazin' the horses a little to one side of the street and there were a few cars working through them. Now and then you would hear a fender bump and there might have been a headlight or two got kicked out during the drive. However, I didn't try to find out about little details like that.

As Beauty hit a nice slow foxtrot following the herd, I took off my hat and wiped the sweat from my head. I began to think a little about what that man over at the cement plant
meant when he said we might have some trouble. We had long since lost Friole, and I knew he had gone crazy with fright but I didn't know whether he had turned back to go to Mexico or was still followin' us.

We came to a nice big open spot to the south side of the street and some of the horses drifted over on it a little bit, and here come a bunch of grown men wearin' kids' knickerbocker britches and caps and wavin' clubs in the air. I guess that was the first time I realized that golf players were one of the more excitable breeds of people, so while Choc rode point, I winged them on the side and got them off without causin' too many new holes in that pasture pool ground.

Along about middle of the afternoon, we watered our horses at the spillway of White Rock Dam. Since we was kind of in the country, we held them up and let them shade and rest a little while. There was a hamburger joint across and back from the road a little piece, and it took a batch of 'em to fill up me and Choc after that morning's drive. When all the horses looked like they had cooled out pretty good, we eased them out up the road in a walk and let them graze.

A little before sundown, we drove onto the square at Garland. I knew there was a big red mule barn with some pens around it across the railroad track on the east side of the business part of town, and we headed them for that barn. In the summertime the work mule and horse business slacked up and Mr. Pace, who owned the barn, wasn't anywhere around, so I opened the gates and stocked his mule barn with West Texas ranch horses and shut the gate and looked back and thought about how much trouble we might have had if we hadn't been real good cowboys.

This herd of horses had endured a pretty bad beatin' from civilization and its ills, such as traffic, hard-paved streets, and gravel-surfaced roads, and they all showed the effects of the day's drive. I had been on my best horse, Beauty, all day and Choc had been riding my other favorite mount at the time, Charlie. These horses had whirled and turned and
jumped and stopped a few hundred times apiece that day and you could say they were badly spent, but Friole and the camp wagon were still lost. I told Choc to unsaddle and stay with the horses and I would ride Beauty back and look for Friole.

Beauty was at this time an eight-year-old and had been my favorite mount for several years. She was fourteen hands three inches tall and had a huge rib cage and heart-lung capacity, and even though she was not a tall horse her body girthed down way below the bottom of my stirrups. Her legs were straight and sound, her back short, and it was unbelieveable how much endurance she had as compared to other horses. Going back to look for Friole could have run into an all night's job, but on Beauty I would still not have been afoot.

I rode onto Friole about two miles outside of Garland. His mules were wet with sweat and had been latherin' under the harness most of the day. He was sure glad to see me and hoped it wasn't too much farther to the herd. He said that them cars had all time been in the way and that his team had all time been scared but they couldn't run away 'cause there was too many people in front of them. I asked him how he knew which way to come after we were out of sight. He said, “The sign from a hundred head of horses wasn't so hard to follow.”

When Friole and I got to Mr. Pace's barn, we drove the wagon into the hall of the barn and unhitched the team. About that time, Mr. Pace heard about the horses and drove up in front. I walked out and shook hands and told him that I knew him from seein' him at the Fort Worth Horse and Mule Market and thought that it would be all right to use his barn even though I hadn't asked him about it. He said, “Why sure, you're welcome, and I'll be down here early in the morning to sell a bunch of these horses for you before you leave town.”