Horse of a Different Color Read online

  It was good news. The wire was from my Omaha agent, and read: “CONGRATULATIONS THREE LOTS TOPPED MARKET NET PROCEEDS SIXTY-THREE FIFTY-SEVEN EIGHTY-FIVE.” For a moment I couldn’t comprehend it, for that was within $215 of what I’d paid for all the hogs I’d bought, and I still had 314 in the pasture.

  Emotionally, I must have been put together backward. I’d taken it fairly well when the bottom dropped out of the livestock market in December, when the flood cleaned us out, and when the judge ruled against me on the partnership, but when I read that telegram my nerves went all haywire for a few seconds. My knees felt wobbly, my hands trembled, and I couldn’t keep tears from coming into my eyes.

  Some people said that Effie Simons was coarse and rough, but that was because they didn’t know her very well. She understood what ailed me instantly, and a lot better than I could have explained it. There were half a dozen men on the street, and their attention had been attracted when she called out that there was a telegram for me. But before anyone had a chance to notice that I was having trouble she stepped back inside her office and pulled me with her.

  Out of sight from the street, she hugged me against her, but only for a second. If it had been longer I’d have broken down and blubbered like a baby, but she knew that too, turned me loose, and gave me a good solid slap on the back. “The kind of lickin’s you’ve run into this past year are mighty tough for a kid your age to take,” she told me, “and don’t forget that the folks hereabouts know it. That’s why some of us are so scared you’ve gone and set your meat prices way too cheap.”

  That slap on the back pulled me together as nothing else could have. “Without the farm trade, I’d be licked again,” I told her. “But if I can hold onto it and get rid of all my leftovers I can make a good profit at these prices.”

  “You don’t need to fret about the farm trade,” she told me. “As long as you give the folks the kind of stuff you’ve turned out so far, along with the price and credit and free pans and buckets, you couldn’t drive ’em away. I don’t suppose you’ve made sweethearts out of the butchers over to McCook and Oberlin, but you’ve sure made a heap of friends up and down this valley and on both divides. Now you trot along home and give me a chance to get line calls out or it’ll be noontime before I have today’s orders ready for you.”

  I didn’t let myself build any more air castles, but I’ve seldom been happier than when I left Effie’s office. Thanks to George Miner’s hog cycle theory, my only cost for enough pork to fill the railroad contract and an equal amount of farm business would be for corn to feed the hogs still in my pasture. If, as Effie believed it would, my farm trade held up, there seemed a reasonably good chance that I might work my way out of debt by the end of the year.

  From that day our butcher business settled into a routine. Nick and I were up at four o’clock, by seven I pulled away with the railroad delivery, and by eight I was back with Effie’s sheaf of farm orders. Some days I worked in the cutting room with Nick until noon, and sometimes for only a couple of hours, depending on the size of the orders. Then I had the rest of the day to take care of my trading business, haul ice, take hides to the buyer at McCook and bring back our express shipments, or run other necessary errands. I was always home in time to have supper on the table at five thirty, and at six Nick retired to the slaughterhouse to replenish our meat supply. While waiting for customers to pick up their orders I posted the books, and by nine o’clock we were in our bunks.

  Seldom more than a dozen farmers came of an evening, each picking up packages for his neighbors. But Sundays were a different matter. Every town along Beaver Valley had its own little nonsectarian church, but people who attended a church of any particular denomination had to drive to McCook or Oberlin. Then too, farm people like to visit with their neighbors, and in western Kansas anyone living within ten miles is a neighbor, but those who went to separate churches had no meeting place to gather and visit. My place, being on the McCook-Oberlin road, was easy for those going to church in either city to drive past, and soon became the meeting and visiting place for not only churchgoers but the whole community.

  They’d begin arriving before ten o’clock, and it was often after four when the last one drove away. Few stayed more than an hour, but whenever I found a chance to glance outside, the yard was full of flivvers, carriages, buckboards, and spring wagons. The men always gathered in a single group by the windmill to discuss crops, the reasons for the depressed grain and livestock markets, and the sins of the government.

  The women never gathered in a single group, but in knots of four or five, or visited with one another in flivvers and carriages—and it might be that a little gossip was exchanged. But few wives went home without a bucket of shortening, a pan of sausage, or a bundle of meat the size of a watermelon. We got few advance orders for Sundays. To get ready for the big rush Nick and I scaled out and wrapped all such items as stew beef, hamburger, shortribs, and sidemeat in five-pound packages, and no farmer’s wife asked to have one broken.

  After the first week we cut few steaks and chops ahead, for most of the women preferred to select a particular round, loin, ham, or set of ribs from the refrigerator, tell me how thick they liked the slices, and watch as I cut them with the saw. I never could have handled so much cut-to-order business if Irene and George Miner hadn’t “happened over” every Sunday; she to help with the wrapping and billing, and he to fetch and carry between the saw and refrigerator.

  The railroad business soon settled down to about fifty pounds of shortening and five hundred of meat a day. Although slightly less in poundage, the farm trade nearly equalled the railroad business in dollars, and by occasionally switching from tin pans and buckets to enamelware kettles and bowls I had no trouble in selling every scrap of leftovers and by-products. Then too, the meat business helped my livestock trading. As I made my trading rounds, one man after another would say, “How about taking this hog (or it might be a calf, cow, or steer) in on my meat bill? I’ll fetch it down the next time I come for meat, and you can credit me with whatever’s right.”

  I never made a profit on those animals, but allowed within a cent a pound of the latest radio quotation. When I bought mortgaged stock from a customer he always had me take the amount of his bill out of the percentage the bank would allow me to pay him in cash. From August 7 until Thanksgiving, there was never a Saturday when I didn’t ship at least one carload of stock, and from among the cattle I bought I always picked out the best heifers for butchering.

  Although I made a fair profit on all but two or three of the carloads I shipped that fall, I made money faster than ever before or since in my life on a couple of carloads that I didn’t ship. One Saturday in mid-October I drove two carloads of fat steers to Oberlin. When I got them there the largest shipping pens were filled with sheep and lambs, the gate between them was open, and two double-decked stock cars were spotted on the siding. There were still a couple of hours till train time, but a man with two teen-aged boys and four nondescript dogs was trying unsuccessfully to drive the sheep into the cars. Though obviously a farmer, the man was a stranger to me, and it was evident that he was no stockman. I wanted to be friendly, so went over to tell him that the easy way to load sheep was to tie a bleating lamb at the far end of each deck, then stand aside to close the doors when the curious ewes went in to investigate.

  I should have known better, because the man was angry, but I climbed onto the gate, waited for a lull in his swearing, and called, “Can I lend you a hand, mister?”

  He glared up at me and shouted, “You tend to your own business and leave me tend to mine! Now get out of here!”

  I got out, penned and watered the steers, and went uptown for supper. On the way back an hour later I heard what sounded like a riot at the shipping pens. Dogs were barking wildly, sheep bleating in terror, men hooting, and above the bedlam a booming voice yelling curses insanely.

  When I reached the siding the fence around the sheep pens was crowded with other traders and stockme
n—laughing, hooting, and enjoying the ill-tempered stranger’s predicament. The pens looked like a two-ring circus in the midst of the grand finale. In each of them bewildered, frightened sheep were racing in a circle, two snarling dogs snapping at their heels while a frustrated boy shrieked wildly and flailed them with a bullwhip. The man, his face purple with rage, stood in the gateway between the pens like a tormented bull at bay. Just as I climbed onto the fence he looked up and shouted, “Who’ll give me a bid on these blasted sheep?”

  I had no idea as to the value of sheep, but he was glaring right into my face and I wanted to start the bidding plenty low, so I called out, “Four dollars a head!”

  “Sold!” he bellowed.

  In a split second another trader shouted, “Five dollars a head.”

  “SOLD!” I yelled, right in unison with the irate man in the gateway. He tried his best to run a bluff that he’d never sold to me, but there were too many witnesses present, and I had a lot of good friends among them.

  Given ten minutes of quiet, the sheep forgot their panic and loaded easily. The count was 258, and though I’d been a sheep owner for less than two seconds my profit was a good one. On the way home I tried to figure out in my head the amount a man would make in an eight-hour day at $129 a second, but lost track after passing three million.

  24

  Dr. DeMay’s Discovery

  FROM the time I quit my diet and went onto beefsteak, potatoes, and hot biscuits three times a day I’d been putting on weight at about the same rate as the hogs in my pasture. I’d never once gone to see Dr. DeMay, and might have stayed away months longer if it hadn’t been for the sheep deal and so few people coming to pick up meat packages on weekday evenings.

  Nick always retreated to his sanctuary right after supper and never came out until he was sure there’d be no more customers. That left me alone from six till eight thirty with only a few interruptions when someone came for packages. I’d gradually fallen into the habit of writing to Edna every evening, and she’d always answered. Ours weren’t love letters—just more or less visiting on paper—but each one added fuel to my rekindled affection for her. I’d been careful to keep it from showing in my letters, but by mid-October I longed for her more than anything I’d ever wanted in my life.

  Tuesdays were my paydays. The mail always brought my weekly meat check from the railroad and my agent’s check for the livestock I’d shipped on Saturday. In August I’d paid off my loan to the Farmers National and my hog mortgage to the receiver of the Cedar Bluffs bank. Since then I’d been whittling away at my debt by turning over to him each Tuesday the balance of my account in excess of three thousand dollars.

  The reduction had been slow, however, for the accounts on my books had increased from week to week, and the payments had all been in nubbin corn or livestock of almost every type and description. It ranged from weanling calves and 50-pound pigs to 400-pound sows and 1000-pound dry cows. The only thing I could do was to put them in the pasture, feed them, and let them accumulate until I had enough of some particular type to ship a carload—and the market slipped steadily downward.

  A few days after I sold my two carloads of bacon hogs at the end of July the market fell off sharply. By the end of September hog prices had dropped four dollars a hundred, but I’d been hurt very little by it. Almost invariably, it was shoats or overweight sows that were turned in on the meat accounts. I used the sows for butchering, so had no shipping expense on them, and the shoats I turned into the pasture. For every sixty I took in, I shipped out a carload that had grown from shoats to bacon hogs since I bought them.

  By early September I’d taken in more nubbin corn than my hogs could eat, so put sixty good steers in the feed lot. They’d done extremely well and were the ones I’d been shipping when I became a sheep owner for two seconds. The sheep windfall was $258, the steers made a profit of nearly $400, my railroad business that week was larger than usual, and when the checks came in on Tuesday I was able to take the first big slice off my debt.

  On the fifteenth of October George Miner helped me round up, inventory, and set a value on every head of livestock in my pasture. The first thing after supper I went over the accounts on my books, adding them up and making allowances for any that I had the least doubt of collecting. To my amazement, I found that my assets, conservatively valued, were within approximately eighteen hundred dollars of my debts. And there were still six weeks until the end of the railroad contract. Unless there was another flood or the place burned down, I was certain to be out of debt before the end of the year.

  I was so happy that I couldn’t keep it to myself, and that evening I wrote Edna a dozen pages, telling her about all my financial ups and downs since coming to Kansas. I told her of my big hauling, trading, and feeding profits, and of losing everything when the livestock market collapsed in the fall of 1920; of gaining back during the winter and spring of 1921, only to be cleaned out by the flood in June; of thinking I was hopelessly ruined when the court ruled that I was liable for Bob’s debts; and about the streak of good luck I’d been riding ever since. I wound the letter up by bragging that I’d made more than a thousand dollars in the past week, would be completely out of debt before Thanksgiving, had gained sixty pounds, and was never healthier in my life. Then I read the letter over, threw it in the stove, and set a match to it.

  The next morning I saved the first specimen after getting up—the one doctors always wanted for testing—took it with me when I made the railroad delivery, and drove straight to McCook. I was waiting outside Dr. DeMay’s office when he arrived, but he didn’t recognize me until I spoke, and then seemed as startled as if he’d seen a ghost. For more than a minute he stood looking me over from head to foot and back again. “Well, son,” he said at last, “I’ve been wondering why you quit me, but I don’t wonder any more. Whoever your physician is now, don’t leave him. I never saw anything like it in my life.”

  He looked even more astonished when I told him that I hadn’t been to any other doctor, and that I’d been living on beefsteak, potatoes, and hot biscuits for three months. “Hmff!” the old doctor snorted. “There’s something here that doesn’t gee. Did you bring along a specimen?”

  “Yes, sir,” I told him, “the first one this morning.”

  He snatched the bottle from me and ran up the stairs to his office as though he were sixteen instead of in his sixties, calling back over his shoulder, “This is the most curious thing I’ve heard of in medical practice. Take a chair by my desk while I run a couple of tests. If anybody else comes, tell ’em to wait outside.”

  For twenty minutes the only sounds were the tinkle of glass or an occasional snort from the doctor’s laboratory room. He didn’t say a word when he came out, but sat down at the desk and thumbed back through the book in which he’d always made notes after testing my specimens. Suddenly he whirled his swivel-chair around and began firing questions at me as though he were a lawyer cross-examining a key witness in a murder trial. After a dozen or more that I don’t remember, he asked, “How many analyses of your urine had been made before the first one in which sugar was discovered?”

  “None,” I told him. “There was never anything wrong with me before that except a leaky heart and a few broken bones.”

  “How many carbuncles did you have last spring?”

  “Thirty-nine,” I said.

  He ran a finger under an entry in the journal and said, “Kind of petered out toward the end, didn’t they?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “The last few were only cat boils.”

  He hummed as if pleased with the answer and said, “Now tell me, how much have you been worrying of late?”

  “None,” I said with a grin. “I haven’t had much to worry about for the past couple of months.”

  A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth and he said, “So I hear,” then drew his brows together in a frown and asked, “Didn’t you think your health was something to worry about . . . after quitting your diet without medical
advice?”

  “I haven’t had much time for worrying since then,” I told him. “Besides, I’ve gained nearly a pound a day and never felt better or stronger in my life.”

  Dr. DeMay sat for a minute, staring down at his desk and tapping it with a stubby forefinger, then looked up and told me, “As I said before, this is the most curious case I’ve come across in medical practice. There isn’t one iota’s variation in the sugar content of the specimen I just tested and the one you brought me when you first came in here two years ago.”

  For another minute the white-thatched doctor sat tapping his desk, then swung toward me and rested his elbows on his knees. “Within the past few months a synthetic insulin has been developed and is now in the experimental stage,” he told me. “A little of it injected into the blood stream has been found to give temporary relief from diabetes—retarding the breakdown of proteins and enabling the body to utilize fats and sugars—but there’s no known cure for the disease and I never heard of its curing itself. Still and all, you’ve made a miraculous recovery—that is, if you were ever in bad enough shape to justify that Boston prognosis, and the more I think about it the more I doubt it.

  “Now you understand, I’m no specialist at diabetes, and what I’m going to tell you is simply a country doctor’s opinion, but it’s the only way I can make sense or reason out of this thing. First off, though I don’t hold too much with Christian Science, I do believe that a lot of physical ills are brought on and aggravated by state of mind. When you first came to me you’d just made a lot of money hauling wheat, hadn’t you, and didn’t have a worry in the world—outside of the sentence those Boston specialists had dished out to you?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Your specimen showed little more than a trace of sugar then, and remained about the same until last December, then the content doubled. Wasn’t that when the livestock market broke, and from then till after the time you saw me in June weren’t you worrying yourself about half sick?”