Horse of a Different Color by Ralph Moody

for my wheat-hauling business and headed up pages for two new sets of accounts—one for the livestock-feeding business, and the other for my trading and shipping records. It was well past noon before I finished, and it took Bones more than two hours to handle the paper work at the bank. He would almost gloat over my having bought an old cow from some poor top-of-the-divide tenant farmer. As he wrote a voucher for transferring the thirty-dollar mortgage balance to my account he’d tell me, “If that cow is less than twenty years old, I’ll bet I’ve held a mortgage on her from the day she was born. Never did think I’d live to collect it.”
    But when the mortgage transfer amounted to only six hundred dollars on a thousand dollars’ worth of stock bought from a prosperous valley farmer, he’d say, “Now that’s the kind of business I like to see: a man getting everything but his brood stock sold and off his place as soon as it’s ready for market. Don’t forget that every head of livestock shipped out of a township brings in fresh money that makes prosperity for you and me and everybody else.”
    When we’d finished the paper work I signed a new note for twenty-three thousand dollars, making my total indebtedness to the bank forty-six thousand dollars. As I swung onto Kitten and started back to the Wilson place I was a bit proud of being a big enough businessman within two weeks after my twenty-first birthday that a banker would lend me any such an amount.
    Saturday morning Bob and I were out at the crack of dawn, getting everything ready for receiving the stock we’d bought. We were none too early, for soon after sunrise a farmer drove into the dooryard with a load of hogs. Before I could check them off the list and show the man where to unload, two more had arrived. Within half an hour the yard was filled with wagons, and along the roadway as far as Cedar Bluffs men and boys herded little bunches of cattle, waiting to get in and deliver them.
    In some ways Bob Wilson was the most amazing man I ever knew. No matter how large the amount, he never bothered to fill out check stubs, and invariably forgot the amount within two minutes. But he could ride for no more than ten minutes through a herd of fifty cattle, never see them again, and tell each one’s markings and weight a month later. He fidgeted impatiently while I checked in the first few loads of hogs, then told me, “There’s no sense wasting time with all that messin’ around. I know every feeder steer by sight, and if you can’t remember what-all you bought these fellas can tell you.” Fortunately, he soon gathered a crowd around the scales, and forgot everything else in the excitement of betting dollars against dimes that he could guess the weight of any “cow critter” to within less than 2 per cent.
    I’d planned to ship all my trading stock that evening, but the westbound train left me only three cars, so I had to hold most of it over. There were still half a dozen men at the scales with Bob when, in late afternoon, I drove what stock I could ship to the railroad siding. It was dusk before I finished loading, and full dark before the cars were shunted into the eastbound train. With the lot full of new steers, there was no possibility of my accompanying the shipment, so I telegraphed my agent what was in transit, then swung wearily into the saddle. When I rode into the dooryard the corn wagon stood right where I’d left it that morning, and Bob was coming from the scales, whistling merrily and swinging a lantern. “You sure ought to been around the scales this afternoon,” he sang out gaily. “I skun them gazabos out of close onto ten bucks. How’d the loading go?”
    I had trouble to keep from shouting when I called back, “Haven’t you fed those cattle yet?”
    Bob didn’t seem to notice my peevishness, but told me, “Well, daggone it, I aimed to, but anymore the days are so short it gets dark on a man before he can say Jack