Wild Cow Tales by Ben K. Green Page A

left my saddle and riggin’ laying in the corner of my horse’s pen. I covered it with some loose alfalfa I guess out of habit of hidin’ it, because I didn’t think anybody would bother it.
    As I walked to town I felt betrayed over Dr. Turner havin’ me shoe Scotty Perth’s horse so I didn’t go to the drugstore where his office was, and I didn’t have any intention of spendin’ the night with him. So I went to the country hotel. It wasn’t much of a hotel—just an old frame buildin’ with eight or ten rooms upstairs and the dining room and lobby and a small pressin’ parlor at the back of the buildin’ on the ground floor. A cowboy never goes to his room in the daytime.
    That cold mornin’ ride had caused me to believe I needed a pair of gloves, so I walked over to the mercantile.News had traveled fast and it seemed that ever’body knew there was another load of Scotty Perth’s cattle in the stock pens. It was noticeable that the people I saw ignored me or gave me some kind of a distrustin’ look.
    I asked the clerk in the mercantile for a pair of gloves. He looked in his glove counter and looked at my hands, that are very small, and with a sneer on his face said, “We don’t have any gloves for kids.”
    I put my hands in my pockets and turned and walked out of the store. I started across the street to the hotel, where I intended to eat up half a cow and a bushel of potatoes if they had ’em. I felt that I was that hungry.
    Dr. Turner hollered at me when I was about in the middle of the street. I turned and looked at him and walked on across the street. He hollered again to “wait a minute!” adding that he wanted to talk to me.
    We stood in the middle of the street, and he said in a rather strained voice, “Why are you stayin’ at the hotel? Why don’t you come down to the house? You know you are welcome there when you are in town, and I’ll have a hard time explainin’ to my wife why you would prefer to stay in that old hotel than in her guest bedroom.”
    I looked him in the eye and cleared my voice and said. “You might tell her that I don’t want to shoe any more horses for Scotty Perth.”
    He said, “Now wait a minute! The horses are full brothers, and Scotty Perth gave my horse to me, and until he lost his leg he had always shod both of ’em. He’s so awkward with his peg leg that he can’t shoe a horse, and you’re the first man that has come along since that could put shoes on them that they didn’t interfere with in travelin’.I thought that it might help to ease Scotty’s anger if he knew you could shoe a horse.”
    I said, “So far as I’m concerned, shoein’ horses would be a damn poor way of winnin’ an argument, and I don’t care what Scotty Perth thinks. This stunt has begun to make me wonder whose side you are on.”
    He looked at me rather painfully as he started to walk back across the street, and in a somewhat bewildered tone of voice he said, “We’ll be lookin’ for you to come to church Sunday and stay for the party my wife is givin’ for the preacher after the services.”
    I didn’t answer him. I turned and walked across to the hotel. I ate up a big batch of grub and went to bed by dark.
    The next mornin’ I killed time the best I could in a town where nobody spoke to me until the railroad spotted the car at the loadin’ chute about eleven o’clock. The cattle had watered good and were full of alfalfa, and I thought they could stand in the car to wait for the train just about as good as they could stand on the ground. There was a ruling by the railroad that all bulls that were shipped in cars of mixed cattle had to be tied with a rope in the car. So I went to the mercantile and bought some big, soft rope to tie these two bulls. I spent part of the mornin’ gettin’ these bulls in the chute and gettin’ the ropes on their horns. They were rank, mean, and bad to fight, but havin’ a chute to put them in and then gettin’ up on the fence over