Dry Divide (12 page)

“No, sir,” I told him. “It's my job and I'm going to handle it all, and a good deal more besides—that is, if you don't kick things over for me by telling owners I'm not dependable.”

Bones put a hand on my shoulder, and spoke as though I were his little boy and he was breaking the news about Santa Claus. “Son,” he told me, “there's nothing I like any better than to see a boy trying to get ahead, but you've got to learn to walk before you run. Sure, you've done a fine job on this harvesting, better than I'd have believed you could do, but what's the sense in throwing away what you've already made. If you'd try tackling a job such as you're talking about, you'd only go broke again—and leave every owner that gave you a hauling job in a jackpot. A man's got to figure things out before he jumps into 'em whole-hog.”

“That's why I brought this screwdriver,” I told him, “but I sometimes make mistakes in arithmetic, so I'd appreciate it if you'd watch while I figure it over again. First, let's figure what the hauling from this place would bring in. There are 1280 acres in two sections, times twenty bushels to the acre, equals 25,600 bushels, times twelve cents, equals $3,072. We'll put that down over on this side. Then sixteen horses at a hundred dollars a team would be $800. Eight sets of harness at fifty would be $400. Eleven wagons at thirty dollars each would come to $330, and let's figure that labor and material to rebuild them would cost another $200. That would make a total investment of $1730. Is that right so far?”

Bones nodded, so I went on, “Now we'll divide 25,600 by 1400, and that gives us eighteen, the number of days it should take to thrash the crop on this place.”

“What good does it do you to know that?” Bones asked.

“I have to know it before I can figure the cost of labor, grub, and horse feed,” I told him. “I'm planning to use my wagons in pairs, with a four-horse hitch, and haul a hundred bushels to each trip.”

“You'll never make it!” Bones told me sharply. “You've got two deep gulches between here and town. Four of these little broncos couldn't pull more than seventy bushels out of either one.”

“I've looked them over and I think you're right,” I told him, “so I plan to use an extra team of heavy tote horses at each of those gulches. If six of these little broncs can pull this fifteen-foot header, can't four of them haul a hundred bushels the rest of the way to town?”

“Reckon so,” he said, irritably, “but get on with your figuring; I got other fish to fry.”

“All right,” I told him. “Let's see what it will cost for overhead and labor. A man can hire pretty good drivers for seven dollars a day, can't he?”

“The best,” he told me.

“Then let's put down six drivers at seven dollars a day—I'll drive one of the rigs myself. That's seven time six is $42, and we'll say the two heavy tote teams I'll hire will cost another ten. That makes $52. Grub and horse feed might run as much as twenty dollars a day, making a daily total of $72, times 18 days, equals $1,296. Now we'll add that to the $1,730 it will cost for new horses and equipment, and it equals $3,026, but I'll take in $3,072 on the hauling from these two sections alone. On all the other hauling jobs I get, I'll make . . .”

Bones saw through it before I was quite finished, and jumped to his feet as if a firecracker had exploded under him. “Get on with your work, Son! Get on with your work! No sense leaving your crew stand around idle,” he told me as he climbed back into his car. “I'll let you have two thousand dollars for thirty days—at eight percent, you understand. And I'll get the answers to those letters off on the noon train.”

He started to drive away, then stopped and shouted, “I'll get right to work, rounding up horses, harness, and wagons for you.”

“That's fine,” I called back, “but don't make any deals till I see the stuff, and I won't have time to look at it before the middle of next week.”

I hadn't done my arithmetic for Bones the same as I'd done it for myself, but in the way that I thought would save the most arguments and do the best job of selling. I knew my tough little mustangs well enough to be sure they could travel ten miles a day farther than he would have believed, so I'd be able to haul thirty per cent more wheat per horse than we'd figured on. And with that extra thirty per cent, I could easily afford to pay my crew ten dollars a day instead of seven. Then too, I'd figured that the new horses and equipment would cost me nearly $2,500, instead of the $1,730 we'd used in our arithmetic. But I'd let Bones name the prices I'd probably have to pay, and there was no sense in telling him I thought he was too low.

Old Bill's barge had been at the header while Bones and I were talking, and I was sure that Jaikus had understood only enough to be completely confused, but he was a babbler, and I didn't want him to get the crew upset. So, as I climbed back onto the header, I called out, “I don't want any talking about this until after we've had dinner. Then I'll tell all of you what I plan to do, and any of you who want to can go along on the deal.”

For the past couple of weeks every mealtime had been a happy time, with everyone talking and joking, but that noon what little conversation there was seemed forced. I waited until everyone had finished eating, then looked up at Mrs. Hudson and asked, “Do you think you could put up with us for another month or two, on the same kind of deal we've had during harvest?”

Martha didn't give her mother a chance to answer, but cut in excitedly, “Sure we will, won't we Maw? Me and Sally'll do all the dishes for you, like we done this past week, and Susie can look after Billy and the baby.”

Mrs. Hudson spanked her hands together, and said, “Quiet! Sure we'll do it, and it's kindly of Bud to ask us, but hush up and let him talk.”

“I'd better do a little asking first,” I said. “How about the rest of you? Want to stick around and put up with me for a boss a while longer, if I can promise you ten dollars a day in wages?”

Although Paco couldn't understand the words, he had a good idea of what I was talking about, and nodded vigorously when the others all said they wanted to stay. I'd been pretty sure they would, for with harvest just about over, there'd be only two kinds of jobs for hired hands in that country; general farm work at about fifty dollars a month, or pitching wheat on a thrashing crew at six or seven dollars a day.

Judy didn't answer when the others did, but tried to act as if she were so busy cutting Billy's meat that she hadn't heard me. “How about you, Judy?” I asked. “If this scheme works out as well as I hope it will, we'll be hauling more wheat than any outfit in this part of the county, and I'll need your help.”

She peeked up at me, and said, “I'd like to, Bud. You know that. But it wouldn't be fitting—a girl driving a wheat wagon . . . through town and all.”

“I couldn't afford to have you driving a wheat wagon,” I told her. “I'll need someone who knows every wheat farmer living within ten miles of The Bluffs, and who can go around to find out when they're going to have their thrashing done, and what sized rigs will be used. Besides, I'll need you to keep my books.”

“Well,” she said, “I know all the wheat farmers . . . or mostly all, but I didn't never keep no books.”

“That makes no difference,” I told her. “Nobody else ever kept books the way we're going to keep them. What do you say? Going to stick with the crew?”

“If you want me,” she said, as happy as Martha had been. Then she added, “Leastways, I'll stay up till school commences, but I wouldn't be worth no . . .”

I didn't let her go any further, but began telling about having sent out letters to land owners, and what I planned about extra horses, harness, and wagons if we got enough jobs, and how I believed we could do the hauling best. When I'd finished, I said, “Of course, Bill and Jaikus heard all this when I was having my wrangle with the banker this forenoon, except that the figures were a little different, and I guess they thought I was out of my mind.”

“Still think so,” Bill broke in. “What you going to pay that robber eight per cent interest for, when you know we won't be drawing much of anything, and you'll have all the money you need right on your checkbook?”

“Because most of that money belongs to you fellows, not to me,” I told him.

Paco was the only one who didn't tell me to use the money as if it were all my own, and the only reason he didn't tell me was because he didn't understand what we were talking about.

“You make me awfully proud and happy,” I told them, “but you see it's like this; when you go fishing for bullheads you use angleworms, but when you go fishing for bankers you use interest. Bones is already charging Mrs. Hudson eight per cent on the amount he's credited to my account, but there isn't any real money in there; it's only a credit. No money will go out of his bank until I spend it for horses and wagons, and if he can charge me another eight per cent he'll make a nice fat profit. We wouldn't get many outside hauling jobs unless he sent out letters saying we'd do a good job, and the only reason for his doing it is to make the profit. Eight per cent interest on two thousand dollars for thirty days will cost only thirteen thirty-three, and that's cheap enough for getting set up in a new business. But right now, we'd better think about finishing the job we're on.”

With the crew knowing what my plans were, no one—except Doc—wanted to knock off to go to town that week end, and I never saw any crew work harder in the field. By working until dark on Wednesday, July 30th, we put the last of Mrs. Hudson's harvest in the stacks—a full day ahead of schedule. But we weren't the only ones who were ahead of schedule. When I'd sent out the letters to land owners I'd put down Hudson's R.F.D. box number as my address, and by the time we'd finished the harvest I had half a dozen orders for hauling wheat. The only real trouble was that they were widely scattered over three townships.

11

Haggling and Horses

T
HERE
is always a border around the outside of wheat fields, where the barge horses have trampled down the grain. On the Hudson place the border was weedy enough that I didn't think it should go into the stacks, but it would make pretty fair horse feed. The morning after we finished harvesting I stopped after breakfast to talk to Mrs. Hudson about the border and a few other things I had in mind. Until then the horses had been hers, and she had to furnish the feed for them, but that morning I gave her a check for $300 and they became mine, so I had to feed them.

After I'd given her the check, I said, “Now I'd like to make a deal with you, if you think it's a fair one. Judy tells me you have a quarter section planted in corn. I don't know much about corn in this part of the country, but if it were anywhere that I've ever farmed it would need cultivating once a month.”

“Not here,” she told me. “All that corn will need from now till shucking time is one good working with a weeder-cultivator. It's best if you can do it right after a rain, but if you don't have no rain you go ahead and do it anyways . . . and hope for the best.”

“Well, then the deal I was going to make you would be lopsided,” I told her. “I'm going to have to find feed for these horses, and pasture for any I'm not using. What I was going to offer was to cultivate that corn for you in exchange for the use of the pasture, and for whatever feed there is in the border around the fields, but that wouldn't be a fair deal with only one cultivating.”

“It would be more than fair to me,” she said. “I couldn't get nothing for the pasture or that border, and it would cost me a couple of hundred dollars to get the corn cultivated. I'd be obliged to you if you wanted to deal that way.”

I told her I'd be more than glad to, and I was. With that border being about twenty feet wide and eight miles long, there would be a bit more than thirteen acres of combination hay and grain in it—enough to feed my horses all the rest of the summer and fall.

Although we could harvest fifty acres of wheat in a day, the cutting of that border was slow and tricky business, and some of the hauls to the corral were more than two miles long, so it took us all forenoon to do our haying. By that time the mailman had brought me four more letters, each of them a hauling order.

After dinner I set Gus and Lars to taking the wagons apart for rebuilding, and the rest of the fellows to taking the conveyors off the header, clearing up the yard, and getting things shipshape around the place, then I had Judy drive me to The Bluffs. I already had orders enough to know I'd be safe in buying the extra horses and equipment I'd need for the hauling business, but I thought it would be best to let Bones see the letters.

He came hurrying across the street from his house as we pulled up in front of the bank, and as he came he called to me, “Got three letters on my desk for you, Son. Thought you'd want me to open 'em up, so I did. Every one of 'em's a go-ahead for wheat hauling, and I've been right busy, getting all the stuff you'll need lined up for you. Come on in.” He kept right on talking as I followed him to his desk: “I've got it all laid out on a map, so you'll know right where to go, and what to get at each place. Had to haggle some of 'em right down to the bone, but I got you some awful good buys—stuff you couldn't touch yourself for twice the price—but I know all these farmers, and which ones are pressed a mite for cash.”

The map he'd drawn covered nearly half the top of his desk, took in a radius of about ten miles around the town, and he'd marked out a route for me to follow. Here and there along it, he'd outlined a place in red pencil, printed the farmer's name, and listed the items I'd buy from him, together with the prices. The first thing that caught my eye was that all the prices were about ten per cent higher than those he'd given me when we'd had our talk in the wheat field. I didn't mention it, but folded the map, tucked it under the belt of my jeans, and said, “I'm much obliged to you, and I'll go look at some of this stuff this afternoon. You didn't make any set deals on any of it, did you?”

“No. Not
set
deals, you understand. Just did the haggling for you, and told 'em you'd be around to pick up the stuff. You wouldn't be able to do much good on any but the stuff I've marked down for you, and from those I've named on the map.”

As he spoke, he pulled a paper from a pigeonhole, laid it on the desk, and pushed it toward me. It was about the size of a check, with my name and $2000 typed on the top line. Just below it was, “8% All goods and chattels,” then a couple of inches of real fine printing, and a blank line at the bottom. “Made the note up so we wouldn't have to fuss around with it after you came in,” he said. “You sign there on the bottom line.”

“No, I don't either,” I told him. “If you want to make out a straight note for two thousand dollars, for thirty days, at eight per cent, with your security being whatever chattels I may buy with the two thousand, then I'll sign it. If you don't want that kind of a note, we'll forget about the loan, and I'll buy what I need from the money that's already in my account.”

“Hmf! Hmf! This is a straight note,” he said irritably; “the kind we use on all our loans.”

“That's all right,” I told him. “I don't care what kind of notes other people sign, but I don't sign any with fine print on them. We'll just forget about the loan.”

“Now, now, Son!” he said. “A loan was a part of our deal.”

“That's right,” I said, “and I'm still willing to make it, but only if the note is made out as I just told you.”

“Well,” he said, “I suppose people do things different in different parts of the country, and we don't see many Easterners around here. If you'd rather have a note written out on a blank form I can do that all right; it'll only take a minute.”

He took a blank I PROMISE TO PAY note from another pigeonhole, and I watched him as he filled it out, but I didn't tell him it would be the first note I'd ever signed. After he'd filled it out the right way, I signed it, and he made out a deposit slip. Then we shook hands, and I told him I'd go to look at some of the stuff he'd lined up for me.

While I'd been in the bank Judy had gone to Joe's store to pick up some more fresh meat, eggs, and a few other things we needed. After I'd helped her lug the groceries out to the Maxwell, I showed her the map, and said, “Let's not follow the route Bones laid out for us. We couldn't get halfway around it this afternoon, and it would leave us too far from home at supper time. Pick out a few that we might hit without going too far out of our way.”

The more Judy studied the map the more puzzled she looked. “I declare,” she said at last, “it looks like Bones is sending you to everybody's poor relations. None of these he's wrote down are wheat farmers, leastways they don't have more'n a little patch, and maybe some corn. They're all cow people, and the no-accountest ones anywheres around.”

“Well, what's the matter with that?” I asked her. “That's the kind of people who would be most apt to have the kind of stuff I want to buy; stuff that won't cost too much. Let's go take a look.”

The first place we went to was only a few miles from town, on the break of the steep hills leading up to the high divide. The house was a dugout, built into the hillside. There were a couple of ramshackle sheds, a barbed-wire corral with a few scrubby horses in it, and beyond that some scrubby looking cattle grazed in a rough, gulch-torn pasture. The man wasn't at home, but his wife came out to the car, and when I told her what I'd come for she pointed toward the corral, and told me, “Them two bays on the far side. Fred said to tell you the price was a hundred and ten dollars.”

I didn't get out of the car. From where I sat I could see that the two bays were probably twice as old as I, that they were as skinny as sawhorses, and on their last legs. If my broncos weren't worth more than ten dollars apiece, those two old plugs together weren't worth fifty cents. I thanked the lady for her trouble, and told her I might drop back some time when her husband was at home, then we drove on to the next place.

It was a bit more prosperous looking than the first, but not much, and under the name Bones had written: “One team horses $112.50. One Studebaker wagon $35. Two sets harness $109.75.”

At that place the man was at home, and though he had no idea he was doing it, he saved me a lot of time and trouble. The horses he showed me were about like my own bay mares; good enough for ordinary farm work, but getting old and slow. The harness was good enough for what I needed, but priced way too high, and the wagon was in the same shape Hudson's had been when I first saw them. After I'd looked the harness and wagon over carefully, I told the man, “Your horses aren't the kind I need, but I could use the wagon and harness if you want to take a right price for them. I'll give you twenty dollars for the wagon, and seventy-five for the two sets of harness.”

“Well,” he said slowly, “I'd like awful well to let you have 'em, but Bones, he won't leave me take no less than them prices he wrote down on the map.”

I didn't have to be very smart to see through the whole thing in less than a second. “That's okay,” I told him. “I'll drop in and have a talk with Bones. If we can get together on a price, I'll pick up the wagon and harness the first of the week.”

The man seemed quite happy, so we shook hands, and I went out to the road where Judy was waiting in the Maxwell. “Back to the bank,” I told her. “There's no sense in trying to fish with the wrong end of the pole in my hands. Now I know why we were sent to the poor relations, and I'm going to have some mighty poor relations with Bones if he tries this kind of a trick on me again.”

From the time I was old enough to swap jackknives, I'd always been in some kind of dicker, and had often come out at the little end of the horn. But when I got stuck it was usually because I'd run into someone who was more clever at deceiving than I was at misleading. The line between misleading and deceiving isn't very wide, but to me it had always seemed that a man was cheating if he went over it. I'd misled Bones in my arithmetic, and my hollering about the small print on the note was done to mislead him on my age, but I hadn't deceived him. I would have if I'd told him I was twenty-one, making the note I'd signed collectible in court.

Even at that, I didn't mind if the other fellow tried to do a little deceiving in a dicker. It was to be expected, and made it more fun to match wits against him. What made me sore was having Bones try to bunko me into thinking that he was dickering on my side when he was actually my opponent. I'd have boiled over if I'd walked into the bank right after leaving that farmer, but I had time to simmer down before we got back to The Bluffs.

Bones was talking on the phone when I went in. I waited until he'd hung up, then opened the gate and went back to his desk. He seemed surprised when he looked up and saw me, cracked a couple of knuckles, and asked, “Something more I can do for you, Son?”

“No,” I told him, “you've done more than enough already. I just dropped in to bring back this map. I won't be needing it; I'm going to buy my stuff at Oberlin.”

Bones scowled at me, angrily, “Now wait a minute, Son! I went to a lot of trouble on your account, running down all that stuff for you, and haggling over prices. I don't aim to . . .”

“Neither do I,” I cut in. “Just because I pulled you out of the hole on your worthless loans to Hudson is no reason for expecting me to pull you out on all the rest of them. I'll buy what I need from men who are free to do their own trading; not from dupes for a banker who has already foreclosed on them.”

Bones sat cracking his knuckles till I'd finished, and most of his belligerence drained away. “You're dead wrong, Son,” he told me. “I haven't foreclosed on a single one of 'em.”

“I believe you,” I said, “but the only reason you haven't is because you couldn't find anyone who would take the junk off your hands—and you haven't found one yet. If you'd come right out in the beginning and told me where you stood, instead of giving me all that blarney about haggling for me, I might have done business with you, but now . . .”

“Now wait a minute, wait a minute, Son,” he broke in, this time persuasively instead of irritably. “Don't forget that I wrote all those letters of recommendation for you, and that you're going to make a heap of money on the hauling jobs I got for you. I scratched your back for you when you needed it, now you owe it to me to scratch mine.”

“The scratching was fine,” I said, “and I appreciate it, but keep your fingernails short; I don't like to be gouged. Now that we're out in the open, maybe we can do some business. I'll gamble time enough to go around and look at the stuff you've marked on the map, and I'll put my bid figure beside each of your offer prices. If we can come to an agreement on the difference, I'll do business with you; if not, I'll buy what I need elsewhere.”

The first ten days of August were about as hectic as any I can remember; not because Bones was still trying to hook me—he'd given up on that—but because everything, including the weather, was setting me too fast a pace. Every mail brought more orders for hauling wheat, until I had so many I couldn't have handled them all with a hundred horses. The only honest thing I could do was to write back to some of the owners, telling them I was unable to handle their jobs but would try to find them haulers who could. The big question to decide was which orders to confirm, and which to turn down, and I couldn't do that until I knew when the thrashing would be done on each place. Otherwise, I might have ten times as much hauling as I could handle on some days, and none on others.