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working as ring man and he was sure givin’ me a lot of attention. Of course, the auction never stopped for dinner and about three o’clock I had nearly a carload of Georgia cotton mules, half a carload of sugar mules, and a full carload of lumber mules and was by far the fastest and biggest buyer of the day so far.
    I was a smart young mule buyer, but I had been at it long enough to know that there would be mules left after my money ran out since they had announced during the salethat the day’s run would be about fifteen hundred head. So I decided I would stop long enough to eat a sandwich and drink a Coke at the stand there by the auction and then go down the alley and look at my mules I’d bought.
    They had already assigned me three different pens for the different classes of mules that I was buyin’, and as the auctioneer dropped the hammer on each mule, a messenger boy would bring me a copy of the ticket. It was the custom of the trade that sometime during the day, you would go down the alley to where your mules were penned and inspect each mule against the description on its ticket. If a mule’s age had been misrepresented or if there were scars or blemishes that had not been called and written on the ticket, the bidder had the privilege of rejecting that mule. Rejects were then sold after all the fresh stock were sold and naturally brought less money than they had in the first go-around.
    Denny was helping me with my mules, and as he turned the pen of Georgia cotton mules out on the plank-floored alley for us to catch and look at, I realized that it was a good deal darker in the barn alley than it had been in the auction ring. Since I wasn’t used to glasses, I was catchin’ some shadows and reflections, so I reached up and pulled off my glasses. I leaned up against the fence and watched these mules for a few minutes; they suddenly lost half a hand in height and about a hundred and fifty pounds in weight from what they had appeared to be in the auction ring. I knew my judgment hadn’t slipped that much and it began to dawn on me that I had raised the market from $15 to $25 a head on the classes that I was buyin’ and that was why Wad was watchin’ the tickets so closely. As a nervous gesture, I put my glasses back on and them damn mules suddenly gained their height and weight that they had lost when I took my glasses off!
    My lumber mules would do for sugarcane mules, my sugarcane mules were about the right size for my Georgia cotton mules, and my Georgia cotton mules were about the rightsize for a clown or mine mules, but I didn’t have any orders for either one. And my new glasses that Strick had been so reasonable on had suddenly cost me about a $1,000.

THE
SHIELD
MARES
    O ld man Charlie Krinskey came through the barn at the San Antonio Horse and Mule Market just before the auction sale was to start and said, “Yeah, Ben, I see that you’re lookin’ at those fine old horses. The Shield horses, you know, have been famous for many years in this country.”
    The two horses that I was looking at were branded with a shield on the left hind leg about the level of the point of the flank, and I remembered that I had seen horses with this brand before. I saw that the legs of these horses showed signs of much abuse, but when you looked at their withers and their backs and their beautiful loins and their good hindquarters, when you noticed the set of their ears and the width between their eyes, you couldn’t help but wish that you’d had a horse like this when he was a four-year-old.

    Now a man that spends his life horseback—and starts at a tender age—develops a keen eye for a good horse. He is ever in search of one that is better than the horse he has under him, or even better than the ones he is trying to breed at home. When the clothes he wears and the very meat and bread that go into his mouth are earned with, by, or from a horse, a man gets