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pretty sharp about horses. And I’ve been in tight spots with wild cattle and bad horses, spots where what my horse could do within the next few seconds would determine how well I would enjoy the next gasp of breath. So with such a background, I asked, “Mr. Krinskey, where do these horses come from, and why don’t we see more of them?”
    Down on the Rio Grande, he told me, there was a family that had bred these horses for many generations. They branded a shield on the shoulder of the mares and a shield on the hindquarter of the horses, and he had never seen a sorry one. But he had heard that the breed was running out, the old horse-members of the family had passed on and it would just be a matter of time until the Southwest would lose another strain of fine horses.
    There was a severe drouth in the Southwest, it had been hanging on for several years. Cattle and horses had been sold off in great droves, and there wasn’t too much livestock left in the country. There had been no demand for broodmares. All men that were working livestock rode geldings. All the remudas at chuck wagons were geldings, and mares were seldom used for anything but to raise colts. Charlie and I talked about that, too.
    He said, “Yeah, not much attention is gittin’ paid to ’em,and the broodmares of the country are gittin’ sorrier as automobiles are gittin’ more plentiful.”
    Of course, when he mentioned automobiles it was just kind of a passing word. They hadn’t cut too deep into the horse business; no such thing as a tractor existed to my knowledge; and nobody was too much worried about the future of the horse. We just assumed that we’d always have to have thousands of them and that they would be with us forever.
    I stood looking over the fence as Charlie walked on down through the barn, and it just kinda occurred to me that if some young man had taken over the Shield that wasn’t too interested in the horse business, this might be the place for me to get some broodmares better than I had ever owned. I thought about this all morning, made further inquiry, and learned a little about the way to get to the Shield Ranch. The best I could gather, it must be about two hundred miles—and I thought it would be a worthwhile trip to see if there were any Shield mares with all the many generations of good breeding in them that I could own at a reasonable figure and maybe keep myself mounted for the rest of my life. Horsemen are inclined to ramble like this in their thinking. Had it not been so, there would not have been developed such great breeds of horses as mankind has enjoyed through the years.
    Next morning I loaded my saddle and the rest of my riggin’ on a passenger train to Uvalde, Texas. This was gettin’ pretty far down in the big steer and brush country—ranches got bigger and fences got fewer. I got off the train in Uvalde and went up to a fine old hotel of the west on the square where I stood around a little while and visited. I found out there was a man who had a trading yard down close to the stock pens by the railroad track. I moseyed off down there afoot and saw he had some good saddle horses—and some others, too. I picked out a good dun horse that had clean feet and legs and a good, stout, hard body. He wasshod. You could tell he had been used and was hard on grain and would be able to carry a man a long ways.
    When I asked the fellow that had the horses about buying a saddle horse, he pointed out two or three different horses to me and made me a talk about each one of them. I looked over at the dun horse and asked about him. “Well,” this fellow said, “yes, he’s a good horse, but he’s a horse I use myself, and he wouldn’t come too cheap.”
    He didn’t know it, but I wasn’t looking for one too cheap. I was looking for one that could go deep into the brush country and give a man a fair chance of getting back on the same