Village Horse Doctor (7 page)

I pulled up in front of the hotel and told Benny Walker, the night porter, to get my man for me. He had barely had time to take a bath, so he put on his clothes and came back down lookin’ rather shocked, worn, and surprised that I would answer another call so soon.

The morning before he had taken a reading of my speedometer and had forgotten to look at it again when we
got in that night. As we started off he looked at the speedometer and you could see some surprise come over his Maryland-bred, Washington-trained countenance.

I had some twenty-five or thirty horses to treat and vaccinate at Imperial between then and daylight. The telephone operator from Fort Stockton caught me at the country café in Imperial and so I made some more calls north and west to Grand Falls and Monahans. Then we whipped back by Crane and McCamey and were back in Fort Stockton about three o’clock that afternoon. This was another three hundred plus miles, which made a total of more than six hundred miles in about twenty-four hours which was the distance between the places where I worked.

Between nine and ten o’clock that night I had a call from Jim Nance, the sheriff at Sanderson, about a horse of his that was at Charlie Gregory’s ranch ten miles west of Sanderson. I went by the hotel and picked up the “Fed” and we started sixty miles south to Sanderson. Jim’s horse was sick but was in the early stages and I almost knew that the one treatment would be all that he would need, but by flashlight and lantern we vaccinated Charlie’s best brood mares and saddle horses.

In the meantime, Frank Warren had put in a call from the Circle Dot Ranch in the Big Canyon that had been relayed to me by Jim Vance, so we went from Sanderson to the Circle Dot. Frank didn’t have his horses ready and told me when I could catch the time that I could come, call him in a day or so, since he didn’t actually have a sick horse and this was just a vaccination call.

I went from the Circle Dot to Sheffield, about another seventy miles, and vaccinated horses there early the next morning and then we ate a bite of breakfast at one of the country cafés. I had had calls catch up with me to go to Iraan, where I vaccinated a bunch of horses and treated
for Mr. Lee a horse that was already in secondary stages, which meant that I would have to double-check and stop by there every chance I got the next few days and nights.

Val Gobert went with us around Iraan to show us where all the different horses were that people had ready for me to vaccinate and he opened gates and entertained Mr. Fed for two or three hours. By now I had calls back to Sanderson.

We drove in under the long driveway at McKnight’s Garage at Sanderson. It was a big old garage with a lot of loafers’ benches just under the shade of the driveway and a big café at the end of the building. We got out of the car, so it could be serviced while we went in to eat. There were several loafers on the old car seats that were set out for that purpose. They all got up to shake hands and ask about people over the country. I had a pretty good audience, so I turned to my passenger and said, “Boys, I want you to meet Uncle Sam.”

They all shook hands kind of polite as they looked him over, and as Monte Cordor shook hands with him, he said, “Doc’s kind of a smart aleck. What’s your real name?”

He put the Maryland brogue to it and told him the name was Stratsford. Between the length of the name and his foreign accent, another cowboy spoke up and said, “Monte, don’t you wished you hadn’t asked?”

I explained to them his mission in the Far Southwest and the reason he was with me, and as we turned to walk into the café, somebody said in a loud voice, “Why don’t you let him drive some. We need to get our money’s worth out of that kind of gov’ment help.”

They served good Western grub and it was about middle of the afternoon, and Uncle Sam’s appetite improved to the point where he ate as much as I did.

On the way back to Fort Stockton we went by Frank
Hinde’s and I introduced Frank to Uncle Sam. Frank took an aerial view of him from his six feet eight inches, and he wore a high-crown broad-brimmed hat that made him look even taller. He shook hands with him and was so polite and nice that you could tell he didn’t really mean it. It was gettin’ real late in the afternoon, so Uncle Sam stayed in the car.

As Frank and I walked to the corral, Frank said, “What’s the matter with that damn feller’s head?”

I said, “I haven’t diagnosed it yet.”

“Well, it looks like he should cover it up with a bigger hat so he wouldn’t look so bad.”

That was a good enough opening for me to cut an old friend, so I said, “That explains why you wear such a damn big hat.”

As we were driving into town that night, Uncle Sam began to break down. He had seen more country, more horses, and more rough roads and a different breed of people than he had ever imagined existed. He had seen us vaccinate wild horses in chutes or rope and choke them down and vaccinate them in a matter of a split second before they could get off the ground, and all in all he was impressed beyond words with his experiences and my professional talent combined with my cowboy and ranch background.

As we drove down the road between stops, I had explained to him some of the finer points that made it possible to work with a horse affected by sleeping sickness, even one that was staggering, and told him that you might slap a horse on the side where you were standing or raise your voice some and holler in his ear but never push against him because he would think that he had found something to lean against and you couldn’t possibly hold him up and he would very likely fall on you. As I walked with a horse trying to put a needle in his jugular vein, I would put my
free hand on the other side of his neck and pull toward me, which would cause him to stagger away from me, making it safer to give him an injection.

Whether Uncle Sam knew it or not, he was seein’ cowboy’n’ and horse handlin’ at its best by lifetime experts.

As we got nearer town, he said that if he wrote his report and tried to explain the distances between calls and the vast amount of country I was covering, and describe the friendly, informality of the people, from his experience, Washington would send out another “brain-washed civil service idiot” to see if his report was true. He readily confessed that he never would have believed any part of what he had seen if it had just been told to him or written up in a report. For ten miles he was almost a human being and actually showed some kind of admiration for me, my clients, and the great Far Southwest.

I let Mr. Civil Service Expert out at the hotel and told him I would call him when I had to leave town again. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and I lay down to take a nap and slept until almost dark. This was the first time in over a week I had been on a bed. I would catch a nap here and yonder in my car while I would be waiting for an owner to get his horses in the corral or during some other short delay.

My phone rang a little after dark and I had several calls stacked up in a matter of a few minutes. I loaded the refrigerated vaccine boxes in the back of my car and picked up other fresh supplies.

I pulled up in front of the hotel and told Benny to get my man. He said, “Doc, what have you done done to that feller! He took a bath and took a plane, an’ he acted plum fitified about gettin’ a taxi to take ’im to the airport and get away from hea’. He looked like he needed some res’.”

Every horse owner had vaccinated every active case and
the neighbors who had pet horses and using horses had all vaccinated too, but it seemed that there would be no end to the epidemic; and now after three weeks, the disease was still spreading and I hadn’t turned down a call and had lost very few cases. Any horse being treated for a disease that is accompanied by high fever and severe dehydration might get over the disease but die from the exhaustion and malnutrition that had occurred during the time of the most severe part of the sickness. Almost any sick animal with a raging fever will have the presence of mind or enough instinct to drink, but few if any will eat feed. All the cases that I had that were not beyond the secondary stage and hadn’t gotten down, I fed by means of stomach tube and pump. I carried hundred-pound sacks of oatmeal and gallon jugs of molasses in the back of my car and as soon as a horse showed response to treatment, I would mix up in a tub a gruel of oatmeal, syrup, and sufficient water to make the mixture thin enough to go through a stomach pump. With the nursing and care of the owners, we rarely lost a horse that was still standing when I got to him for the first time.

Dick Arnold, a transplanted Vermonter who had come to the Far Southwest as a very young man and had aged out in the business, was still looked on by many of his neighbors as misplaced rather than transplanted. Dick had lots of horses and I was always doing some practice for him. He called early in the morning to tell me that he had three sick hosses and for me to come pa’pared to treat and vaccinate all his hosses.

Tires were very scarce, and although I had three permits from the ration board in my pocket to buy tires, there were no tires available; I had borrowed the spare tire from three different people’s cars. I owned one tire that was on the ground, hopin’ every day that some of the filling stations
in town would be lucky enough to get a shipment of what we called war tires, which were mostly synthetic rubber.

Dick’s ranch was between fifty and sixty miles south and I got to within about a mile of the ranch house when I blew out a tire. It was a country road with very little traffic, and after I blared my horn and hollered a few times, Dick drove up the road in a new Packard to see about me.

We loaded in his car all the medicine and vaccine that I would need to treat his hosses, and I decided that I would worry about the tire when I got through with the stock. During this period everybody tried to help those of us who needed to travel in order to be of service to the community, and I knew that Dick would have his men help me repair that tire one way or another.

He did have three very sick horses that we treated first and then vaccinated one hundred and four head. It was noon and Dick had a good housekeeper and cook who called from the back porch that dinner was ready. By now I had noticed that both of Dick’s pickup trucks had brand-new tires on them, and as we went into the screen porch, layin’ over in one corner were two more new tires, but I could see at a glance that they were truck tires and wouldn’t fit my car. The thought ran through my mind that Dick had some better source of gettin’ tires, black market or otherwise, than I did.

We got in place, as was the custom of the country, and went by the kitchen stove and helped ourselves to the barbecue, beans, and potatoes that were in Dutch ovens on the top of the stove. After I had eaten a big dinner in a hurry, I stepped up from the table, reached for my hat, and said, “Dick, I’ve got to go.”

He said, “Don’t hurry me. I’ll get my hat.”

While he was comin’ off the porch, I stepped in that big
new Packard about two hundred feet away, started the motor, and slammed the door and as I waved at Dick, I hollered to him, “Bring my car to town after you get new tires on it.”

I looked back in the mirror and saw him stompin’ the ground and whippin’ himself with his hat: I had thought about askin’ him for a pickup, for he would have gladly loaned me one, but then he wouldn’t have been worried about gettin’ me new tires for my car. Since he always owed me a good deal more than a set of tires would cost, I knew that he would make the necessary arrangements, fair or foul, to get that new Packard back as soon as possible.

On the third morning at about daylight he drove up in front of the office in my car, which had four new tires on the ground and a spare in the turtle. We both had a big laugh and went up to the hotel and had breakfast together and traded automobile keys and drove on.

My day’s work started by heading east to the Baker-White Ranch Company, where Pete TenyCke was foreman. He didn’t have a sick horse, but he had a bunch of good horses that he wanted vaccinated.

Next I had a lot of work to do at the Elrod Ranch at Sheffield and went on across the Pecos River to Vic Montgomery’s, where I vaccinated his horses and treated a sick stud, but not for sleeping sickness: he had a heart condition. I went on to Ozona and treated several horses in town in people’s backlots.

By now it was night and I was way past due up north of Ozona around Rankin and Crane. I drove into Crane that night and gave some further treatment to horses that I had treated a few days before. I went on into Midland, where there was a Chrysler garage that had an all-night service department.

Midland was one hundred and ten miles north of Fort
Stockton and sort of the north edge of my territory. I got over there rather often and the night crew always serviced my car while I went across the block to the Scarborough Hotel and got some sleep; because I was away from home the chances were good that I wouldn’t be bothered. The next morning I would start out in a car that had been well serviced while I slept.

I was never a very good businessman and always a poor bookkeeper and this Chrysler car was sort of a dirty sand color, so I used the outside of the cab for bookkeeping purposes. When I made a call, either before I left or the next time I stopped I would take my pencil and write the amount of the call somewhere on the outside of the car and put an initial of some kind on it so I would know whose it was and then draw a circle around it. This was all the bookkeeping system I needed since I rarely sent out bills. When a rancher would see me in town and say that he had sold something, such as lambs, wool, or cattle, and wanted to pay me, we would walk out to my car and I would look around on it for his bill. During the time we were doing this, we would be discussin’ what all we did to the livestock the time that I made his call.

I cared very little about a car; it was just a means of transportation. And although I had one serviced, I never had one washed. This particular night after I had gone, the service crew were talkin’ about all the business I gave them and the fact that I never got a wash job, and to show their appreciation for me coming by, after they got through greas-in’ and packin’ the wheels, they just gave me a great big wash job, free—and I lost my books!