excerpt
The Day Before
The Circle H Ranch
Willow Springs, Montana
It was Saturday. The day before the sale at the Circle H. Joel
had toyed with the idea of driving over to the Ramage place,
but a part of him was saying that wasn’t right. He knew from his
conversations with Roy that the Ramages saw him as competition.
This had been the weekend of their production sale for
years. For Joel, he had set up a competitive situation by
piggybacking on the Ramages’ clients. Joel didn’t like that at all.
He had run into Jack Ramage once in town only a week or so
earlier and had tried to make pleasant conversation with him.
He could tell that Jack was carrying a lot of anger and resentment
toward him. At first, he thought that it was all about how
Ramage felt about him, but later in the day when he was telling
Cindy about the chance meeting, she added another angle to the
conversation: the Ramages were advertising that their sale was
also a herd reduction sale as a result of the drought. The
Ramages had traditionally sold their horse crop as saddle-broke
two-year-olds, but this year, in addition to the fifty
two-year-olds for sale, they were also selling thirty mares and
thirty yearlings. They were really cutting back.
The good news for Joel was that the sale of the quality mares
and younger horses should draw even more folks into the country
for the sale. The bad news was that, with that kind of horseflesh
available on the day before his sale, he wondered how many people
would have any money left on the Sunday to invest in any…
Manolis Aligizakis 