These nice little, fat, young, hard-twisted, ill-tempered, unbroke Mexican mules were getting in bed with me, so to speak, because they were worth about $17 a head; I had been feeding them about two months, and I had a little more money than that in them to start with, not counting the feed bill. I had tried all the tricks that I knew to get these little mules sold, and I had gone to my old mule-trading friends, and none of them knew where you could ship these little five-hundred-pound mules and get them sold for anything or something, much less a profit. I had given up on the idea of a profit, but I thought my banker would have greater esteem for me as a horse trader if I could get the money back out of them, and I was trying awfully hard. I had taken so much hurrahing about my little mules, and about them being sold to me for colts, that it was almost unpleasant to live over on the north side of Fort Worth around the mule barns and stockyards. It had ceased to be too funny since those little mules ate grain twice a day and hay all night, and were working hard to run up the overhead.
