Sale Day
The sale barn cafe was full by six thirty.
It always is on sale day. Every Tuesday in Cimarron Wells, Texas, from September to May. The ranchers come in from forty miles around with their trailers hitched and their calves loaded, and before the auction starts at nine, they eat.
The cafe sits at the front of the Cimarron Wells Livestock Auction, a long metal building on the edge of town with pens out back as far as you can see. You can smell the cattle from the parking lot. Inside, you smell coffee and bacon grease and the sweet, sharp smell of the pens drifting in every time somebody opens the back door.
Don Hollister sat where he has sat for thirty years, at the near end of the long table.
Everybody in Hartley County knows that table. It’s a long Formica table by the front window, with mismatched chairs and a sugar shaker in the middle that’s been there since the Reagan administration. The big ranchers sit there. The ones with the land and the cattle and the names on the barn walls.
Don’s seat is the one at the end closest to the door. Where he can see everybody come in.
Felt hat. Tan canvas jacket. White mustache over his coffee cup.
He’s seventy-one. He runs about nine hundred mother cows on twenty-two thousand acres south of the Canadian River. The Hollister place. His granddaddy started it in 1919.
A row of cattlemen in hats sat with him over plates of eggs, talking calf prices.
Six of them. Seven. Dale Pruett, who runs the ranch north of Hollister’s. Bobby Ray Tillman, who owns the feedlot in Dalhart. The Kessler brothers, who farm wheat and run stockers. A man I didn’t know from Oklahoma.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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