"Why, hello, Mr. Andy," said Warren T. "How are you this fine day?"
It was hotter than Tom B— ever got in a poker game.
I knew the old fellow had had a good breakfast, and that he had no doubt spliced me up a pair of pedigrees of some sort or other. I just sort of imagine that when a herd book gets slightly mixed up, or time has elapsed and a given bull's heredity sort of lost in the hazy past, that those fellows quietly sit down and whittle out a pedigree that sounds about right. . .
Let me tell you a bull story about as he related it to me last
Friday. This is Warren T. speaking:
"About 1902 or 1903, I wanted to branch out bigger, buy more land and become a Hereford leader for sure. . . Mr. — was showing Herefords in Indianapolis. He had by far the best bull I had seen or heard of. His name was Perfection Fairfax, and he had a pedigree that read like the Lees of Virginia. . . The only way his owner would part with him would be to sell his whole herd of 37 cows too—for $17,000 cash. I brought him home to Kentland. He won the International Championship and we both became famous in the Hereford world. The Fairfax strain took the country by storm. His sons and daughters were sensations. He lived until he was past 17 years old, and was a virile breeder to the day of his death."
"Look up yonder on the knoll past the machine shop and the big barn. See that cement column up there? The boys here at the farm erected that monument, and old Perfection Fairfax lies right under it. He died in 1918. Old Perfection made breeders millions of dollars. Look up there on the wall to my right. See that oil painting? That is Perfection Fairfax. I had a famous artist paint that. See that long picture over there on the wall east of old Perfection? That is a picture of 32 of his sons I sold at one time to one breeder down in the Argentine. We had that picture taken the day they left the farm. They made me some money."
"What is the highest price, Governor, that you ever got for a bull?" I asked.
"The highest price I ever got was $25,000."
"Holy Nellie," said I. "Isn't that the highest price anybody ever got?"
"No," he said. "Do you want me to tell you about that? . . .It's a pretty long story but interesting. Along about 1915 Perfection Fairfax was getting old, and I decided I'd go out again and buy the best young Hereford bull on Earth. As I traveled and asked, I kept hearing about a Richard Fairfax, one of old Perfection's calves—a calf I had raised, and still owned his mother. He had been sold at one of my sales and wound up in Dakota—and it was always the same tale that he was not for sale at any price, whatsoever. Absolutely."