On every side there was uproar. Horses whinneyed and neighed, wheels rattled, small boys yodeled for joy of the crowds and excitement. From every direction came the sound of men's voices proclaiming loudly in the familiar phrases of the horse trader the virtues of the animals that they had to sell or trade.
Listening to the peans of the traders, one would be led to believe that all the horses for sale or trade were splendid animals, young, healthy, vigorous, and docile. A glance around, however, belied this impression. Very few conformed in any way with the descriptions of their enthusiastic would-be vendors. There were old horses with hanging heads and sagging haunches, bowed like an old man at the knees and shoulders. There were vicious horses, with evil, suspicious eyes and ears that they laid back ominously. There were weak, spindly horses, with no breadth to their backs and haunches that sloped away into nothing, like the shoulder of a ringleted mid-Victorian female. There were old race horses, once good for the track, now good for nothing whatever. There were horses with clumsy, ill-shaped legs and awkward feet, that could hardly raise one hoof without setting it down on another. There were horses, naturally of good disposition, which had been made irritable and vicious by bad training. There were horses with all sorts of bad habits. There were horses with the heaves, horses with ringbone, spavin, stringhalt, and a dozen other equine diseases and defects.
The really good horses were very few in number; because a good horse can readily be sold near home and for a good price. The farmer used Court Day as an occasion for trying to get rid of the maimed, the halt, the blind, and the aged.
Everybody knew this; and yet everybody who had a little money in his pocket and many who had none at all, bought and traded horses on Court Day. It had become a passion which swayed in spite of reason, like the lure of the lottery or the seduction of the gaming table. Horse trading, with the drinking which accompanied it, was to these lonely tobacco growers their one joyful extravagance. It was their dissipation, their romance, their single oblation to the god of life and joy.
Around the corner of a side street, the Blackford party glimpsed Uncle Sam Whitmarsh in conversation with a lithe young man wearing a broad felt hat over a face that betokened life in the open air. Each man was holding the bridle of a horse. Coming up to see what it was all about, they found that a trade was in progress.
Uncle Sam was never so taken up with a trade that he had no time for his friends. He beamed a welcome on his good neighbors and his son-in-law.
"Howdy, Jerry. Howdy, Joe. Waal, Judy, you're a-lookin' like a rose in May. You don't mind a old man like me tellin' yer wife she's handsome, do you, Jerry?... No, stranger, the mare's too light. I hain't got no youst for her no more'n a hen has for teeth."
The horse that Uncle Sam held by the bridle was a heavily built iron gray work horse apparently about twelve years old. He was a bit clumsy looking, but on the whole sound and healthy in appearance.
The stranger's horse was a beautiful cream colored mare with large, intelligent eyes, small ears, a gracefully arched neck and slim yet strong looking legs, the very perfection indeed of shape and proportion. Not even a track horse could be daintier in appearance. Uncle Sam tried to look at the animal with disdainful indifference; but for all his experience in the art of dissimulation, he could not keep out of his eyes a covert gleam that glinted of admiration and coveteousness.
"I'd suttenly never dream o' lettin' her go under a hundred," the young trader was saying. "But I jes can't take her a step fu'ther 'ithout shoes, an' I hain't got the money to git her shoes. I've had hard luck lately, stranger. Gawd, what hard luck I've had! Many a time this past month my three babies hain't had all they cud eat; an' me an' my wife has gone hungry fer days together. The two linin's o' my pocket has got to know each other good these past weeks. Lookit the shoes I got on, willyuh? I can't git shoes fer myse'f, let alone fer the mare."