Of course, I was only pretending. There wasn't a woman within a half-mile. But, you know, my performance did exactly what I had hoped it would do, only more so. In a fraction of a second, Clark had put away his drainer before he had time to stop the flow of water. I could tell by the way he stepped out from his hiding place that dampness was already down beyond his socks and into at least one shoe. Then in about three seconds, when he realized what I had done to him, he looked up at me and said, "Johnson, I'll kill you for that." But he didn't. And I'm sure he felt better when he got home and got a bath and put on dry clothes. Now, changing the subject, Anita came home from School one day and asked, "Daddy, why is it that, when kids at school tell a joke or a story, the goofy guy in the story is always named Clarence?" You know, I couldn't think of a good answer to give her, and I still can't. During those years on the Royston farm, we witnessed the advent of cattle auction sales in our part of the country, and of course they led to other little happenings. I might as well tell about one or two of them right about here. From our home it was only 30 miles to Sweetwater and 50 miles to Abilene. Those two cities together had at least three cattle sales a week. I was sitting at one of those sales one day, waiting for the cows to start selling, when they began selling a lot of odds-and-ends prior to selling the cattle. There are times when these odds-and-ends can defy the imagination. Some of the items I have seen sell at such times were old saddles, new saddles, lariat ropes, milk goats, six bantam hens with matching rooster, three quart-bottles of screw worm medicine, a set of badly used harness, four weaning size hound pups, and many others. Well, on this particular day, I was just sitting there being bored when suddenly here comes a sorrel saddle horse for sale. The bidding got off to a slow start and didn't speed up an awful lot. This gave me time to start thinking, but I started in the wrong direction. True, he was a good-looking animal--beautiful, not a blemish on him, tall and strong, just the horse for me. Now, what I should have been thinking was, "If he's all that good, why isn't he bringing more money? Why aren't more men bidding on him?" I think I figured out the answers just about the time I made the final bid on the old horse. I think everyone there that day, except me, knew the horse, had owned him a week or two and had brought him back to sell to somebody like me, someone who had not owned him and didn't know about him. In fact, I sold him the following week. Only I didn't take him back to the sale, I sold him to a cow-buyer who didn't know him. And he took him back to the sale a week later.