excerpt
The news was not good. Cindy reported that while the
crowd at the Ramage Sale was a good size, maybe four- or
five-hundred people, the buyers were few and far between.
Mostly lookers. She had talked to a Ramage daughter-in-law
whom she had known from her school days and who said that
they were very disappointed with the prices. It was the worst sale
for the Ramages in the last ten years. Their two-year-olds weren’t
even topping 2,000 dollars, and some of the richly bred
broodmares were going for 1,000 dollars apiece. Joel, Harry, and
Tanya understood that this was the black cloud that would be
headed their way the next day. What a terrible way to be smacked
by the reality of being tied to an agrarian economy. Sure, there
were always some city buyers who were exempt of the negative
impact of drought, but for the rest of the country, no rain meant
no money and no money meant the horse buyers, or at least the
country ones, were few and far between.
Joel could have cried. He had worked so hard and come so far
in the last six months, and now to be hammered with this? Sure,
this was “next year” country, but he didn’t know if he could even
make it that far. And who was he kidding? He still hadn’t talked
to Cindy about the possibility of her and Lila joining him on the
ranch. It didn’t look like he could even keep the ranch. Instead of
the kind of financial rewards he was dreaming of only
twenty-four hours earlier, Joel was now thinking about making
enough money to pay back the 10,000-dollar line of credit that
Donna Davis from the bank had been good enough to extend to
him. Thank God that he had decided to add the younger horses
to the sale. Maybe that way there will be enough cash to pay the
expenses and pay back the bank. He would worry about what
came after that another day, but for right now, he was focused on
how he could just break even on the sale.
Tanya had tried to cheer everyone up with a reminder that they
were “writing the script,” and not to allow their fears get the better
of them. He heard Tanya remind them that they were powerless
over what was going to happen tomorrow, and although he knew…
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