HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR

Subtitled Reminiscences of a Kansas Drover, this is a recreation of the kind of life Moody led as a very young man in western Kansas after the First World War. Sent West to recover his health, Moody, though not yet twenty-one, was soon in business for himself as a grain hauler. His success encouraged him to branch out into the feeding and shipping of livestock and eventually as a supplier of cut meat to the railroad and to farm families. His story is a detailed recollection of the kind of knowledge he acquired about hogs and steers, farming elementals and the vagaries of the market which he could, to some extent, as a middleman, take advantage of. There were some setbacks but his youth, his enterprise and his ingenuity, in addition to the unfailing friendships he made all over, brought him out eventually on the credit side--a successful retired businessman at twenty-three, engaged to his childhood sweetheart. Was it all really so sanguine? That's the way he writes it, folks.