I’ve Called Cattle Auctions in Fort Worth for 30 Years. Last Spring I Caught a Bidder Cheating, and When I Saw Who It Was, I Wished I’d Never Looked Up
I kept calling.
That’s the thing about an auction. You can’t stop. You can’t step off the block and think. Four hundred people are waiting, the cattle are in the ring, and the words have to keep coming.
So I kept calling, and I watched my brother-in-law touch his eyebrow two more times.
The real buyer, a feedlot man from Amarillo, ended up paying eleven thousand dollars more than the cattle were worth.
Mrs. Benavides was thrilled. She came to the office after the sale and shook my hand with both of hers.
“Mr. Graves,” she said. “My husband always said you were the honest one.”
I couldn’t look at her.
The next lot, the one Royce’s partner was selling, went for well below market, because every buyer in the room had just spent too much on the widow’s cattle and had nothing left. Royce’s partner bought it back through a third man. They’d sell it again in two months in Oklahoma City for a profit of forty thousand dollars.
I’d heard about the scheme for years. Rumors. Never proof.
Now I had proof. I’d seen it with my own eyes.
That night, I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the stockyards and didn’t drive home.
If I reported it to the Packers and Stockyards division and the state licensing board, Royce would lose his license, his bond, his business. He’d probably be charged with fraud. The feedlot man from Amarillo could sue him. Their family’s whole income was gone.
And Dee would never speak to me again.
She’d had a hard life. Our father drank. Our mother left. I raised her from the time she was nine and I was sixteen. Royce was the first good thing that ever happened to her. That’s what she always said.
If I said nothing, the widow’s money was fine. The feedlot man could afford it. Nobody would ever know.
Except me.
At 11 p.m., my phone rang.
It was Dee.
“Hollis,” she said, and her voice was strange. “Royce just told me something. Can you come over?”