The Perry brothers had a 10,000 acres place leased near Kissimmee called the Double LL and Boggy Creek ran through it. It was owned by a big operator we`ll call "Larry." Well, it was a good pasture with lots of grass and white Dutch clover. We were running probably five hundred head of mama cows and the required number of bulls - one for every 25 cows. One day, we were bringing a little bunch of cows back to the cow pen and I was riding a green mare I was training for one for the Perry brothers. I had dropped back a couple of hundred yards and was putting a little reining and sliding stop on the mare. Well, she was getting antsy to catch up with the other horses. I busted her out in a run and shut her down in a slide. I was on a thick carpet of clover and her hind feet went out from under her. I came off her rump but she scrambled up and stampeded to the cow pen with my left foot still caught in the left stirrup. She didn`t know what to think, but she did not try to kick me. I was sliding along the ground at a high rate of speed and she was kinda running sideways and looking at me on the ground, as if to say, "What the hell are you doing down there?" There were several pine stumps between us and the cow pen and I was hoping I wouldn`t hit one. After about a hundred yards, my foot came out of my boot and I eventually hobbled up to the cow pen where my mare was standing. The cowboy I was working the mare for asked me with a straight face, "Just what part of her training was that stunt supposed to be?" Larry, the man who owned the Double LL, also had a big cement business in Orlando, with several men driving his mixing trucks. Larry was a ladies` man and one of his drivers suspected him of seeing his wife. So, when the driver went by a little bar and saw Larry`s white convertible Cadillac, he stopped, eased up and looked in the bar. Sure enough, Larry and the driver`s wife was cuddled up in a booth. So, the driver just eased back into his cement truck (which was still mixing cement), pulled it up to Larry`s Cadillac and filled it up to the brim with cement. |