Part 3 — Who Was Bidding By Phone
Jimmy turned his sheet around so I could read the name. It said Karen Webb, phone bidder, and she had bid on lot fourteen higher than anyone in the barn. Karen was my daughter.
I sat there on the bleachers with my hand over my mouth. I thought she had been in on it with Cody. I thought I had lost my daughter and my cows in the same week.
Then Jimmy told me the rest. Karen had called the barn at eight that morning, before the sale. She said, My mother does not know these cattle are here. If they come through the ring, I will buy every head, whatever it costs, and I will bring them home.
My daughter had found out only the night before, when Cody let it slip at supper. She spent the whole night arguing with him, and by dawn she decided that if she could not stop the sale, she would drive up the price so nobody else could take my cows away.
She did not tell me because she was afraid I would be hurt that she had doubted her husband. She did not tell Cody because she knew he would sabotage the call.
The brand on a calf says who owns it, but a daughter on a telephone line showed who loved the woman who raised it.
Karen drove up from Wichita that evening and found me in the barn lot, scratching an old cow behind the ears. She said, Mom, I am so sorry. I said, You bid high, honey. She laughed through her tears and said, I was ready to sell my truck.
The brand inspector wrote up his report. Selling livestock without the owners consent is a serious violation in Kansas, and the department fined Cody and barred him from consigning cattle at the Hays barn for two years.
The barn voided the sale and refunded the commission fee. Cody was also required to cover the trucking, the vet check for the stressed animals, and every dollar I spent in the whole mess. He paid it all in cash, and he did not argue.
I did not press criminal charges. I told the county attorney that I would rather have my family back in one piece. Cody signed a written agreement that he would never again handle anything with the Lazy K on it.
Karen and her boys come out every weekend now. We brand the calves together in the spring, and her youngest, who is nine, holds the iron with both hands while I hold his shoulders.
The Lazy K still burns on every calf. When I look at the brand on the hide, I see my husbands grandfather, my husband and a daughter who bid on her mothers cows from three hundred miles away.