"Jasper's Story"

 

  It’s a rare treat to have old Jasper Blankenship come down from the diggins to stock up on supplies. And he favored us with stories at the Mule Barn this bright morning over coffee, too.

   “Well, Doc,” Jasper said, “you’re right. I wasn’t always a miner. Back during The War I had a job in the city at one of the big war plants, you know. I was a security guard and watched the gate. In those days, there was this one carpenter who just gave me the fits. He’d come out the gate at the end of the day with a wheelbarrow full of sawdust. I always stopped him and poked around in the sawdust and never found anything, but I just knew he was stealing something.”

  Jasper took a sip of coffee. “Well sir, four five years ago I was wetting my whistle up north a ways and this guy walked in and I knew him from somewhere so I struck up a conversation with him. Turns out he was this same carpenter guy who was wheeling that dang sawdust out the gate every afternoon. I knew this was my chance, as so many years had gone by since we both worked there.

  “I told him I always knew he was stealing from the plant but could never find it in all that sawdust. I said it was a long time ago, so would he mind ‘fessing up to it, just to satisfy my mind?

  “He just grinned at me. So I got another round for us, and he seemed friendlier then. So I tried again. ‘Come on, pardner,’ I said, ‘I know you were stealing something there. What was it?’”

  Jasper grinned. “He smiled at me and said, ‘Wheelbarrows.’”

 

Brought to you by “Dogsled, A True Tale of the North,” my first book. Online at Amazon.

 

Newspaper columnist Slim Randles, who writes the weekly Home Country column, took home two New Mexico Book Awards in 2011. His advice book for young people, “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right,” took first place in the self-help category, and “Sweetgrass Mornings” won in the biography/memoirs category. Randles lives and works in Albuquerque. Home Country reaches 3 million hometown newspaper readers each week

Slim Randles learned mule packing from Gene Burkhart and Slim Nivens. He learned mustanging and wild burro catching from Hap Pierce. He learned horse shoeing from Rocky Earick. He learned horse training from Dick Johnson and Joe Cabral. He learned humility from the mules of the eastern High Sierra. Randles lives in Albuquerque.

Randles has written newspaper stories, magazine articles and book, both fiction and nonfiction. His column appeared in New Mexico Magazine for many years and was a popular columnist for the Anchorage Daily News and the Albuquerque Journal, and now writes a nationally syndicated column, “Home Country,” which appears in several hundred newspapers across the country.

 

  Huntington Beach News