Part Thirty One

Dalton Maynard said:

I got where I am by being a good judge of people. So when I say I offered Preacher a job – twice – it wasn’t because I was taken by his boyish charm. It was because I thought he could do the job I had in mind for him. In fact, I thought that he was one of the few people on Earth who could do it. And if he walked through that door right now I’d probably offer it to him again.

When my son Joey was a kid, about the only time we had together was Sunday mornings. I was busy building a company then. Hell, I still am, but you notice the time away more when your kids are little. But we had Sunday mornings together, and we would spend them watching old Westerns on the TV. So I guess that’s where he got it – the thing for cowboys, I mean. And he passed it on to his daughter Kelly. I remember when she was little – our first grandchild – she would come spend the night with us and she and I would spend Sundays watching Westerns, just like her dad and I used to.

Anyhow, that’s how I met Preacher. The summer Kelly graduated from high school she, Joey, and I spent two weeks at the Bar Nothing Ranch in Greenville, New Mexico. Playing cowboy with the rest of the rich folks. And Preacher was working there as a teacher and guide and cook and – toward the end of our stay, anyhow – a gunfighter.

In fact I remember the first time I ever laid eyes on him – not for him so much as for something funny Kelly said. We’d just gotten to the ranch and he was coming back from a trail drive, driving that wagon down the dusty track between the men’s and women’s bunkhouses. The three of us were heading to the mess hall and stepped aside for the trail riders and Preacher looked straight at us and nodded and touched the brim of his hat for Kelly. And – you know, Preacher was a good-looking guy, I guess, and so when the wagon went by Kelly turned to us and her eyes were wide and she had this big grin on her face and she said “I LIKE cowboys!”

Anyhow, we spent the next few days getting our cowboy diplomas, proving we could stay on a horse, proving that we could throw a lariat without choking ourselves – although I never once saw any of us dudes actually rope something. Takes more than four days to learn, I guess. And then it was our turn for the trail ride, four days and three nights, walking a hundred head of cattle around the ranch. There were two real cowboys, plus Preacher driving the chuck wagon, plus six dudes.

We didn’t know Preacher’s name, of course. We called him Chuck Wagon. Those guys did a good job of staying in character, and teaching you at the same time.

Anyhow, we rode around the ranch, and Preacher had coffee and biscuits for us each morning. And each night, a fire and some more filling grub at our camp site. He was qualitatively different from the other two real cowboys – more in the way he talked. You could tell he was an educated young man. Smart, and hardworking. I asked him, what’s a college boy doing out here making biscuits and gravy for a bunch of rich pretend cowboys? I figured he was working his way through school or something, but he told me he had graduated and was still trying to figure out where his niche was. He didn’t mind hard work, his brain was always engaged, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut and his eyes open. A rare combination in a college graduate.
So we all got to like Chuck Wagon on the ride, and I remember telling Joey that I’d take five Chuck Wagons over the last fifteen MBAs we’d hired at IM.

Anyhow, we survived the trail ride and made it back to the ranch. We still had a few days left there, but we’d book rooms at the Desert Rose in Greenville itself. Running water. Better food than the trail. From the outside the town, like the ranch, was 1885, but there were some modern comforts tucked away in the corners.

And Preacher was there in town. He did three trails rides in 21 days, and then had a week “off” – which wasn’t really off at all, but he got to sleep in a bed instead of in a wagon. In his off week he played a gambler in the Lodestar Saloon. Which is where I spent most of that remaining time, while my son and granddaughter learned how to churn butter and refill cartridges and work in a livery stable.

They let you gamble with this special scrip, which looked like 1885 paper money. I don’t know how it was legal, but apparently it was. Maybe one of the Greens was part Indian.

In town every other day there was a staged showdown in the middle of the town. A hired gun versus the aging sheriff. The latter was Big Pete, who owned the place. They told me that he got to be the sheriff because at 60 he was still the fastest draw on the ranch. Seems there was a standing bet, in fact – any staffer could put his week’s wages up against the 1885 gold piece that Pete Green kept in his hatband. Outdraw him two out of three, and you got the gold piece and his job as sheriff. But if he outdrew you, you worked for free for the next week.

His son, Little Pete, told me that he outdrew his dad once, but that nobody else had even taken one out of three, let alone two. I believed it.

Anyhow, over a couple days of poker I got to know Chuck Wagon better. Enough to know that his real name was Preacher Haywood, that he had a degree from some obscure East-Coast liberal arts college, and that he was a pretty unique guy. I ended up doing a lot more talking than I usually do. He was very good at that, at putting you at ease and, I don’t know, just sort of soaking things up. A listening sponge. And when he did speak up, it wasn’t just noises. He understood what I was talking about and got right to the heart of problems.

So I had already decided to offer him a spot in our executive trainee program. I knew he could more than hold his own against those business-school boys.

But before I could bring it up – the day before we left – we got word that someone was going to challenge Big Pete for the sheriff’s spot. All the workers were talking about it. We went over to the firing range and sure enough, there was Preacher with a six-gun on his hip, standing and waiting quietly.

He didn’t act like someone who had a week’s salary resting on a bet that nobody had ever won before. Didn’t act like someone who was in front of a pretty big crowd of his co-workers and a bunch of tourists. He stood there like he was waiting for a bus. Big Pete wasn’t exactly jumpy, either, but Haywood had icewater in his veins.

The way they did these things was pretty clever. They put two coffee cans up on fence posts. The duelists stood about a dozen feet away. When the judge said “draw” they both shot at their coffee cans. First can off the post, wins.

Little Pete was the judge.

The first round Preacher’s can jumped a half-second before Big Pete’s, and that got a big reaction from the crowd. Then they drew a second time and Pete won, and I could tell that the older man had held back a little that first round just to see what the kid was bringing. I remember thinking that Haywood had misjudged his opponent, had thought that he had been seeing Pete’s “A” Game all along.

Then they drew the third time and Preacher beat him clean.

There was actually a moment of silence as the staff tried to drink in what they’d seen. The guests didn’t know what a big deal it was, so we were cheering loudly right away, while the staff mostly stared in disbelief.

And I realized that Preacher had held back, too.

That night I offered Preacher the spot. I told him I didn’t know how much he was making as a cook, but I would double it if he came to work for Interglobal Materials.

Preacher knew who I was, and what IM was about. My old man died in 1958 when I was a year shy of graduating from the University of Chicago. I quit school and came home to take over his bankrupt scrap-iron company, and over the next 20 years I’d turned it into a multinational worth billions, mostly by making high-end, high-quality synthetic composites out of recycled metal and plastic. People paid me to haul away their trash, and then paid me again to get their trash back in a new form. God bless America. Anyhow, he knew about the company. I told him, we are getting bigger and richer every year, and there is nothing but potential for you at IM.

And he told me he was flattered, but that he couldn’t take it. He said, it’s very tempting – it sounds like interesting work – but I could only do it if I could commit 100%, and I’m not ready for that yet.

Joey and I tried to talk him out of it, but he wouldn’t be persuaded. What the hell. If he’d taken that job… I mean, who the hell knows, but I could see him being COO by now. No MBA, no engineering degree – I had a million of those. Preacher could learn what they knew without learning to think like them. That’s what I was looking for.

Anyhow – should I mention the second time? OK, we’ll do that later.