Staley's Stable:
This is an example of a good livery, run bad.

Services:
50 cents per horse per night, water and feed, has room for 5 horses.

Boarding animals: Watching horses for people who don't have the land, gear, or time to watch them. (Hotel guests, etc.) Shoeing, grooming, light veterinary care. Absolute champion service- makes your horse look like a million bucks. For a small extra fee, the owner's younger daughter will braid a horse's mane. The stalls are clean, the horses are fed properly, long-term 'guests' are walked around the yard regularly.

Horse leases: Rents out his small string of horses for draft-use or riding.

Building:  There’s a generous, post-fenced dirt yard in the back. The business areas are much better kept than the cabin. There's a stove in the barn (for warming the horses), and a water-trough out front, filled from a well to the southeast.

Owner: Bill Staley (36)

Bill undercharges (making a bare living). He’s a softie on people in hard straits. People can’t bully him into ‘forgetting’ a fee, but talk him into ‘pay when you can’ easily. He's watching the horse of a man who, Bill’s starting to suspect, died in the hills but hasn’t been reported yet. (He will, on his own, care for it forever without selling or claiming it. “Just in case.”) He also gives renters pick of his horses rather than 'take the first one or leave it', leaving his best horse tired out and the next-best horses under worked. He'll do something about people abusing or stealing his animals, but people are riding around, hauling and plowing with them, for free. Bill is strict about paying his own debts, and assumes that setting an example will send a message.

Anyone trained in book-keeping will figure out this pattern from his ledgers, but anyone reading the books at all will notice they were being kept in different, more feminine hand until about two years ago. (The earlier entries would be the late Flora Staley's. She ran that side.) Liveries are usually well-off, but they aren't and the house doesn't have much money or valuables except sentimental items (he uses the bank). (Not that a would-be robber would believe that.) The most dangerous defender of the house is Bloodbath (the dog).

His older daughter May, by default, has had to become the hardass of the operation. She’s had to go get horses back, and is much stricter about collecting fees. This isn’t how she saw things going. Willa is fearless around horses, but shy of strangers and misses her mother. (Mrs. Staley is buried forty paces from the cabin door, behind the church. All three visit, at different times.)

It’s just a partnership (or even one good sit-down) away from a being top-notch outfit, but who’s going to do it?

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