Where to Put Your Thumb

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two horse dealers stood their animals in the same row of stalls at the Michaelmas fair, and the whole difference between them was that one asked to be trusted and the other taught the buyer how to find him out.

Two horse dealers, the same oats and the same row of stalls.
Both sold a sound horse at a fair figure and warranted it truly.
One told every farmer he was not like the rest of the trade.
One told every farmer where to put his thumb.
The stabling cost the same for both men and the hay the same.
Same trade, same stalls, same horses. Which man was believed?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two horse dealers in the town I've never named, their stalls in the same long shed at the Michaelmas fair, the same trade to the last article: the coats brushed until they threw the light back, the farmers in from the parishes with the harvest money in a pocket. A cart horse was the dearest thing a small farmer bought in a decade, and he bought perhaps three in his life. He had no practice at judging one.

He also arrived robbed. Not by either of these men, but by the dealer who sold him the mare that went lame in a fortnight, or sold his brother-in-law a horse with four years filed off its mouth. Every farmer in that shed carried a grievance that belonged to somebody else, and carried it into both stalls equally.

The first dealer met it as an honest man does. He said, early and warmly, that he was not one of those: his father had stood the same stalls, his word was his trade, and he would warrant the horse sound in writing. All of it was true. He then let a man look at an animal he did not know how to look at.

The second dealer, before a farmer had walked once round the horse, named the three ways a bad animal was got rid of at that fair. The first was the gloom of the stall, where a cloudy eye and a filled leg look much like health, so a buyer should have it led into the road and trotted away and back on the hard. The second was the hour's exercise before the buyer arrives, which walks the stiffness out of a horse that will be stiff again tomorrow, so he should see it cold at seven. The third was the mouth, filed to take years off, so a buyer should look at the groove in the corner tooth, then lay his thumb on the tendon below the knee and feel for heat, which no file can touch.

He had them on a card and gave one to every man who stopped, and then said the part that mattered: use them on mine, and on mine first.

Be fair to the first man. His honesty was not a pose and his horses were as good. But he asked the farmer to take a stranger's word in the trade where a stranger's word is worth least, and the dealer two stalls down was saying the same sentence in the same tone. The second asked for nothing. He handed over the means of judging and stood by while it was used against him.

The farmers used it. Most of his horses passed, one or two did not, and those he put to the plough himself rather than argue. The card went home in a coat pocket and was read out at the smithy on Saturday, and by the next autumn men arrived asking which stall gave out the three questions.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The suspicion a new customer brings you was earned by somebody else in your trade, and no claim about your own honesty will shift it, since the dishonest man makes that claim in the same words. You shift it by handing over the means of judging the work, beginning with yours. Give him the test, and you have given him the only thing he wanted.

Begin with what a customer is doing when he cannot judge. He cannot weigh you against your rival, having no scale to do it on. He weighs the trade entire, and marks it down by the worst man he has heard of, being unable to tell its members apart. That is arithmetic performed in the dark, and it is why the good man in a mistrusted trade pays for the bad one in every figure he quotes.

The second thing is why a check persuades where a promise does not. A promise costs a liar nothing, so the buyer discounts it to nothing. A check cannot be given by the man it would catch: the dealer with a filled leg cannot teach you to feel for heat, and the builder who buries bad work cannot invite you behind the plaster. It is a signal only one sort of man can afford, and the customer sees that in the moment his hand is on the tendon. It is the force behind the fault a customer finds for herself and never afterwards argues about, and the near relation of the admission a man is afraid to make and wins the work with.

The third thing is that an instruction travels and a protestation does not. Nobody repeats your assurance that you are honest, since in another mouth it sounds like nothing. Three checks a farmer will gladly repeat to a neighbour about to spend money, with your name attached.

Two cautions. The first is that you teach the check and never accuse the rival. A man whose first ten minutes are spent warning you off other dealers is himself the warning, and a trade talked down loses the sale altogether: the farmer who thinks the whole shed crooked buys no horse. Name the trick, not the man. The second is that you will be tested first and hardest, so put your own house right before the card goes out. And do not perform it: a check chosen because you conspicuously pass it, while the real weakness goes untaught, is a trick of its own, and it is found out.

Three questions, for the week in front of you:

1. What do people complain of when they are let down by my trade? Not your failures, the trade's: three sentences you have heard in other people's kitchens, and what every enquirer is braced for.
2. What could a customer look at, press, time or count to see the difference? Something he can do himself, in a minute, taking your word for none of it. Put the three on one card.
3. Which of those checks would I rather he did not make? Answer honestly and you have found what to repair this month. There is always one.

The Answer to the Riddle

The same oats and the same row of stalls, one man telling every farmer he was not like the rest of the trade and the other telling him where to put his thumb. Which man was believed?

The second, and not for being the more honest of the two. He was believed because he stopped asking to be, and gave away three tests a dishonest man could not have afforded. The farmer did not take his word. He took his own.

The verse:

The word of every dealer in the shed is much the same,
And he who swears the loudest only proves the trade is sore.
So teach the man the trick by which his brother-in-law was had,
And let him lay his own cold thumb upon the tendon for the rest.

Until next time. Go and write down the three checks a customer could make on your trade without you, answers included, and give them to the next person who enquires.

P.S. There is a second use for the card, and it is not for the man who is buying. Give it to people who will never be customers: the carrier, the smith, the clerk at the corn merchant's. They are asked for a name far oftener than you are asked for a price, and a list of plain checks costs them nothing to pass on.

Also in the archive: The Dearer Man, The Hot July and Most People Ask Me That.