The Blue Hen ~ Conclusion

One by one the sealed bids were opened by the club’s president and read aloud to the hushed crowd of tuxedoed and gowned revelers. The bids ranged in odd numbers from a low of $30,001 to a high of $50,001, of which there were two. These were, as the two the Curmudgeons had predicted, by Harvey Grant and Fred Lee.

They were as different and yet as alike as men could be, Harvey from NYC, Fred from Atlanta. Both were sixty, married to a second and trophy wife twenty years his junior. Both were ruggedly handsome, just under six feet tall and fit. Both had scored big and recently, Harvey though A-I and the Cloud, Fred through backing a genius in genetics, discoverer of a bad gene that caused a fatal illness and a gene therapy to fix it. Both were Billionaires, several times over. Both had within the year bought a trophy plantation, Fred’s just below the Georgia-Florida line twixt Thomasville and Tallahassee, Harvey just above that line in Georgia. Both spreads had until so acquired been owned by Hanna descendants since assembled in the Nineteenth Century by brothers from Cleveland. Both had as his plantation’s manager a third generation Bird Dog Man, meaning a professional trainer-handler of pointing dogs, also good with retrievers and horses and most important with charming and entertaining and protecting from themselves and one another guests on and owners of such plantations.

Most important to the Curmudgeons, both wanted to own bragging rights to the region’s best bird dog, a winner of the Yankee Trial. But first each must gain admission to the club that hosted it for members only.

The Curmudgeons had secretly maneuvered for this moment by collusion with Fred’s and Harvey’s Dog Men. The four had decided $50,001 was the right tie bid to set up a live auction between the two bidders to break the tie. Amazingly, none in the audience suspected the collusion though many would later.

Sam Nixon MD took the stage to suggest the live-auction solution to break the tie and introduce the auctioneer to conduct it, Pete-Bob Dix. The salesman-con man-lovable rascal, currently engaged mostly in selling plantations (in fact he had shared in the commissions funded by Fred and Harvey) was also a trained—at the Kentucky Auction Academy at Bowling Green—bid caller who had knocked down lots of most every thing that could be sold legally and otherwise, from canners and cutters at the local livestock sale barn to heirloom jewelry at a charity event like this one, and of late most of his engagements had been charity events.

Pete-Bob made another significant contribution to the night’s event. He suggested a Calcutta charity auction whereby attendees at the ball could bet on Fred or Harvey to be winner of Abigail with another pot for closest to the winning bid, to benefit Tall Timbers and its property Dixie Plantation and the Continental Championships. Then before the bidding began the Curmudgeons got Fred and Harvey to agree, with help from their Dog Men, that whichever proved the successful bidder for Abigail, one male and one female pup from the coming litter would be donated for auction in the Calcutta.

Finally the Calcutta bets were in and Pete-Bob began the bidding for Abigail. Ben and Sam had a private bet on closest to how long it would take. It took just three minutes. Abigail went for $250,000 to Harvey Grant. Ben won the bet with Sam with a bid of two minutes thirty seconds. Sam had bet five minutes. Their bet was for a fifth of The Macallan Twelve.