stolen wagon

sure wish i had a pic for this one, it was the neetest horse dawn wagon i have ever seen
i had a fireplace to build in saskatuwan canada, we moved to the little town out in the country as it was going to take a couple months to get the job done
while we were there we discovered there were many abandend homesteads in the area. the people had  moved to town and the homes abandond, some of them still farmed but they lived in towns and just came to work the farms in the spring and fall. a lot of the places had a lot of antiqute junk around and could be had just for the takeing
we found the owner of one homestead and she told us we could take anything we wanted if we gave her 50 dollors, we hauled a lot of stuff from that farm, including a cast iron stove, that was in good shape and we  used it for heat in our home back in bc
one day wile cruzing the back roads with my helper, we came across  an old horse dawn wagon.  it was sitting on the side of the road on the outside of the fence, about 200 feet from the farmers house.
we stopped to look it over,  it was an old gravel hauling wagon, it had a belly dump bed in it, rigged with chains and a crank with chains to open and close the belly of the wagon
i was over 30 years old and when i climbed up onto the seat of that wagon and pretended to be driveing a team of horses , i felt like a kid, didnt realize my imagination could be that strong
nobody ever did come out of the house while we were there, but it was easy to see that people lived there
we talked about how easy it would be to just tie the wagon behind the truck and pull it off. we were only kidding as we knew it was stupi to steal a wagon. then we drove off and went home
next couple of days we talked about the wagon while we were working, drank some beers oer it and smoked a few joints.
then we decided we would go back and stead that wagon. as i think of it now i wounder how i could have been so stupid, but after i made up my mind there was no changeing it
so late that night, in canada it doesnt get dark till late at night, we headed back to the farm to get the wagon.
we took fuses out of the truck so no tail lights or brake lights would come on
backed up to the wagon and tied the tung to the bumper of my pickup. we pulled it down the side of the road to the next gate in the barbed wire fence. opened the gate and pulled the wagon thou the gate into the field, it was a big field, probley severl hundred acres, the plan was to pull it far enough away from the road that we could be seen working on it.  problem was ounce we got away from the road we couldnt see where we were going, couldnt turn the lights on if we wanted to. i was like driveing blind. the field was summer fallow, ploughed dirt, but here were some low spots that had standing water, at one point i was driveing along and all of a sudden i relized we were driveing in mud.   so there we were in the farmers field with his wagon behind the truck,   and if we got stuck the farmer was our only way out, if he went to the law we would proberly end up in jail. i was scared, in a real swet, but i knew if i stopped we would never get going again in that mud. i was gritting my teeth, i dint know which direction we were going or where the water was, we could have easily been driveing right into a swamp
i didnt slow down or speed up just kept the truck moveing, was afraid to steer as it would get us stuck, just kept going, and luckily, finally got to dry ground, we never did see the water we asumed we had just driven passed the edge of the standing water,
we went a bit father, we were way out in the field, nobody could see or hear us way out there
the plan was to load the wagon on the back of my pickup and haul it off
we removed all the wheels and whatever we could get lose with our tools, dont remember how we got the wagon bed up on the pickup but we did, then loaded the whaeels , tung, and all the parts in the back of the wagon. got back to the fence and followed it till we found a gate, got back on the road, put the fuses back in for lights and headed for the ranch where i was building the fireplace, we found a hideing place in the brush, unloaded the wagon with intetions of loading it back on the pickup when we went back to bc. several weeks later we  started loading all our junk on the truck and there was no room left for the wagon. so we decided we would leave it there and someday come back for it
a few years later, i met jerome ( the guy i built the fireplace for and he told me he had left the wagon ioin the bush for a year or so then painted it and set it out at the entrance to his ranch. it may still be there today