“My Lord!” he exclaimed. “What on earth is that? Is that the way cattle grow down in your country?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Len gravely, still holding the animal on his reata. “He’s a nice little yearling. Give him time, an’ he’ll raise right smart o’ horn. O’ course, he’s still young. Texas, she sort of runs to horn, in some spots, special seems like.”
“Spots? Spots? What spots?” demanded Pattison. “Where’d that critter come from?”
“He come from our range, sir,” replied Len. “He range over with a bunch near the Laguna Del Sol. They all watered in there, at the Laguna. Near’s we could tell there must be something in the water in the Laguna sort of makes the cows in there run to horn, like.”
“Well, I should say so! But still, you can’t make me believe that any steer less than a four could ever grow horns like that.”
“Oh, yes, they kin,” rejoined this artless child of the range. “My pap used to drive down to Rockport, on the coast—I’ve helped drive south, to ship cows on the Plant steamers. I reckon they was going to Cuby. We had to rope every steer and throw him down and take a ax and chop off his horns, they was so wide. That was to give more room on the boats. Some steers didn’t like to have their horns chopped off thataway. Well, here we got plenty of room for horns anyhow.” He swept an arm over the field of waving grass reaching on to the blue horizon. “Give me three years more on this dogy and I promise you he’ll have horns.
“Speaking of horns, Jim,” he resumed; “oncet when we were driving in a coast drive we turned in a lot of dogies, of course claimin’ a cow was a cow, an’ nache’l, four years old even if it was only a yearling. Well, the damn Yankee who was buying our cows he kicked on so many dogies. Of course, none of us fellers’d ever heard of a thing like that; a buyer allus taken the run o’ the delivery, head for head. Says he, ‘I ain’t buyin’ yearlin’s, I’m buyin’ fours.’
“Well, we driv in another dogy right then, one of them Lagunies, an’ he had horns big as this one here. The damn little fool he put on more airs than any Uvalde mossy horn about his headworks. It was just like he said, ‘Look at me! I done riz these here horns in one year, where it taken you maybe a hunderd.’ Cows was their pride, mister, same as us. Uh-huh.