He surveyed the immediate country leisurely, confident of what he would discover. Two hundred yards in front was a patch of mesquite, and they made for it. Behind a bush they found the calf--a sturdy, red-and-white baby with a specially black, moist nose. It flattened out when Steve stood over it.
“Git up,” he commanded, “I want to see more of you. I bet them hoofs of yours is soft.”
The calf hugged the ground. He raised the sagging body by the brisket and tail, none too gently. When he let go, the little fellow collapsed, spread out like a jellyfish. He must have marveled as he lay there, rolling his wide, questioning eyes upward, what strange beings these were, for he was just one day old and had never seen a man.
“Come a li’l’ seven,” Steve cried joyously. “Look a-here, Reb. See his face.”
Between the youngster’s eyes was a crimson splash which made a perfect 7. Reb examined the peculiar marking with interest and suggested that Come-a-Seven might bring the little devil luck as a name.
The calf resented all this handling and raised his voice in a plaintive bawl. As they loped away on their errand, the cow crashed through the bushes to her offspring’s side. She nosed him solicitously, rumbling caresses.
Come-a-Seven inherited all the hardiness of his race--indeed, in later years, Reb vowed that he was tougher’n the oldest man in the world. Half an hour after his advent into this vale of tears he could walk. It was not a gait to justify boasting, because his forelegs showed a tendency to give at unexpected places, but he saved himself from a fall by leaning against his mother’s shoulder. He next made the circuit of the cow twice in a clumsy hunt for the fount of his food supply and finally reached it in an extremely awkward position. Nevertheless, she watched him pridefully, her sight blurred with happiness; and braced against her hind leg, he fed like a glutton. Feeling full and reckless therefrom, he humped his back in abandon and tried to cavort, but came down with a jarring thump.
The young mother did her duty by him like a Scotch washerwoman with nine children. He breakfasted at dawn--drank until he could drink no more. Afterwards she went off to graze, leaving the calf behind some screening hush. It was seldom she strayed so far that she was not within sight or call: there is danger to toddling calves that lie out on the range unprotected.
How fast his strength grew! At five days of age he could have butted into a wooden fence at half-speed without any especially ill effects, save to the fence. Yet his mother’s care never abated. She would go over him every night with eager tenderness and was ever aggressively on the alert to defend. For she would have fought anything on four legs for the life of that loose-jointed, red-and-white blatherskite she held to be prince of his race.
The cattle grazed in scattered bunches over some hundred thousand acres of the east range--they are not so companionable as horses and do not herd so closely in their feeding. Nor will the bulls take such responsibilities upon their shoulders as do stallions with the mares and colts. Come-a-Seven, in fact, never saw his father, to his knowledge. That ponderous, morose scion of Hereford stock lived his own life in his own way, spending half the day sleeping in the shade of a cottonwood; and he did not worry about family matters. His scores of children might fare as best they could. In the meantime he had his amusements. Besides, what on earth were their mothers for?