“Oh, the funny little darling!” she cried. “Papa, he is all legs and spots, and—and ears.”
“Yes,” the man replied; “he will soon lose his spots, but his legs and ears will stay with him, and it won’t be very long until he will show you how he can use those long legs of his.”
The man rode away, and Polly carried me into the house, where everybody handled and looked at me, all of which made me feel forlorn indeed. But when Polly put me into a box half full of nice, clean hay, in a sunny nook between two of the cabins, I felt that the best thing for me to do was to lie down and go to sleep.
After a comfortable nap I awoke, feeling very hungry, and began to call feebly for my mother. But it was Polly, henceforth my foster mother and beloved friend, that came in answer to my call. She carried me into the kitchen, where a bottle, with a quill wrapped with a soft rag for a stopper, was standing by the fire. Polly took the bottle and put the stopper into my mouth. The rag was not pleasant to my taste, and the quill, although disguised by many soft wrappings, was hard and unyielding. Naturally, I objected, but Polly persisted, and after a while I got a taste of the warm milk that flowed through the quill. Then I ceased to struggle and proceeded to take my dinner in the only way I knew.
At an early age I was taught to eat cornmeal and wheat bran, both of which I liked very much.
Soon the yard became entirely too small for me. I longed to go outside, where there was room for me to use my legs, and I got to watching for the gate to be opened. Polly noticed my desire to get outside the gate, and one day when I was standing near it, looking out through a crack in the fence, she came and put her arms around my neck.
“Lopez,” and her voice had a note of sadness in it that I had never heard before, “it is because I love you so that I keep you shut up in this yard. A big, wicked panther lives near here, and he might carry you off, just as he did my little lamb. I never told you about it before, because I did not want to make you feel sad, and—and, Lopez, I thought maybe you would feel jealous if you knew how much I had cared for something else.”
I tried to make her understand that I was not in the least jealous of the dead lamb; also that the fact that a panther lived near the ranch did not alarm me. I longed for freedom—glorious freedom—and felt that there was no animal of the plains that I would not willingly enter the lists against in a foot race.
One bright morning, soon after this, Polly’s father opened the gate, at the same time saying to her, “I am going to turn Lopez out for a little while this morning and let him stretch his legs and eat some grass.”
“Oh, papa!” she cried; “he will run away, and the panther will catch him.”