"Oh, yes. The heifer was the calf. Now, whether the cow disowned the calf, or the calf the cow, I never found out. Anyway, the day that the cow disappeared into the bottom land that little calf trotted up to the house and tearfully begged to be loved. Well, you might have thought I'd had enough of pets for one while, but, no; the helplessness of that poor little calf so went to my heart that for weeks I rode nine miles every day for milk, and fed it to that little creature with my own hands."
"A sort of foster-mother," I suggested.
"Yes, I was a mother to that little orphan calf. But, if you'll believe me, it was a case of 'how sharper than a serpent's tooth is an ungrateful child,' or however that goes. Yes, sir, that calf followed in the evil course of its mother, only if anything it was worse, sort of like Agrippina and her son, Nero, only this was a daughter.
"You see, the cow was perfectly open about her evil deeds, but the calf was underhanded. After trotting around me, looking as innocent as though butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, she'd all of a sudden disappear, and come back after a few days with an ear torn and the skin raked off her side; and pretty soon I'd hear that she'd been attacking horses or fighting other cows.
"One day she chased an unlucky workman out onto the railroad bridge and kept him there until a train came along and the engineer slackened enough to take him on and carry him to Plum Station. Another time she got after a tramp that was camping on the bottom land among the willows, and forced him to take refuge in the forks of a crooked tree, where he roosted until one of us went down and called off Miss Bossie. In fact, the only return that calf ever made for all my loving care was to scare away tramps. If I could have kept her around the house just for that purpose she would have been one of the best investments I ever made.
"But as years went by that calf became more and more abandoned to evil. She would wander farther and farther from home, until now I spend half my nights worrying about her and more than half the day following her up and taking her home with me."
"I should think you'd get rid of the creature," I interrupted.
"Kill her? Yes, I suppose that would be the most sensible thing to do, but you know how it is about always loving the prodigal son the most. Yes, sir; wherever that animal goes it takes my heart with it, and, though it's nigh onto eleven years old, I never can think of it as anything but a pet calf."
"And so it was bringing up that heifer that interfered with your literary career?"
"Interfered? Well, I should say so! Back at the start I did publish some poems in the local papers, and I read one or two essays at the Zion Church literaries. But people wouldn't believe they were original. No woman, they said, who spent her time chasing wild cows over the country could write odes to spring and essays on Shakespeare.