Of course the line-back calf and his playmate went
along, outrunning their mothers. They traveled far into the night
until they reached a chaparral thicket, south of the river, much
larger than the one in which he was born. It was well they sought
its shelter, for two hours before daybreak a norther swept across
the range, which chilled them to the bone. When day dawned a mist was
falling which incrusted every twig and leaf in crystal armor.

There were many such northers during the first winter. The one
mysterious thing which bothered him was, how it was that his mother
could always foretell when one was coming. But he was glad she could,
for she always sought out some cosy place; and now he noticed that his
coat had thickened until it was as heavy as the fur on a bear, and he
began to feel a contempt for the cold. But springtime came very early
in that southern clime, and as he nibbled the first tender blades
of grass, he felt an itching in his wintry coat and rubbed off great
tufts of hair against the chaparral bushes. Then one night his mother,
without a word of farewell, forsook him, and it was several months
before he saw her again. But he had the speckled heifer yet for a
companion, when suddenly her dam disappeared in the same inexplicable
manner as had his own.

He was a yearling now, and with his playmate he ranged up and down the
valley of the Nueces for miles. But in June came a heavy rain, almost
a deluge, and nearly all the cattle left the valley for the hills, for
now there was water everywhere. The two yearlings were the last to go,
but one morning while feeding the line-back got a ripe grass burr in
his mouth. Then he took warning, for he despised grass burrs, and that
evening the two cronies crossed the river and went up into the hills
where they had ranged as calves the summer before Within a week, at a
lake which both well remembered, they met their mothers face to face.
The steer was on the point of upbraiding his maternal relative for
deserting him, when a cream-colored heifer calf came up and nourished
itself at the cow's udder. That was too much for him. He understood
now why she had left him, and he felt that he was no longer her baby.
Piqued with mortification he went to a near-by knoll where the ground
was broken, and with his feet pawed up great clouds of dust which
settled on his back until the white spot was almost obscured. The next
morning he and the speckled heifer went up higher into t