The Best Pulling Team in the State

Dragging the mild-eyed Jersey, which had developed an incredible obstinacy with the cessation of Tex's Comanche yells behind her, Wallie applied the rope he had inherited, with the best imitation he could give of the performance, but futilely.

The cow and the horses pulling in opposite directions went around and around in a circle until the trampled earth looked as if it had been the site of a cider-press or a circus.

After they had milled for twenty minutes without advancing a step Wallie lost patience.

"Oh, sugar!" he cried. "This is certainly very, very annoying!"

The cow was as much an obstacle to the continuance of their journey as the horses, since, bawling at intervals, she planted her feet and allowed her neck to be stretched until Wallie was fearful that it would separate, leaving only her gory head in the halter.

With this unpleasant possibility confronting him, Wallie shrank from putting too much strain upon it with the result that the cow learned that if she bawled loud enough and laid back hard enough, he would ease up on the rope by which he was dragging her.

Wallie had been taught from infancy that kindness was the proper method of conquering animals, therefore he addressed the cow in tones of saccharine sweetness and with a persuasive manner that would have charmed a bird off a tree.

"Bossy! Bossy! Good bossy!" he cajoled her.

Immune to flattery, she looked at him with an expression which reminded him of a servant girl who knows she is giving notice at an inopportune time. Then she planted her feet still deeper in the sand and bawled at him.