For the time being he put all thought of the missing present from his mind. Just as Frank had said, the chances were he would find it again, sooner or later. Yet Bob admitted to himself that it had been a long time since anything had arisen to annoy him so much.
They were now bearing down upon the spot where the steer was acting so strangely. He circled around a small patch of timber and brush that was too dense for him to push through, every little while bellowing angrily, shaking his long horns, and giving every evidence of having been worked up to a pitch where he could not contain himself.
“Strikes me he’s keeping close to that _motte_ of timber, Frank?” suggested Bob, as they kept galloping closer to the spot.
“Just what I had in mind,” replied his chum.
“Look at him behaving as if he’d give anything to be able to rush it; but no long-horn could push through that thick scrub. There’s something in the bunch that makes him furious, that’s what, Frank!” went on Bob.
“Reckon you’re right, Bob; anyhow that’s what I was thinking myself.”
“Could it be a rattler?” asked the Kentucky lad.
“Well, now, I hardly think a steer would act that way if it was,” replied the youth who had been brought up on a ranch, and knew a great many things that were as yet mysterious to a recent tenderfoot like Bob. “In the open, some steers might try and jump on a snake that was coiled, just as I’ve seen a deer do more’n once, grinding it to pieces under his hoofs. But if the snake got in among the brush, a steer would let him go.”
“Then what can it be?” queried the boy from Kentucky; “a sneaking coyote?”
“Hardly that, either,” declared his chum, decidedly. “You see these old steers size up a coyote as a harmless thing, not worth wasting time over. Now, if it were a wolf that would be another thing. A steer hates a mountain wolf like poison. Seems like they know how the gray rascal is always hanging around, waiting to pull down a calf when the chance comes.”
“So I’ve been told,” declared Bob; “Ted related an instance where a steer and a wolf had a battle over the body of a heifer the robber had stolen.”
“Yes, I happened to see that fight; and the steer won out, too. The wolf was as mad as they make ’em, and wouldn’t quit. He grabbed the steer several times by the nose, but couldn’t hold on. And finally the steer managed to pin him to the ground by one horn. After that it was all over with Mr. Wolf.”