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cattle! The beasts kicked and switched their tails in these strange experimenters' faces; it was way over a hundred in the sun, and the dust from the rampaging of the offended cows hung in clouds around them and stuck to their sweaty foreheads. Buried away under the matted hair of the cattle hid those ticks, and the little ones out in the open seemed to crawl away under the hair when the cramped fingers of the searchers went after them. And how those damned parasites stuck to their cow-hosts—there were magnificent blood-gorged lady ticks who mashed up into nasty messes when you tried to pull them off—it was a miserable business!
But toward evening of that day they could find never a tick on any of those three North Carolina cows, and into Field No. 2 they put them, along with four healthy northern beasts. "These northerners, perfectly fit for a fatal attack of Texas fever, will be rubbing noses with the southerners, will be nibbling the same grass, drinking from the same water, sniffing at the North Carolina cow's excretions—but they'll get no ticks from them. Well—now to wait and see if it's the ticks who are to blame!"
July and the first of August were two months of hot but strenuous waiting. Smith, with a Government bug-expert named Cooper Curtice, kept himself busy with vast studies of the lives and works and ways of ticks. They discovered how a six-legged baby tick climbs up onto a cow, how it fastens itself to the cow's hide, begins to suck blood, sheds its skin, proudly acquires two more legs, sheds its skin again; they found out the eight-legged females then marry (on the cow's back) each of them a little male, how the lady-ticks then have great feasts of blood, grow to tick womanhood—and at last drop off the cow to the ground to lay their two thousand or more eggs; so, hardly more than twenty days after their journey up the leg of the cow, their mission in life is done, and they shrivel up and die—while strange doings begin in each of those two thousand eggs. . . .
Meanwhile, every day—it was a relief to get out of that