“I dunno. I didn’t wait to see. But Mr. Norris here were a-sayin’ there’s nothin’ in the back country a-goin’ to hurt you unless’n it’s rattlesnakes. Now when I was a-prospectin’ I allus used to carry a hair rope along, and make a good big circle around my bed with it. The rattler won’t crawl over the hair rope.”
The boys thought he was joshing them, but Long Lester was telling the literal truth. “Once I was just a-crawlin’ into bed,” he went on, “when I heard a rattle,” and with the aid of a dry leaf he gave a faint imitation of the buzzing “chick-chick-chick-chick-chick” that sounds so ominous when you know it and so harmless when you don’t. “I flung back the covers with one jerk, and jumped back myself out of the way. There was a snake down at the foot of my blankets. They are always trying to crawl into a warm place.”
“Then what?” breathed three round eyed boys.
“First I put on my shoes and made up a fire so’s I could see, ’n’ then I take a forked stick and get him by the neck, and smash his head with a stone.”
“And yet I’ve heard of making pets of them,” said Norris.
“They do. Some do. But I wouldn’t,” stated Long Lester emphatically. “Ner I wouldn’t advise any one to trust ’em too fur, neither.”
“They say a rattler has one rattle on his tail for every year of his age,” ventured Pedro.
“A young snake,” spoke up Ted, “has a soft button on its tail. And then the rattle grows at the rate of three joints a year, and you can’t tell a thing about its age, because by the time there are about ten of them, it snaps off when it rattles.”
“Down in San Antonio,” said Ace, “we had an hour between trains once, and we went into a billiard parlor where they had a collection of rattlesnakes, stuffed. And they showed some rattles with 30 or 40 joints to them.”
“Huh!” laughed Ted. “That’s easy! You can snap the rattles of several snakes together any time you want to give some tourist a thrill.”