“Only some stun rollin’ down the mounting. I’ve often done the thing myself, just to see it jump and hear what an infernal noise it would make.”
“May it not be Indians?”
“Indians? Now just you look a-here, stranger; if you consate that any red-skin ever cut up such a white man’s caper as that, you don’t know any more about them than I do about Scriptur’, and that is mighty little. But this isn’t followin’ the trail and savin’ the gal. Inter your saddles—no, thank fortune you haven’t got any, and your beasts would never stand them ef you had. But mount, onyway, and mind you don’t go stragglin’ through the sloo, for though thar isn’t any water thar now, there are quicksand beds, and ef you git inter one you’ll go way down—down—down into China.”
Jaded as they had been by their previous journey, the sparkling waters of the chalybeate spring, that foamed clear as crystal and aeriform as champagne, and the soft, juicy grasses that margined them, had revived the horses, and again they sprung forward, as if endowed with new life. Restraining and petting his noble black, Waltermyer took the lead, and soon they were lost to all surrounding objects in the tall dry rushes that ever mark the course of what the Western borderers call “sloo.” Fully two miles wide, the task of crossing was not only seriously uncomfortable, on account of the heat and the clouds of insects that arose before and around them, but the footing was insecure, mined with holes and tangled with treacherous roots.
They rode on in silence, save when, now and then, some serpent, gliding suddenly from under the feet of the horses, startled them, and they leaped madly aloft with a wild snort, their riders wondering at the movement, for their eyes had not fallen on the reptile, with its gorgeous skin and fire-like eyes, as it glided rustling along to seek some deeper hole in which to coil its shiny folds.
“Many a time,” exclaimed Waltermyer, with an almost noiseless laugh, as one of the company was dismounted by the leaping of the animal he rode, “I’d been willin’ to have been thrown higher nor Independence Rock, to have just caught sight of one of the critters.”
“Of what? What was it? I didn’t see any thing.”
“No, nor know any thing until you found yourself flat. Why, man, it was a rattlesnake, that’s all.”
“A rattlesnake!”
“To be sure it was; and I suppose you didn’t know either that the reptiles and perarer dogs and owls all lived in one hole—sorter family parties.”