“Almost the only inhabitants,” said Chris. “Well, if we do have to come to eat ’em, perhaps we shall get monuments set up to us in our honour for introducing a new kind of useful food of which there’s plenty being wasted in the far west. Pity they’re so small. They’d shrink too in the cooking. Why, a hungry man would be able to polish off one easy.”
“Do you want to make me ill, Griggs?” said Ned, shuddering.
“Certainly not, my lad.”
“But I say, Griggs,” cried Chris, “how big do those things grow—how long were the largest you ever saw?”
“Oh, they don’t come quite up to boa constrictors. Let me see, the largest I ever saw measured was—was—”
“Twenty-five feet?”
“Nay, nay, nay, not quite as long as that, but quite six feet, which is bigger than I like, after all. Most of ’em’s little, like those. Dangerous sort of things, and don’t the horses and mules understand! Don’t catch them going near a rattler if they know it.”
“My nag has shied four times this morning at the poisonous brutes,” said Chris.
“Seems to me,” said Griggs, “that they like this part of the country. I’d be pretty careful about walking about when we get down. It’d be as well to ride about a bit when we stop for camping, so as to scare the beggars away. We don’t want to get bitten.”
But from that time, oddly enough, they saw no sign or trace of the reptiles. The sun grew hotter and hotter, but neither in sandy level nor rugged stony patch was a snake seen basking. Nothing was visible but lizards, and they disappeared when the doctor called a halt in the most rugged part of a stony waste where there was an overhanging cliff and a broken gully which promised at a distance to be the home of a spring; but though it had evidently been at one time a pool overhung by rocks, there was not a trace of moisture. It afforded a little shelter, however, in an overhanging part where there was a rugged projecting shelf, and there being nothing better, the halt was made there, only to prove too hot a one for endurance, the rocks seeming to glow, and keeping off such air as was astir as well as the sun; so after a short time the doctor decided to go on once more in search of some more likely place.