“Well, we buries pore Bill, havin’ a swell funeral with a circuit-rider to do the preachin’. Ed, out of respect to the deceased, wears the boots to the funeral. Purty soon he gits a sore heel. ‘Bill’s boots,’ he says, ‘are a little too big. They made a blister on my heel.’ One mornin’ he takes to his bunk, sayin’ he guessed his sock had pizened his heel. That night he breathes his last. Fine man he was, too. They don’t make better men than Ed Wilson.
“Jist before he dies, he calls us all to his bedside and says, ‘Boys, I’m goin’ to the big round-up. I ain’t been as righteous as I ought to of been, but I’m hopin’ the Big Range Boss will cut me into his herd. Dave, you can have my bridle; Red, you can take my saddle; and Pete, you can have my boots.’ Them was the last words he ever spoke.
“Ed’s family asks us to send the corpse back to Virginia, which we does, me going along with it. And I meets Ed’s family and tells them what a fine man he was, and how he always done his duty, and ever’thing. And fine folks they was, too.
“When I gits back to the ranch, I finds pore Pete all laid out for the undertaker. ‘He died of the sore heel,’ says the boss, ‘jist like Bill and Ed. He says give his boots to you.’
“By this time I was gittin’ suspicious. I takes the boots and examines them close, and there in the spur-piece of the left boot is the fang of that dirty, low-down, cut-throat reptile. I takes the pliers and pulls out the fang, and to make shore it don’t cause any more devilment, I takes a spade and buries it at the back of the bunk-house.
“Then I puts on the boots and wears them right on. This is them I got on now. See that place right there that looks like a pinhole? That’s where I pulled the critter’s fang out.”
“I guess it didn’t do any more harm,” said Lanky.
“None to speak of,” replied Red. “The boss’s old hound dawg comes along and sees where I buried the fang, and he forgits but what he’d buried a bone there, and he begins diggin’ like a fool. Purty soon his paw swells up, and we have to shoot him. But as far as I know that was the end and the extent of that reptile’s devilment.”
“Well, well,” said Hank. “That puts me in mind of a thing that happened to Jess Simpson and me jest before I joined this outfit. We was goin’ to a rodeo at Vega in Jess’s flivver, and jest before we gits to Lubbock, we sees a rattlesnake in the road ahead of us. ‘Watch me git him,’ says Jess, and jest as the critter raises his head to strike, Jess busts him one right in the mouth with the front tire of his Ford. ‘One less venomous reptile in the world,’ says Jess, and we drives on thinkin’ that’s all of that.
“Jest as we gits to Lubbock, Jess notices that a tire is nearly down. He pulls up to a little garage in the edge of town and has it fixed, and then we goes on. When we gits to Plainview, we notices that the tire is nearly flat again; so he has it fixed there. Then we goes on to the rodeo, and Jess wins a hundred dollars bull-doggin’, and me seventy-five goat-ropin’, which we spends and starts home.