“What did you do?” asked Lanky.
“Well,” said Joe, “after thinkin’ it over and seein’ there wasn’t nothin’ I could do, I jest shet my eyes and went back to sleep, and when I woke up in the morning, the critter was gone. Jest crawled off of his own free will and accord.”
“Well,” said Red, “that shows what a tenderfoot you was, and Hank, too. If you’d jist of put hair rope around your bed before you went to sleep, them snakes wouldn’t of come in.”
“I had read that in stories,” said Lanky, “but I didn’t know if it were really true.”
“True as the gospel,” said Red.
“How does it work?” asked Lanky.
“Tickles their bellies,” replied Red. “A rattlesnake jist can’t stand ticklin’. One fall when we was workin’, the cook one night didn’t make camp till dark. Then we found out he had bedded us in a regular den of reptiles. We made our beds right up techin’ each other, and put hair ropes on the ground all around the whole outfit. The next mornin’ we counted a hundred and twenty-nine rattlesnakes around the beds. They had jist naturally tickled their fool selves to death tryin’ to crawl over the rope.”
“The critters, however, ain’t so numerous as they used to be in Pecos Bill’s time,” said Joe. “That man almost put ’em out of business in his day.”
“How did he do that?” asked Lanky.
“Bill was a very smart and ingenious lad,” said Joe. “He was the first man to capture a whiffle-poofle; he was the first man to train prairie-dogs to dig post-holes; and he was the first man to do a lot of things. Among other things he invented a way to slay rattlesnakes wholesale. When Bill wanted to capture or exterminate any sort of reptile or bird or beast, he would study the critter’s habits and find out what his weakness was; then he would go off and study and study, and purty soon he would come back with a way all figgered out. Bill always used his head. He put in two of the best years of his life studyin’ rattlesnakes. Not that Bill was afraid of ’em. But one of the critters bit his horse one time, and then he got mad. But he never let on. He jest went out and made friends with ’em and lived with ’em, and noticed their habits and their diet and where they liked to live at different times of the year, and all that.