“I’ve learned his meek and mildness, but the minute the —— fool gets mad he backslides. Didja ever hear such language? Awful! I hates to see anybody kill him, ’cause his soul won’t be welcome nowheres.”
“He ain’t got none,” declares Windy. “No soul a-tall, Hashknife, but, man, man, he sure has a memory for words.”
“Burnt me right across the shoulder,” says I. “Stay here and get killed if you must, but I’m goin’ to smoke that hombre out. Sabe?”
“We’ve got to find Mary Jane,” says Windy. “All this time——”
“We’ll find her,” says Hashknife. “I figure she ain’t far away.”
We crawls over the top of them rocks, out through the fissure and glides down the other side. Then we crawls on our hands, knees and belly until our shirts are on a par with our knees and seats. We reaches the other side of the hill and angles through the rocks, until we’re working around behind a sort of cliff. Then a danged rattlesnake has to plant himself right in our trail. Ornery son of a gun wouldn’t budge and we didn’t want to shoot him for fear of letting folks know where we were.
There wasn’t a loose rock in reach, so Hashknife takes off his belt, slips his holster off and then he slams Mr. Snake with the buckle-end. It sure was effective. Windy collects the rattles as we go past. We gets almost around the cliff and then gets to our feet and peers around.
“Got to get up higher,” whispers Hashknife. “I reckon we can climb this end of the cliff.”
We crawls to the top and finds that it’s still lower than the main part of the cliff, but between us and the high part is about fifty feet of open country. We thought it was cliff all the way, and here we are up on kind of a table-rock. We peers around.