elt as disappointed as if he had run to a fire and found it out when he
got there.

On horseback or afoot one was constantly on the lookout for them. For
those gray coiled horrors were deadly. We knew that. There were plenty
of stories of people who heard that dry rattle, saw the lightning speed
of the strike and the telltale pricks on arm or ankle, and waited for
the inevitable agony and swift death. The snakes always sounded their
warning, the chilling rattle before they struck, but they rarely gave
time for escape.

Sourdough stopped at the store one morning for tobacco. He had a pair of
boots tied to his saddle and when Ida Mary stepped to the door to hand
him the tobacco, a rattlesnake slithered out from one of the boots. He
jumped off his horse and killed it.

"Damn my skin," Sourdough exclaimed, "and here I slept on them boots
last night for a pillow. I oughta stretched a rope."

Plainsmen camping out made it a practice to stretch a rope around camp
or pallet as a barricade against snakes; they would not cross the hairy,
fuzzy rope, we were told. It may be true, but there was not a rope made
that I would trust to keep snakes out on that reservation.

I remember camping out one night with a group of homesteaders. The
ground was carefully searched and a rope stretched before we turned in,
but it was a haggard, white-faced group which started back the next
morning. True, there hadn't been any rattlesnakes, but from the amount
of thinking about them that had been done that night, there might as
well have been.

A young homesteader rushed into the print shop one day, white as a
sheet. "A snake," he gasped, "a big rattler across the trail in front of
the store."

"What of it? Haven't you ever seen a snake before?"

"Have I!" he replied dismally. "I saw them for six months back there in
Cleveland. But my snakes didn't rattle."

Ours rattled. The rattle of the snake became as familiar as the song of
the bird. The settlers were losing livestock every day. Everyone was in
danger. With the hot dry weather they became bigger and thicker. The
cutting of great tracts of grass for hay stirred them into viperous
action. They were harder to combat than droughts and blizzards. Not many
regions were so thickly infested as that reservation. Those snakes are a
part of its history.

"Couldn't be many in other regions," Olaf Rasmusson, an earnest young
farmer, said dryly; "they're all settled here."

"Look out for snakes!