st through a big
knothole in the floor. Its beady eyes held me for a moment, as they are
said to hypnotize a bird. I could neither move nor scream.

Then with a reflex action I threw an empty galley--an oblong metal tray
used to put the set type in--square over the hole. The snake moved so
quickly it missed the blow and lay under the floor hissing like an
engine letting off steam. It would have been in the print shop in
another second. The floor was laid on 2 x 4 inch scantlings, so there
was nothing to keep snakes from working their way under. It should have
been banked around the foundation with sod.

The next day a homesteader's little girl was bitten. Oh, for serum! But
if there were any such life-saver on the market we had no way of getting
it.

_The Wand_ called a meeting of the settlers and laid plans of warfare
against the snakes. The homesteaders organized small posses. And cowboys
and Indian bucks joined in that war against the reptiles.

They killed them by the dozens in every conceivable manner. The cowboys
were always telling about shooting their heads off, and they said the
Indians used an arrow, spearing them in the neck just back of the head.
They never let one get away if they could help it. Some of them claimed
they picked up rattlesnakes by the tails and cracked their heads off.

The snakes wintered in the prairie-dog holes, but I never heard of a
prairie dog being bitten by one of them. On warm days in late fall the
snakes came out of the holes and lay coiled thick on the ground, sunning
themselves, while the little dogs sat up on their hind legs and yipped
in their squeaky voices. The settlers and cowboys invaded the dog towns
and killed off the snakes by the hundred. Dog towns were the tracts
where the prairie dogs made their homes. During the intensive snake war,
a homesteader came from one of the big prairie-dog towns to take us over
to look at the kill.

There, strung on wires, hung more than a hundred huge, horrid rattlers,
many of them still wriggling and twisting and coiling like a thrown
lariat.

It seems too bad the snakeskin industry of today missed that bonanza of
supply, and that science did not make a more general use of rattlesnake
serum at that time. The settlers would have made some easy money and
science would have got serum in unlimited quantity.

This is a gruesome subject. The constant, lurking menace of the snakes
was one of the hardest things the frontier had to endure